This morning I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” which appears in his anthology of the same name. (The piece originally appeared in Gourmet Magazine in 2004 and is online.) Wallace was assigned by Gourmet Magazine to attend the Maine Lobster Festival, and what he wound up writing was an exploration of the morality of eating living creatures.
In the case of lobsters, they are literally living right up until you toss them into a big pot of boiling water:
The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came in … whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting 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 the lobster is fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking 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 the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain…
Therefore, as is not the case with cows or chicken, the chef can’t avoid the fact that the food he’s cooking used to be a living being.
I made a sandwich this morning to take to work for lunch. After I finished reading the article later on my morning commute, I thought about that sandwich: in between the bagel halves, along with the piece of munster cheese, were several perfect, sterile, oval-shaped slices of turkey meat. They had been wrapped in plastic when I bought them. They couldn’t have looked less like food. They looked like they’d rolled off a factory conveyor belt — which of course they had. And when I’d taken the plastic-wrapped package of sliced turkey out of the refrigerated case and put it in my shopping basket, it hadn’t even entered my mind that a big bird had been tightly crammed into an enclosure with hoards of other big birds, probably scared to death, or at least very unsettled (chicken producers remove the chickens’ beaks from their bodies so that the chickens don’t peck each other to death from the stress of overcrowding), and sliced pieces of that bird were now in my shopping basket.
I wound up going out to lunch with a friend instead (he’d just come back from vacation and we decided to catch up), and I got a veggie burger. I never get veggie burgers. But I got one today. This was partly because my friend is a vegetarian (well, a pescatarian) and he ordered one, but also, I just felt like not eating an animal.
It’s possible that the world would be better off if we were all vegetarians. For one thing, crops take up much less acreage than does the ground required for livestock to graze. For another, we’d have less heart disease; we’d be collectively physically healthier as a society. And for another, we wouldn’t have to deal with the messy question of eating animals.
And yet,we human beings have a natural taste for animal flesh. Hamburgers taste good! And animals are fantastic sources of protein. And didn’t the Native Americans of the Plains — those indigenous peoples we idolize as having lived, unlike our selfish selves, in harmony with the Earth — eat buffalo meat?
I don’t really have a big moral problem with eating animals. After all, we’re bigger than they are (usually), and we’re the owners of this planet (except not really), and we as a race do wonderful things (except not always). As you can tell from the parentheticals, I have some doubts. And I wouldn’t be particularly happy if some giant aliens came along and decided to stick us humans into overcrowded pens, pull out all our teeth, fatten us up, and then slaughter and roast us and wrap perfect, oval-shaped human slices in vacuum-sealed plastic.
And yet, after finishing this entry, because I didn’t eat my turkey sandwich for lunch I’m going to eat it for dinner.
We’re complicated living creatures, we humans.
Even more than the whole boiled-to-death thing, what I have never been able to get past with lobsters is that essentially they are GIANT BUGS. Ew!!!!!!!
Strict vegetarianism is just not good for humans. Most of us could stand to eat less meat and dairy, but the complete lack thereof tends to leave people without enough energy.
My cousin’s been a vegetarian for about ten years, and now that she’s trying to get pregnant she’s gone back to eating meat occasionally. It’s just good common sense.
If you’re bothered by ethical issues (as am I, sometimes) you can always choose free-range meats. There are better options today than there were when vegetarianism became big.
This is an issue that has bothered me for some time.
I think the problem for me is not eating an animal per se but the commodification of a living thing.
Capitalism, industrialism, and modernity have given us many wonderful things. But the cost has been the reduction of all things (including animals and persons) to commodities to be bought and sold, valuable not in themselves but in what they can be exchanged for and what can be gotten out of them.
People I know who live on or grew up on farms have a much healthier and integrated appeciation of animal life than urban folk. They are conscious and aware that for them to eat, something had to die. The relationship to animals was immediate and personal. The animals was a real, living thing — and then slaughtered and eaten. I think such a connection imparts a much greater appeciation for life.
But thanks to alienation, many of us have lost that — too our detriment.
I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 1983. I could stand to loose 15 pounds (desserts!) but I’m otherwise healthy. The main reason I became a vegetarian was that I grew up on a farm and took care of our animals. All of them (even chickens!) had distinct personalities and felt the same emotions as humans.
Now, mike, I’m curious why you think strict vegetarianism isn’t good for us. Is it the protein debate? Most nutritionists will (however grudgingly) admit that we eat far too much protein in a meat-heavy diet as it is.
I’ve been vegetarian for a short while now but I don’t miss meat at all, really, and certainly feel healthier than I have in decades. In fact, minus one cold in the iddle of the summer, I’ve not had anywhere near the number of illnesses I always had when I was a heavy meat-eater.
As for the reasons why I did it, I’m all for animal rights and cruelty-free animal treatment, but it’s the secondary reason for my decision. The first was health and I’m seeing that it was a very good reason for me.
I was vegetarian for two years with no issues…but it was for a girl, so not the best of high standing moral reasons ;-).
I do have ethical struggles with some of the things we do to our food, de-beaking, over crowding, artificial hormones, inhuman slaughter houses to name just a few.
It is not a straight forward argument however, think of the many rodents killed by farming activities, and insects sucked up killed during harvesting and spraying of our veggie’s. There is not a black and white answer for this one.
I have read many times that lowering (not eliminating) meat will lead to a healthier life for most Americans. Maybe that is a good enough selfish reason to reduce the amount of preprocessed meat we eat.
Strict vegetarianism is like any other diet – you need to watch what you eat and ensure you get the right stuff. If you don’t, you end up malnourished, but it’s just as easy to do that on the standard american diet as it is any other.