Vegan Practically

In 2003, Gourmet Magazine sent David Foster Wallace to do a story on the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF). The resulting article, “Consider the Lobster,” appeared in August 2004. In my view it’s one of the best pieces of non-fiction writing to question the ideology of eating animals, in this case lobster, ever written.

It starts as a report on a major annual event with all the crass pageantry, smells, crowds, and marketing described in detail, as if passing on the information to a reader who might be interested in going. He recounts it as “enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed.” But Wallace soon turns to more probing questions, such as what exactly are lobsters? (after a scientific overview of this particular crustacean, he summarizes that lobsters are “basically giant sea insects.”)

They may themselves be the scavengers of the ocean floor, but “they themselves are good eating.” Of course they used to be only for poor people, but now “lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down from caviar.” That said, at the MLF it’s served in a very crowded tent on styrofoam trays with plastic utensils after being boiled alive in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker.

And here is where the paper takes its brilliant turn, as Wallace asks a number of pertinent questions: “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 U.S.: 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 it all just a matter of individual choice?”

As he puts it, the nature of his assignment — to give an account of his experience of spending days at this festival, made him think hard about the whole idea of buying and eating lobster. And that leads him to reflect on the question of whether lobsters feel pain. He goes into some detail (which I will not recount here) of how lobsters act when they are plunged alive into a pot of boiling water at home, and decides that while it might be some comfort to think that the jury’s still out, “the lobster acts as if it is in terrible pain.”

He then spends some time considering whether lobsters’ particular nervous system, which lacks the ability to produce natural opioids and endorphins, which are what nervous systems such as ours to do deal with intense pain, makes them experience it more intensely rather than (as some have hypothesized) not at all.

For the unconvinced, he invites us to think rather about lobsters’ capacity to express preferences. They seem to prefer certain water temperatures. They appear not to like being crowded in tanks with other lobsters (which is “one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.”). They certainly seem to express preferences, even if rudimentary. And why, he asks, does the rudimentary nature of their preferences matter? A rudimentary preference is still a preference.

In his words: “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 and 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.”

Now, Wallace was not himself a vegan. He admits to believing that animals are less morally important than human beings. And yet he further allows that he has a selfish interest in maintaining this belief and that he has not worked out “a personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” (You could all it “speciesism”). So despite his desire not to be dishing out a “PETA-like screed,” he really does push the boundaries of what you would expect to see printed in Gourmet magazine.

(Aside: In 2018, based on its assessment of the evidence that lobsters expereince pain, Switzerland made it illegal to boil lobsters alive. Not that they can’t be eaten. They must be stunned first with an electric shock to the brain.)

In the end, he turns the moral question on the foodies who are the magazine’s intended audience, asking: “Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just 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)?”

These are good questions, not just about lobster, but about all of the non-human animals that humans eat and use. And they’re not hypothetical philosophical reflections. The question of how the extent to which humans’ gustatory pleasure should take precedence over the vast animal suffering that produces it has real material consequences for non-human animals every second of every day.

The article is rhetorically brilliant in its bait-and-switch approach, incredibly well-written, philosophically compelling, and honest in its level of self-reflection and critical reflection on barbaric yet widely accepted food practices.

And that’s why it’s my favourite essay about eating animals.