Shots In The Dark: Can You Kill a Lobster Painlessly?

Thursday, June 22, 2024

Can You Kill a Lobster Painlessly?

This website says no...but then, it wants you to "eliminate lobsters, crabs, and other sea animals from your diet" (fat chance), so you can't really trust it then, can you?

Meanwhile, lobsterlib.com (yes, seriously) makes the case that lobsters and humans actually have a lot in common—lobsters carry their young for nine months, they have "an awkward adolescence," and so on.

Hmmm. While it's true that my ex-landlady bore a certain resemblance to a lobster, I remain unconvinced.

Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters—which they say is pretty good, actually—agrees that the whole dropping a lobster into boiling water is not such a fine thing. He's got a better technique—with pictures!

He also has a nice piece in Boston Magazine on anti-lobster activism.....

Who knew that people spent so much time thinking about how best to kill a lobster? Me, I find it heartening. With some exceptions (veal, foie gras), I'm not against eating animals—they do it, so why shouldn't we?—but I am for treating natural things with respect....

¶ 8:15 AM

Comments:

The lobster guy gets the point right on. Whole Foods is (now) a large corporate conglomerate whose interests are served by selling fancy high priced stuff at high volume via a hip marketing strategy. Globalization of food production/distribution feeds right into its business plan. But the store's holier-than-thou organic ethos is, as a result, running smack dab up against the local food movement, which opposes globalization at the expense of a more exotic, hipper dinner plate. The broader issue here is materialism and overconsumption. We are creating a world economy that depends upon consumption for consumption's sake, whether with respect to food, consumer goods, the list goes on. Alex Beam's sarcastic piece obscures this issue, which isn't about tree huggers vs. normal people. It's about whether we, the normal people, are going to consume our way into a global apocalypse. All things in balance. Whole Foods' "courageous" decision to stop shipping lobsters is little more than a gigantic red.....herring.

# posted by Anonymous : 10:33 AM

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