2000s Archive

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED

AUGUST 2004

For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun,

fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more.

The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in t

he state’s

midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry

. What’s called

the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it mi

ght extend all

the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther north than Belfast on Route 1, whose su

mmer traffic is,

as you can imagine, unimaginable.) The region’s two main communities are Camden, with its very old mon

ey and

yachty harbor and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs, and Rockland, a serious old fishing town th

at hosts the

Festival every summer in historic Harbor Park, right along the water.

1

Related links

The lush life of

Kobe beef

: Fact or Fiction?

Investigative Report:

a chicken's life

, from coop to cooktop

Plus:

Politics of the Plate

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This whole interchange takes place on Route 1, 30 July, during a four-mile, 50-minute ride from the ai

rport

11

 to the

dealership to sign car-rental papers. Several irreproducible segues down the road from the PETA anecdo

tes,

Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regula

r suppliers

—articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boi

ling-lobsters-alive

issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains

 don’t have this part.”

Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is i

nteresting is that its

thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part

of a Test Your

Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council:

“The

nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the g

rasshopper. It is

decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain tha

t gives the

experience of pain.”

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false

 or fuzzy. The human

cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awar

eness, language, etc.

Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prosta

glandins that

are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.

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 On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in

what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain—i.e., experiencing pa

inful stimuli as

unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.

Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of a

nimals feel pain,

and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to

 be extremely

complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totall

y subjective

mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even jus

t the principles

by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain i

nvolve hard-core

philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved

 nonhuman

mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the

 first layer of

additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And ever

ything gets

progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mamm

als into

cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like

lobsters.

The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just c

omplex, it’s also

uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys

 a variety of

foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main wa

y of dealing with

this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears

 to me unlikely

that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality

of their eating

habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is wha

t it was like to

attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eati

ng lobster, and

thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating l

obster, it turns out

that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s

that you do it

yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.

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 As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which

is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north groun

ds for everyone to

see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival

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 at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live

cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or so

mething—there’s

no way.

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepa

red and eaten

(although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really me

ans killing

them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our l

ittle preparations

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like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever re

tail container they

came home in ...whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is fr

om the trip

home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tiltin

g it from a container

into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to

hook its claws over

the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when th

e lobster’s fully

immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clan

king as the

lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes

around. The lobster, in

other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with th

e obvious

exception of screaming).

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 A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks

to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with t

hem into another

room and wait until the whole process is over.

There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living cre

ature has the

capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider.

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 One is how much

of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors,

prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates

 behavior

associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not

to see struggling,

thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually t

akes lobsters

between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talked about how long it tak

es them to die in

superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.)

There are, of course, other fairly common ways to kill your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum fre

shness. Some

cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between

 the lobster’s

eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the

 lobster instantly or

to render it insensate—and is said at least to eliminate the cowardice involved in throwing a creature

 into boiling water

and then fleeing the room. As far as I can tell from talking to proponents of the knife-in-the-head met

hod, the idea is

that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a willingness to exert personal agency

and accept

responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it.

(There’s often a

vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro-knife arguments.) But the problem

with the knife

method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. ner

ve bundles, which

are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And

 disabling only the

frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness. Another alternative is to

 put the lobster in

cold salt water and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are go

ing mostly on the

analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water

 incrementally.

In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs

and lobsters turns

out not to hold.

Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, be

cause there are

even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usu

ally after

poking several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn

 about the hard

way). Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe: Some chefs cut the lobster in half befo

re cooking;

others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts in the pot.

And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion number one. Lobsters don’t have much in t

he way of

eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thous

ands of tiny hairs

that protrude through their carapace. “Thus,” in the words of T.M. Prudden’s industry classic

About Lobster

, “it is that

although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impres

sions from

without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.” And lobsters do have nociceptors,

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 as well as invertebrate

versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain.

Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioi

ds like

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endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense

pain. From

this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even

more

 vulnerable to pain, since they lack

mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implie

s an absence of

the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect

 a marked upswing in

mood as I contemplate this latter possibility: It could be that their lack of endorphin/enkephalin har

dware means that

lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically different from mammals’ that it may not ev

en deserve the

term

pain

. Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experienci

ng pain

in a totally different way than you and I. These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologica

lly speaking, but

don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that they feel it but don’t feel anything

about

 it—the point

being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they want to get away from. Maybe lobsters

, who are also

without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pai

n in just the same

way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual

 suffering, which

seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to

fear/dislike/want to avoid.

Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, th

e pathetic clinging to the

edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living

 creature

experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s be

havior in the

kettle appears to be the expression of a

preference

; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive

criterion for real suffering.

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 The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative

case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going

about their

vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that t

hese worms

appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anyth

ing bad has

happened or would

prefer

 not to have gotten cut in half.

Lobsters, however, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect chang

es of only a

degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cov

er 100-plus

miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.

19

 And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like

bright light: If a tank of food lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters

 will always congregate

in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that

’s part of their

captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is

to keep them from

attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.

In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cook

er, watching the

fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear c

orners, or scrabble

frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or

frightened, even if

it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings ...and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into

it? Why is a

primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to

 inflict it by paying

for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think

so. I’m trying,

rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter an

d saltation and

community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit

 yourself to think

that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like

a Roman circus or

medieval torture-fest.

Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible t

hat future

generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now

view Nero’s

entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical,

extreme—and

yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important

than human

beings;

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 and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have a

n

obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be ab

le to keep doing it,

and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is

 truly defensible

instead of just selfishly convenient.

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Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the r

eader can

identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I am also concerned not to c

ome off as

shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the (possible) moral status and (very possi

ble) physical

suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not jus

t to eat but to

savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined

enjoyment

, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of

gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with convictions or rationales and who regard

 stuff like the

previous paragraph as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss

 the whole issue

out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is

 it just that they don’t

want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t

being extra aware and

attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real go

urmet? Or is all the

gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?

These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract ques

tions about the

connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such

deep and

treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits

to what even

interested persons can ask of each other.

Footnotes:

1

 There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.”

2

 N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be t

alked about in this

article.

3

 Midcoasters’ native term for a lobster is, in fact, “bug,” as in “Come around on Sunday and we’ll coo

k up some

bugs.”

4

 Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring.

5

 Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in melted butter torpedoes all these happy

 fat-specs,

which none of the Council’s promotional stuff ever mentions, any more than potato-industry PR talks ab

out sour cream

and bacon bits.

6

 In truth, there’s a great deal to be said about the differences between working-class Rockland and th

e heavily populist

flavor of its Festival versus comfortable and elitist Camden with its expensive view and shops given en

tirely over to

$200 sweaters and great rows of Victorian homes converted to upscale B&Bs. And about these differences

 as two sides

of the great coin that is U.S. tourism. Very little of which will be said here, except to amplify the

above-mentioned

paradox and to reveal your assigned correspondent’s own preferences. I confess that I have never under

stood why so

many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening tra

ffic to loud hot

crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence

of tourists. This

may (as my Festival companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste:

The fact that I

just do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am probably not t

he one to talk about

it (the supposed appeal). But, since this note will almost surely not survive magazine-editing anyway,

 here goes:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a whil

e. Not good for the soul

in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-t

he-facts-and-find-

some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country

is broadening

or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intr

anational tourism is

radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individu

al, of living

somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and

 repellent, a

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sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-

date American: alien,

ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is

to spoil, by way

of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on pla

ces that in all

noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction af

ter transaction, to

confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become eco

nomically

significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

7

 Datum: In a good year, the U.S. industry produces around 80 million pounds of lobster, and Maine acco

unts for more

than half that total.

8

 N.B. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed “debeaking” broiler chickens and brood

 hens in

modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confin

ed in

unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death.

As a purely

observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chick

ens receive no

anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related p

ractices like

dehorning cattle in commercial feedlots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotic

ally bored

neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew alm

ost nothing

about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article.

9

 The terminal used to be somebody’s house, for example, and the lost-luggage-reporting room was clearl

y once a

pantry.

10

 It turned out that one Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas, a high-ranking PETA official out of the group’s Vir

ginia

headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo, working the Festival’s main and side entrances

on Saturday,

August 2, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers emblazoned with “Being Boiled Hurts,” which is t

he tagline in

most of PETA’s published material about lobster. I learned that he’d been there only later, when speak

ing with Mr.

Rivas-Rivas on the phone. I’m not sure how we missed seeing him

in situ

 at the Festival, and I can’t see much to do

except apologize for the oversight—although it’s also true that Saturday was the day of the big MLF pa

rade through

Rockland, which basic journalistic responsibility seemed to require going to (and which, with all due

respect, meant

that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the Harbor Park grounds, especially if it wa

s going to be

just one person for one day, since a lot of diehard MLF partisans were off-site watching the parade (w

hich, again with

no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring, consisting mostly of slow homemade floats

and various

midcoast people waving at one another, and with an extremely annoying man dressed as Blackbeard rangin

g up and

down the length of the crowd saying “Arrr” over and over and brandishing a plastic sword at people, et

c.; plus it

rained)).

11

 The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night

 involves lost

luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the local National Car Rental franchise was—Dick c

ame out

personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop t

he entire way, with

a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I

 now know more

about this man than I do about some members of my own family.)

12

 To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yankin

g your

hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the

processes by

which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove

, the brain is

bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine.

13

 Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the

system of corporate

factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re

 marketed and

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packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious,

 sentient creatures

to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. PETA distributes a certain video—the title of which is being

omitted as part

of the elaborate editorial compromise by which this note appears at all—in which you can see just abou

t everything

meat--related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B.

2

Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many

partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are -fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems

simplistic and

self-righteous. Personally, though, I have to say that I found this unnamed video both credible and de

eply upsetting.))

14

 Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and

 the meat,

whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat

we eat from

the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating hig

her animals is

endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mamma

lian order?

(And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-hi

storical reasons

for that equivalence?)

15

 There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a

pot of boiling

lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s flesh and it

s carapace (this is

why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that the sound is the lobster’

s rabbitlike death

scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine and don’t have anything close to the vocal

equipment for

screaming, but the myth’s very persistent—which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural uneas

e about the

boiling thing.

16

 “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of

consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Si

nger, whose 1974

Animal Liberation

 is more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement: “It would be nonsense to say that it

was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have

interests because it

cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse

, on the other

hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.”

17

 This is the neurological term for special pain receptors that are (according to Jane A. Smith and Ken

neth M. Boyd’

s

Lives in the Balance

) “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical

substances which are released when body tissues are damaged.”

18

 “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interest,” but it is a better term for our purposes be

cause it’s less

abstractly philosophical—“preference” seems more personal, and it’s the whole idea of a living creatur

e’s personal

experience that’s at issue.

19

 Of course, the most common sort of counterargument here would begin by objecting that “like best” is

really just a

metaphor, and a misleadingly anthropomorphic one at that. The counterarguer would posit that the lobst

er seeks to

maintain a certain optimal ambient temperature out of nothing but unconscious instinct (with a similar

 explanation for

the low-light affinities about to be mentioned in the main text). The thrust of such a counterargument

will be that the

lobster’s thrashings and clankings in the kettle express not unpreferred pain but involuntary reflexes,

 like your leg

shooting out when the doctor hits your knee. Be advised that there are professional scientists, includ

ing many

researchers who use animals in experiments, who hold to the view that nonhuman creatures have no real

feelings at all,

only “behaviors.” Be further advised that this view has a long history that goes all the way back to D

escartes, although

its modern support comes mostly from behaviorist psychology.

To these what-look-like-pain-are-really-only-reflexes counterarguments, however, there happen to be all

 sorts of

scientific and pro-animal-rights countercounterarguments. And then further attempted rebuttals and redi

rects, and so on.

Suffice to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suf

fering issue are

Consider the Lobster

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_th...

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12/30/08 4:51 PM

involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally

inconclusive that as a

practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscien

ce, going with (no

pun) your gut.

20

 Meaning a

lot

 less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs.

the

value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s tas

te for a particular

kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat

well without

consuming animals.

PHOTOGRAPH BY

CLARITA BERGER / NATIONAL GEOGR