Consider The Lobster

“The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea insects.”

After spending two paragraphs describing the taxonomy of lobsters, Wallace concludes with a blunt summary of what they are. In doing so, he flattens the posh, lofty ideal of what a lobster is by making a comparison to something that sounds completely unappetizing. He mentions immediately afterwards that they are “good eating,” though, and sets up one of the central tensions in the text: the experience of eating lobster juxtaposed with the reality of what lobster is.

“Nothing against the euphoric senior editor of Food & Wine, but I’d be surprised if she’d ever actually been here in Harbor Park, amid crowds of people slapping canal-zone mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and watch Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children.” 

Wallace is on assignment for a food magazine, Gourmet, that caters to luxury consumers, and he notes that the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival was especially crowded due to a segment from the editor of another magazine that caters to luxury consumers. The festival, at least to his eyes, does not reflect a luxury experience at all and is filled with all sorts of little inconveniences that remind Wallace of the problems of consumerism as well as tourism. In mentioning Food & Wine, too, Wallace shows his seeming discomfort at being hired by Gourmet to write an article for readers who seek to be consumers and tourists, as one of Wallace’s central goals is to get those types of readers to consider the ethical implications of their consumerism.

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… you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.” 

Wallace makes extensive use of footnotes in which he presents his own opinions that are not directly related to the essay, but they add important insights necessary to fully comprehend his argument. After describing the negatives of the crowd as well as the consumerism at the Maine Lobster Festival, he describes his own thoughts on tourism. Being a tourist means chasing consumerist false realities in lieu of the real experience of being someplace else. The process turns one into an insect, like a lobster, on top of something that no longer exists, the reality of a place.

“A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle.” 

After an extensive explanation of how to boil a lobster, Wallace bluntly states the crux of the moral issue he raises and sets up the rest of the essay. Since lobster is killed by the consumer or, at least directly for the consumer, one must ask what it means to kill a lobster for the mere pleasure of eating it. Unlike other proteins, lobster is not separated from slaughter to cooking by another step in the chain (such as a grocery store individually wrapping a steak), and yet restaurants and recipes do not even make a point of reminding someone that the lobster is alive as part of its preparation for consumption. It is an obvious fact, and, like other things that are obvious, ends up being taken for granted by most.

“So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does ‘all right’ even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?” 

The questions Wallace first poses here are the ones the bulk of the essay explores. Like most of the text, this quotation only complicates the question by surrounding the main question with other questions that imply that there may in fact be something wrong with asking the big question. But the question is one he cannot help but ask in front of a giant killing mechanism that the Maine Lobster Festival features and advertises; after all, if killing a lobster is wrong, how much more wrong is it to kill so many lobsters in such a spectacle?

“There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.” 

Dick, one of the locals Wallace talks to, justifies lobster consumption with this pseudoscience, a false belief that is reinforced by the Maine Lobster Festival itself. Thoughts like these seem to suggest that people justify their bad choices by ignoring the truth of it. That is, they are concerned about pain, but they dismiss their fear with falsehoods that allow them to ignore their concern altogether. Wallace proves that lobsters do feel pain or something like pain at least, so he implies that everyone may have to actually confront if lobster pain is justified by the pleasure a human gets from eating lobster, as it is impossible to dismiss reality itself.

“As far as I can tell, my own main way 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 about it, either.” 

Wallace repeatedly interrupts his own essay by admitting his own thoughts on the subject. He is concerned with not coming across like a PETA fanatic sanctimoniously declaring what the reader should or should not justify, and in statements like this, he makes it clear that he does not have any moral clarity either. Like most people, he has ignored the moral implications of lobster consumption, but his goal in writing the essay is to make the reader (and himself) confront those issues.

“Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival 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 something—there’s no way.” 

Part of the appeal of the Maine Lobster Festival is that it takes place at the same site in which lobstermen unload their haul, so festival goers can see the lobster both taken from its natural home and directly killed in front of their very eyes. Since Wallace is interested in the ethics of this operation, he struggles with the spectacle that is the killing. With irony, he makes a hypothetical comparison to point out the ridiculousness of this aspect of the festival, as no one would want to watch a bunch of cattle get slaughtered and cooked right in front of them.

“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).” 

The behavior of lobsters when they are entered into hot water suggests that lobsters are similar to humans in disliking the act of dying, a point Wallace clarifies by making another simple analogy. The humanlike behavior often becomes unbearable for the home chef who will leave the room to avoid hearing the lobster suffer. Wallace asks, then, if humans cannot stand to be reminded of the humanlike suffering of lobsters, why do humans justify their suffering?

“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.” 

Wallace adds complexity to his discussion of pain by noting that the sensation of pain is different from the awareness of pain. Though lobsters clearly do feel pain, it is possible they can neither actually fear pain nor recognize it as unpleasant. This could suggest that killing lobsters is not as morally suspect as other pieces of evidence Wallace presents, but, regardless, it, like so much of the text, makes the topic of morality murkier, as there is no clear answer.

“To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior 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.” 

Because lobsters are not able to speak, it is impossible to ask them if they feel pain. However, the way lobsters react in hot water—clinging to their container to avoid being placed in the water, then clanging the sides and lid of the pot to try to escape—suggests that they would prefer to not be in the boiling water. Though Wallace says that he personally thinks animals are lower on the moral scale than humans, he makes a clear comparison that lobsters act like humans when they are being cooked, implying that they are not dissimilar from humans in all respects.

“My own initial 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; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.”

At the end of the essay, after Wallace has made a convincing argument that lobsters at least experience some kind of pain, he admits that he cannot go so far as to say they are actually like humans. He compares PETA-style statements that compare the suffering of animals to the Holocaust or Roman circuses and admits such comparisons are not fair. After asking the reader to consider the lobster’s suffering, though, he cannot actually come up with an ethical code that allows him to enjoy eating meat, even though he implies he will continue to do so.

“I’m also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.” 

At various points in the essay, Wallace describes the work of PETA, work he sometimes supports but that he also seems to think is too fanatical and simplistic. He clarifies that he cannot answer the questions he poses with any such clarity and has attempted to make his argument without sounding sanctimonious or self-righteous in part because the issue is far too complex for such simplistic moralizing. In the end, he suggests simply that each person needs to individually decide what is morally right while also implying that the world is so confusing that making such decisions is extremely difficult.