Consider The Lobster

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2004

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Symbols & Motifs

Lobster

Lobster is both the subject of the essay as well as a symbol of what Wallace wishes to explore. Though “everyone knows what a lobster is,” the lobster means something different to him than it does to the groups he mentions in the text: the readers of Gourmet, Maine locals, and the members of PETA (236). The tension between what each person thinks of lobster as is at the heart of the essay because it reveals the complexity of morality and justifications for certain behaviors in a complicated world.

The readers of Gourmet see the lobster as “good eating,” while the locals in Maine see it as vital part of their economy (237). Of course, even that gets complicated when Wallace notes the wealthy “demilocal” who lives in Maine only seasonally and tends to see the lobster more like the readers of Gourmet do (243). PETA sees the lobster as an animal worth saving and the cooking of lobster as being abjectly cruel. To Wallace, the lobster is all of those things. While lobsters are “basically giant sea insects,” Wallace does think they taste good or at least agrees that society currently values them for their taste, even if that's a relatively recent phenomenon (237). But he also sees them as perceptive creatures, as he notes that lobsters act like humans would if placed in a pot of boiling water (248). Thus, the lobster is gourmet food despite it being like a big bug, and it may be okay to kill it but only if one recognizes that killing the lobster does cause it some pain. But then what is pain? The lobster itself leads to all sorts of complicated and unanswerable, though interconnected, questions (including for Wallace, what it means to be a tourist, what defines the local economies in Maine, what a typical reader of Gourmet thinks about, etc.).

Is it okay to cause pain for our culinary enjoyment? This is the uncomfortable choice Wallace asks the reader to consider, as he will not accept the locals’ (and festival promoters’) argument that lobsters are incapable of feeling pain. That lie just allows the consumer to avoid the moral dilemma that exists when one eats lobster. But, like every decision in the world, one cannot simply wish the discomfort away, even if the discomfort may not lead to clear answers. The world does not allow for easy and clear rules, and lobsters serve as a symbol of that world.

PETA

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals makes several appearances in “Consider the Lobster,” although Wallace himself never directly encounters any members of PETA. He hears of and reports on the various ways PETA people have interrupted previous Maine Lobster Festivals and notes in a footnote that one member of PETA was there the day of the big parade that Wallace attended. He notes that the locals seem to ignore them but also recounts the “demilocal” who complains of “these ex-flower children coming up and down along the line handing out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them” (244). While these incidents suggest a certain preachiness about PETA, Wallace also notes in a separate footnote a well-done PETA video about the horrors of factory farming, suggesting he thinks they have a point on some issues.

What PETA represents to Wallace is not the nuisance the “demilocal” sees them as nor simply a group to ignore but, rather, the type of person he wishes not to be. PETA is full of “fanatics” who make too “simplistic” and “self-righteous” pronouncements on complicated truths (247). Unlike Wallace, who admits to being more “confused” than anything else on the subject, PETA puts forth an absolutism and certainty that cannot actually be found on the subject of animal cruelty (253). They are no better rhetorically than the organizers of the Maine Lobster Festival who sell lies that lobsters cannot feel pain while making the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker. And to Wallace, such polar extremes are to be avoided.

The World’s Largest Lobster Cooker

One of the Maine Lobster Festival’s largest attractions is that visitors can see lobsters carried off boats before their eyes and then cooked in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, a vat so big it can “process over 100 lobsters at a time for the Main Eating Tent” (243). It is the sheer spectacle of all the killing that makes Wallace first ask the question about whether it is moral to boil a living thing alive “just for our gustatory pleasure,” and its prominence in the festival also hints at another discomfort Wallace has with the festival as a whole (243). He makes a point to note that a similar (and hypothetical) Nebraska Beef Festival would never include “the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something,” which means that people are making some conscious choice to celebrate one kind of killing but not another, even while both the killing of cattle and the killing of lobster are similar (247). But it’s the proximity to the killing that Wallace implies makes a difference, while always questioning why that should be the case. In having a very public spectacle of someone killing the lobster for you, though, the morality or “intimacy of the whole thing” that comes from cooking the lobster at home is completely lost (247).

The World’s Largest Lobster Cooker serves as a symbol for the lobster’s pain writ large, yet it also represents the secondary subjects of the essay: consumerism and tourism. The boiling pot of water is traumatic enough, and Wallace brings it up again and again to highlight the moral discomfort it causes. When that process is designed explicitly to attract festival goers and tourist dollars, it becomes further morally compromised. Whereas Wallace never says whether killing a lobster is moral or otherwise, it is clear he does not think the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker is justifiable.