Does The Main Lobster Festival really stir up ideas about weather or not a lobster feels pain?
- Festivals are meant to be a place where you enjoy Americana, food (cooked in all ways, shapes and forms), entertainment, and friends/ family. Festivals bring all shapes, sizes, colors of people together under a common fascination with in this case lobsters.
David Foster Wallace’s essay did provoke me. It asked me to “consider the lobster”. For me the matter of fact is that it is JUST A LOBSTER. It looks weird, with its abnormal structure, its prominent claws, and its antenna like eyeballs that stick out of its head. Yet I am a human, I like to eat protein (preferably from animals, though its possible to survive on protein from plants and such), and the lobster is a great source to do such that.
I gathered that David Foster Wallace’s essay was supposed to be about the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine, yet someone he ended up going off on a tangent about how we need to consider the lobster, more in the act of actually killing it rather than eating it. I felt that the essay become preachy because if your are supposed to be writing an article for a food magazine you shouldn’t be going off on a tangent of whether or not the lobster feels pain or is suffering. He assumed that “everyone” who decides to go to the MLF, at some point in the time there, starts to think about the morality of killing the lobsters in the way we do.
Yes, the lobster that we have picked out for our meal that day probably does not want to die- but again what animal does want to die. Though with the fact that an animal no matter where on the chain of superiority most likely is “programmed” to not want to die, I highly doubt that they contemplate how not to die that day.
The lobster most likely does not think about where or not that this box filled with food will be at trap and eventually lead to my end. If that were so, they would have figured out by now.
I will just have to leave it with that David Foster Wallace is an unique writer in the sense that he does tend to voice his opinion of where a lobster can feel pain or not even if he did not realize it or not. He was effective enough to get me to “consider the lobster”, even though in the end I ended up siding with eating it no matter how it is cooked. They day that the lobster can out smart a human and start eating us, will be the day I pay respects to it and learn how to not get captured by it and begin a wonders game of whits.
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Good point about going off subject. I wonder, though...he's not the only one who let this happen. Why'd the editors at Gourmet allow this to be published? I mean, they could've just said no, right?
ReplyDeleteInteresting to hear that Wallace caused you to a) consider the lobster, b) not turn you off to the article, but c) maintain the views about lobsters you had previously. How'd he manage to do all three?