Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

I'd like to take a minor detour today to remember David Foster Wallace, one of the great contemporary American writers, who died of an apparent suicide over the weekend. Wallace's fiction broke new ground, from his sprawling novel Infinite Jest to his collections of short stories. However, it was his nonfiction essays that had the most profound effect on me. A sharp, and occasionally pompous, observer of American culture, Wallace's essays appeared in various magazines and were eventually anthologized in the collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster.

The essay that provides the title for the second collection, Consider the Lobster, was published in 2004 for Gourmet magazine. Apparently given the task of traveling to Maine to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace instead turns the focus inward. He uses the Festival, featuring the world's largest lobster pot and a Main Eating Tent, to question his own eating habits. The essay winds through a discussion of the standard methods for eating and preparing lobster, basic crustacean neurology and biology, and questions of moral responsibility. In the end, Wallace asks us to ponder the question that forms that title of this post: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

Wallace does not profess to be a vegetarian, and certainly is not attempting to convert anyone to a particular viewpoint. He simply asks, why is the eating of other animals ok? Where do we draw the line and what are our moral obligations? He doesn't offer any conclusions, but asks for a deeper reflection from his reader.

I am writing today about Wallace in general and this essay in particular because it had a profound effect on my thinking. I choose to not eat meat for many reasons, but reading this essay was the first time I began to actually reexamine my own food choices. I think Wallace makes a compelling argument, not for vegetarianism, but for questioning our own behavior. As being a vegetarian, for me, is part of a commitment to going green, I decided that a short recognition of the influence of David Foster Wallace is both relevant and extremely important.

You can read the original essay in the Gourmet archives. I think you are best served by picking up the essay anthology, because the other essays are all stellar, and the book does a better job of handling the footnotes that are essential to his style.

I'll leave you with Wallace, in his own words:

In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? 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.

Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate 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;²⁰ 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 be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.