Consider The Lobster

The postmodern fiction writer David Foster Wallace wrote “Consider the Lobster” for the August 2004 issue of Gourmet. Wallace was one of the most acclaimed American writers of his generation, known for his novels Infinite Jest (1996)—named one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine—and The Pale King (2011), which was published posthumously and named as a contender for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Editors at Gourmet sought him out to write the article about his visit to the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival, imagining a piece rooted in culinary travel and cultural history—not the essay they received about the ethics of lobster consumption. Today, the essay is celebrated as one of the most famous and well-read articles ever published in the now defunct Gourmet magazine and is one of Wallace’s best-known works; it has been anthologized in several nonfiction collections. This guide uses the version of the essay published in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, published in 2007.

The essay opens with a description of the setting. In the midcoastal region of Maine on the western side of Penobscot Bay, the town of Rockland holds the Maine Lobster Festival each July. The area is dominated by two towns, the old moneyed Camden and Rockland, an old fishing town. Gourmet has assigned the correspondent (as Foster calls himself) to cover the 2003 festival, which is expected to be busier than normal due to a CNN piece in which an editor at Food & Wine declared the festival to be one of the best food events in the world. The festival is massive, with tents featuring lobster cooked in dozens of ways, lobster souvenirs, a concert featuring Lee Ann Womack, a parade, and various lobster-themed competitions. The correspondent notes he is attending with his girlfriend and his parents, one of whom comes from a part of Maine associated with potatoes, not lobsters.

While everyone knows what a lobster is, there is more to know about it than most people care to discover. A lobster is an aquatic crustacean that basically resembles a big ocean bug. Now, lobsters are considered a luxury food. However, lobster used to be considered lowly due to its abundance in New England. Until sometime in the 1800s, there were laws preventing prisons from serving lobster too frequently, and the first lobster industry developed to create canned lobsters sold to workers who liked the crustacean because it was cheap and high in protein. Since then, though, lobster has gained a reputation as posh and decadent, an image the Maine Lobster Festival and its sponsor, the Maine Lobster Promotional Council, try to counter by describing the health benefits of lobster and its affordability. The festival sells cheap lobsters, but it requires the eater to wait in a long line and fight for communal tables and other inconveniences, including low quality utensils and beverages. And most festival events require guests to pay additional fees for entry or seating. The event is, like all other popular commercial events, not for everyone.

Summer is the season when lobsters molt and when Maine restaurants can sell both hard and soft-shell lobsters. The latter are cheaper but easier to take apart and are supposedly sweeter in flavor. However, the molting lobsters also have less meat. Because lobsters can live to be more than a hundred, they can get significantly larger than the molting ones, too. Lobsters can be prepared in a variety of ways, but the most common method is boiling. To cook a lobster at home, one boils water, puts a live lobster in the pot, and covers it. To test whether the lobster is finished, one can pull on one antenna and see how easy it is to pull out. Directions for cooking lobster rarely note that the lobster needs to go into the pot alive (assuming this is obvious). Lobster is easy to cook and, because it is cooked alive, is extremely fresh. But this leads to an ethical question: Is it alright to boil something alive just because the finished product tastes good?

A well-known group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), thinks not. In most years, PETA protests the Maine Lobster Festival. In fact, this is one of the first details most will hear about the festival. While a cabdriver admits that locals do like the festival even though most do not attend it, a consultant who lives in Maine part of the year complains of hippies who hand out pamphlets about how much pain lobsters feel when they die. A rental car liaison named Dick recalls past years having multiple demonstrations, but the 2003 festival seems to have no PETA people at it (a footnote mentions there was one PETA person there but that he was not seen by the correspondent). However, Dick admits that most of the PETA people leave the lobster people alone. Besides, he adds, he and his family (which contains at least one lobsterman) do not see eating lobster as a moral issue since lobsters lack a part of the brain that lets them feel pain. Though Dick’s belief is scientifically inaccurate, that belief is echoed by the festival literature which claims that lobsters lack a cerebral cortex, which is the part of the human brain that creates the experience of pain. However, the pain receptor is actually part of a more primitive system in the brain that is managed by the brainstem and the thalamus. The cerebral cortex is involved with the emotional experience of pain, the idea that feeling pain is unpleasant rather than just painful.

Of course, the question of whether various animals feel pain or whether the feeling of pain is justifiable for human consumption of them is extremely complex. The fact that animals cannot use language to describe pain complicates the issue further, as does the hierarchy of animals. It’s also an uncomfortable topic to consider. The correspondent notes he has avoided this conflict by just ignoring it, and he recognizes that many Gourmet readers probably do not wish to think about it either. But there is no honest way to not consider these issues after attending the Maine Lobster Festival. Part of the issue is that lobsters so frequently get boiled alive by consumers or, at least, for their direct consumption. Additionally, the festival advertises the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, a giant killing cauldron everyone can see. By way of comparison, a beef festival would never feature a massive killing floor.

Preparing the lobster at home (and the correspondent notes “preparing” is a euphemism for killing) is more intimate. The lobster will usually try to cling to the container it’s in to avoid entering the boiling water, and, once in the water, will often try to pry the container lid off or scrape the sides of the pot. Thus, the lobster acts like something experiencing great trauma and pain. The sounds of the lobster clanging will often cause the home cook to leave the kitchen and wait until the killing is complete. Ethicists usually agree there are two criteria for determining whether a living creature has the ability to suffer: how much an animal is capable of suffering due to neurological and physical capabilities and whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with experiencing pain. The thrashing motions clearly demonstrate an experience of pain for the 35 to 45 seconds it takes the lobster to die in boiling water.

There are, however, other methods of killing. One involves stabbing the lobster quickly between the eyestalks, considered by some to be more merciful (and since it requires more agency from the preparer/consumer, they theoretically deserve to eat the lobster more). Another method is to put a lobster in cold saltwater and slowly bring it to a boil. This method is based on the mistaken belief that lobsters will not feel pain if their temperature increases slowly. And there are crueler methods too, such as poking holes in a lobster’s shell and microwaving it or simply cutting it in half while it’s alive. Regardless of the methodology, lobsters do have the physical ability to feel pain due to hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that allow them to sense touch.

However, unlike humans, lobsters cannot make or absorb natural pain minimizers such as endorphins. This could mean that lobsters do not actually experience pain in the same intense way mammals do. The correspondent notes that this idea improves his mood. He considers that a lobster might experience pain the same way lobotomized humans do: They experience pain but do not actively dislike it the way most humans do. This hinges on there being a difference between experiencing pain neurologically and suffering mentally. The issue of pain, then, may come down to preference; the ability to prefer not to feel pain may determine whether something can feel pain. As an example, a worm when it’s cut in half will continue moving, suggesting that it shows no preference for not being cut in half. But then again, there is a problem, as lobsters do show clear preferences for low depths, low light, and solitude. In addition, lobster claws are usually banded to prevent them from attacking each other in captivity since they would prefer not to be in packed conditions.

Ultimately, standing in front of the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, anyone can see the lobsters are scared and not happy, even if those emotions are more basic versions than those felt by humans. But why should the fact that these feelings are less defined make killing or eating the lobster less uncomfortable? Still, the author admits he himself wants to consider animals a lower form of life than humans because, in part, he wants to be able to continue eating meat. He does not want to come across as self-righteous when he is basically just confused about the topic. He admits the questions he is posing are not topics readers of Gourmet usually consider. At the same time, shouldn’t people who consider themselves gourmands be extra attentive to the ethics of what they consume. Or is food simply gourmet based on how it is presented and how it tastes? Regardless, there is a limit to what interested readers and writers can ask of each other.