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Blog Post #9: Consider the Lobster

I first read this article during my Junior year of High School in my AP English Language and Composition class. I remember discussing the ethics and morals of boiling a lobster and how disgusted I felt after leaving class that day. To this day, I have not eaten lobster. Why? Because of Mr. Wallace and his existential crisis of an article.
Re-reading this paper today was certainly different from reading it two years ago. Back then, I was ready to be upset about anything and everything. Thus, I wrote off lobster from my life. Now, I relate more to Wallace’s ending statements, in which he writes that he has “an obvious selfish interest…since I like to eat certain animals and want to be able to keep doing it.” This statement reflects the Maine Lobster Festival as a whole. On the surface, it is a fun festival in which one eats plenty of freshly cooked lobster. Digging deeper, we find that this festival is a place where lobsters are inhumanely boiled alive by the hundreds.
It wasn’t until I read Wallace’s snippet regarding the readers of GOURMET and their willingness to self-assess “the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly” that I realized this was written for a food magazine. The article sidetracks to ethical questions about cooking lobster and pulls the reader into a world of rights and wrongs, rather than sunshine and summer food festivals. The darkness of the topic reflects the darkness in us as humans and the ease with which we will kill an animal. This is indeed much more than a food article, as it displays the cowardly, wicked, murderous nature of humans as a species.

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