5 To Boil or Not to Boil
Arrange your lobster meat in the shape of a crown on a platter. Put the tomatoes on top, and between them pour the lobster butter you have just made. Glaze with sauce (step 4) and serve. Since this dish is a trifle complicated, a novice should not attempt it. It takes quite a cook to tackle it.
Alexandre Dumas, 18701
Rockland, Maine, proclaims itself ‘The Lobster Capital of the World’. It is the largest town and primary port of lower Penobscot Bay, the centre of the lobster fishery in the United States.2 All across the bay and around its islands brightly coloured lobster buoys dot the surface in mesmerizing densities. Flying over the area in a small plane on a summer day it’s as if hundreds of thousands of candies were strewn across the water from the smashing of a zeppelin-sized piñata.
Every year since 1948 supply and demand come together in mid-coast for a whirling crimson party: the Maine Lobster Festival. Lasting five days in 2009 the festival hosted approximately 75,000 visitors and boiled some 8,850 kg (19,500 lb) of lobster.3 There are at least a dozen other lobster festivals of various sizes and angles around the USA – from Redondo Beach, California, to Panama City Beach, Florida. Both Boston and Reno have staged competitions for the speed eating of lobster. Sonya Thomas holds the current record after she downed in twelve minutes 44 American lobsters – over 5 kg (11.3 lb) of meat – at a contest in Kennebunk, Maine.4 On the Fourth of July in Bar Harbor, Maine, people gather to watch lobsters with names such as ‘Butters’ and ‘Suppa’ race in lanes filled with seawater. Bar Harbor got the idea from a similar event in South Carolina.5
Poster for the 2009 Maine Lobster Festival by Bill Ronalds, celebrating the King of All Seafood. |
Half a dozen lobster festivals run every year in the Canadian Maritimes, too, including the ‘Lobsterpalooza Feastival’ in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The town of Shediac, New Brunswick, which refers to itself as the ‘Lobster Capital of the World’, also hosts a festival. Nova Scotia declared 2009 the ‘Year of the Lobster’, and their Shelburne County Lobster Festival is in the region that more humbly calls itself the ‘Lobster Capital of Canada’. One year the Shelburne festival featured at separate events: creamed lobsters, boiled lobsters, lobster burgers and lobster chowder. Their logo is a cartoon of a lobster in a chef’s hat with a fork standing beside a terrified man in a pot of boiling water.
Yet somehow, despite these somewhat low-brow lobster hullabaloos, we, worldwide, continue to perceive the lobster as a high-end, luxury food: to be eaten on special occasions and as an experience worth travelling for. Is lobster genuinely that delicious, or are other historical, sociological and psychological factors at work?
A story is often told that early American indentured servants or slaves protested against being served lobsters too often, that they demanded various laws limiting this diet. There are indeed narratives describing lobster as so plentiful that it’s not highly valued, such as the nineteenth-century account of the Canadian Maritimes by John Rowan. In 1623 William Bradford wrote that the first settlers of the Plymouth Colony could only serve newcomers ‘lobster, or a peece of fish’, with no bread or anything else but water.6 Another early seventeenth-century account by William Wood declared that lobsters are ‘very good fish, the small ones being the best; their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten’.7 Yet Wood also called the lobsters ‘luscious’ in another section of his account. Regardless, these ‘please-no-more-lobster’ laws or a sense that this was only peasants’ food – because lobster was also used for bait and fertilizer – seem greatly exaggerated, if not apocryphal. Food historian Sandy Oliver wrote that she has neither found nor heard of a single primary document of one of these complaints or ordinances against eating lobster.8 She told me: ‘I have been pounding away at this lobster question for the longest time. You’d be pretty surprised at the violence of the reactions I get. People love this myth.’9 Oliver summarized lobster as a food in early New England: ‘Like the oyster, the lobster had a dual identity as a luxury food in cities and inland where it was not native, and as a food for all classes, including poor fishermen, along the coast.’10 In 1887, at the height of the canning era, Richard Rathbun wrote in his government report:
Canned lobster label, Portland [Maine] Packing Company, c. 1867. Under ‘Bay Lobster’ the label says: ‘This favorite Crustacea has become so important an article of food, that a statement of the best methods of preparing it for the table will be useful. Many prefer it cold, just as taken from the Can, it having been boiled before sealing’. The label goes on to give directions for preparing ‘Lobster Curry’, ‘Balls’, ‘Salad’, and ‘A La Creme’.
On the sea coasts where [lobsters] occur, except in the vicinity of large towns and cities, they are not generally much, if any, more expensive than the common fish of the same region, and they are, therefore, quite extensively eaten by all classes, and many of the fishermen and others also catch them for their own use. Away from the sea-shore, and even in many of the larger markets located near good fishing-grounds, the prices are generally much higher, placing this class of food beyond the reach of the poorer people, and often raising it to the rank of a luxury.11
Of course, just as the pizza chef has difficulty eating his own pie, not all fishermen salivate at the thought of a lobster dinner. Thomas Fairfax, a nineteenth-century lobster smack captain, said: ‘Lobsters are very good as an article of commerce, and pretty enough to look at, after they’re b’iled; but, as to eating them, I prefer castoff rubber shoes.’12 More recently, a man named George Hoag from inland Maine said: ‘If them tourists want to come up from Boston and pay them prices, then, by Christ, let ’em. Damn fools. Lobsters, hell, they’re big cockroaches, that’s what they are. You ain’t gonna catch me eatin’ one, even if I could afford the damn thing.’13
Yet for every Captain Fairfax and George Hoag there are thousands of people who drool over the prospect of lobster as food, who adore a quiet evening at the edge of a dock eating fresh lobsters with family and friends, or have a blast at a bustling, buttery lobster festival. Accounts abound of people positively adoring the firm, salty-but-not-too-fishy flesh of lobsters, along with the process of eating them out of the shell. Robert Blakey, a nineteenth-century British professor, hyperbolized:
Only think of Adam and his immediate descendants regaling themselves on boiled lobsters, or indulging in the stimulating properties of its various forms of sauces! Who knows the part lobsters may have taken in the roystering and Bacchanalian revelries among the citizens of the Plain – how many convivial spirits were wont to gather in the evenings around its savoury fumes preparatory for whetting the appetite for more varied and sensual indulgences, ere their gluttony and other sins consigned them to Divine chastisement? Speculations crowd on the mind, in all shapes and forms, when we think of the lobster feasts before the Flood.14
The Greeks and Romans seemed to have enjoyed eating lobster. The Roman chef and author, Apicius, was reportedly so fond of slipper lobsters that once he heard about their size and excellence on the coast of Tunisia he mounted an expedition to sample them for himself.15 Apicius wrote of recipes for boiled and roasted lobster, including one with a sauce made from ‘pepper, cumin, rue, honey, vinegar, fish stock, and olive oil’.16
Though it seems shellfish fell out of favour for a good part of the Middle Ages, food historian Terence Scully explained that European nobles and affluent townspeople ate and could afford lobster.17 The Vatican’s fifteenth-century recipe book of the master cook to King Charles V includes a few mentions of lobster, such as directions for preparing Gravé de d’escrevisses, which seems to have been for either the clawed or spiny species. This gravé is a thick, spiced sauce made of lobster, which is then poured over fried chunks of lobster meat.18 Another mediaeval recipe book recommended that when preparing rissoles one could substitute lobster for meat on days when the Church required it to be a ‘lean-day’.19
Lobster was a small but present feature of the diet in England’s Early Modern period.20 Robert May included over a dozen lobster recipes in his 1678 edition of The Accomplisht Cook. He wrote directions for stewing lobster in wine, mincing with eels, marinating, roasting on a spit, broiling and jellying lobsters, as well as how to ‘boil Lobsters to eat cold the common way’ and how to ‘keep Lobsters a quarter of a year very good’, by wrapping the cooked corpses in brine-soaked rags and burying them in sand down in the cellar.21 The poet Alexander Pope used lobster to evoke decadent times in his poem ‘A Farewell to London in the Year 1715’. He wrote of he and his colleagues’ rakish excesses in the city: ‘Luxurious lobster-nights, farewell,/For sober, studious days.’22
Hannah Glasse’s popular The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (first London edition 1747), had half a dozen recipes for lobsters and lobster roe, including lobster in fish sauce and lobster pie. Glasse recommended that when at the market: ‘Chuse them by their weight; the heaviest are best, if no water be in them [;] if new, the tail will pull smart, like a spring.’23 The Compleat Housewife (c. 1729) also gives a few lobster recipes, including one for pickling, one for ‘potting’ a dozen boiled lobsters in butter and spices so the meat will keep for a month or more and a recipe for roasting: ‘Tie your lobsters to the spit alive, baste them with water and salt till they look very red.’24 This also from The Compleat Housewife:
To butter Crabs or Lobsters.
YOUR crabs and lobsters being boiled and cold, take all the meat out of the shells and body, break the claws, and take out all their meat, mince it small, and put it altogether, adding to it two or three spoonfuls of claret, a very little vinegar, a nutmeg grated; let it boil up till it is thorough hot; then put in some butter melted, with some anchovies and gravy, and thicken with the yolks of an egg or two; when it is very hot put it in the large shell, and stick it with toasts.25
In the nineteenth century, with the introduction of canning and improved transportation methods, lobster became a more accessible dish. Live lobsters were still cooked and served, but recipes now regularly involved picked lobster meat and often recommended it served cold in lobster salads.
Charles Dickens wrote often about Victorian food, including lobster. In David Copperfield (1850), for example, the honourable Peggotty family on the coast ‘dealt in lobsters, crabs, and crawfish’, and they bring David two ‘prodigious’ lobsters, among other shellfish, as a gift when visiting him at school. Later David is jealous of a suitor offering a picnic meal of lobster to his beloved Dora, and when Traddles tells of living well in London he speaks of simply picking up a lobster on the way home from the theatre.26 In an edition of Dickens’s periodical Household Words an article explains how to make a proper lobster salad for a supper-party. Lobster salad is presented as a normal dish, almost obligatory for a ball supper that is ‘good, economical, and easily prepared’. The author suggests fresh-picked meat mixed with hard-boiled egg yolks to be piled high atop ‘perfectly dry’ lettuce, with a creamy dressing or mayonnaise sauce.27 In another issue of Household Words, a writer gives this recipe, intended in part for the middle-class reader:
POTATO CASE WITH LOBSTER
Steam and mash up a pound of potatoes very smooth and dry. Add to this the yolks of two eggs, work over the fire in a stew-pan until dry, then mould in the same manner as a pork-pie crust, brush it over with yolk of egg, and bake until nicely coloured. With a quarter of a pint of white sauce mix half a teaspoonful of essence of anchovy and one of lemon juice, stir into it half a tin of preserved lobster, and let it stand by the side of the fire to get hot, but do not let it boil. Fresh lobster can be used, of course, but is more expensive. When ready, pour the lobster with its sauce, which should be thick, into the case and serve.28
Dickens’s wife, Catherine, also wrote of lobsters in her What Shall We Have for Dinner? (1851). She advocated lobster prepared in several different ways, even for the same party. She suggested lobster cutlets, fillets, lobster salad, lobster curry and diced claw meat to add to a seafood filling for puff-pastry.29
Dozens of recipes and menus with lobster in all sorts of forms appeared in other Victorian cookbooks and in restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic. Authors such as Eliza Acton and Mrs D. A. Lincoln, in various editions, explained preparations for lobster patties, salads, sausages, lobsters in soups, chowders, bisques and lobsters sautéed in butter with a little flour, chilivinegar and nutmeg, then served in the shell. They recommended the use of the eggs, the ‘coral’, for a variety of sauces, and wrote about how to make devilled lobster, ‘Indian lobster-cutlets’ and lobster fricasseed.30 A menu for Keeler’s European Hotel in inland Albany, New York, for example, had in March of 1897 an image of a lobster at the top of the menu, even though they offered twice as many oyster dishes. The entrees included lobsters ‘Plain Boiled’ and ‘Extra Plain Boiled’, lobsters broiled alive, lobster croquettes with peas, and ‘Patties a la Keeler’.31
A ‘Shell-fish’, awaiting the dressing room, in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1868). |
As overfishing and over-canning began depleting the stocks of lobster, the price went up accordingly. It became difficult for a family to buy lobster if living away from the coast, and thus its status rose as a luxury food. An author in 1905 wrote: ‘With lobsters at 30 cents a pound they are quite beyond my reach; and all I can do is dream of the time when they sold for 5, and we had all the lobsters we could eat.’32
Since then lobster has remained a food symbolic of the prosperous and served primarily on special occasions. This is reflected nicely in the 2005 film Brooklyn Lobster in which a New York family struggles to keep its lobster pound and sea-food market from being bought out. Here lobsters are a direct metaphor for money. The film opens with the pound’s loss of saltwater circulation, so all of the lobsters, ready for the Christmas rush, are in danger of dying. Keeping the lobsters alive throughout the film parallels the family’s struggle to save the business. The owner, Frank Giorgio (Danny Aiello), identifies personally with the pugnacity of these animals but, more importantly, lobsters are his livelihood. One of his employees calls the boxes of lobsters ‘crates of cash’. The wealthy WASP characters in the movie eat lobsters loudly, almost grotesquely, while wearing plastic bibs over formal clothes – ties, blue blazers, pearls – and speak rowdily about it as a special food. One rich, duplicitous character shouts multiple times: ‘Bring me a big f—ing lobster!’ The film shows several close-ups of lobsters, but the first one of a cooked bug, a bright red full-screen image of a lobster boiling in a pot, is held just after the family gets the news that their business has been saved. The Giorgio family rarely eats lobsters but in the end, when they do, it is at their Christmas and celebration dinner. Notably, this bluecollar family, their employees and their friends do not wear bibs at their civilized, joyous feast.33
One of Freeman McKown’s popular clambakes in West Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in which lobster was always the centrepiece. McKown ran these events from about 1890 to 1930.
In the 2005 film Brooklyn Lobster, Christmastime is a crucial money-making season for this lobster supplier – so they fly a ‘Santa Claws’ to advertise. |
Sexual connotations have regularly been stirred in with the lobster’s status as expensive, decadent fare. Each year the Maine Lobster Festival crowns a pretty young local woman as the Maine Sea Goddess. She sits centre stage in a throne with a large green claw over each shoulder. Allegedly Alexander the Great so craved lobsters that the members of his court needed this food, either whole or as a sauce, to ‘allay his periodical paroxysms of passion’.34 In 1620 Dr Tobias Venner, in his Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, believed lobster to be an aphrodisiac. He advised that it ‘giveth much good and firme nourishment’ but one should be careful because lobster ‘maketh a great propensitie unto venereall embracements’.35 Venner’s views might have just been due to the food’s expense and rarity – as might be true today.36
This association of lobster with lust and sexual activity seems to have carried on through the centuries. John Smith wrote in ‘A Rhapsody upon a Lobster’ (1713):
The Lusty Food helps Female Neighbours,
Promotes their Husband’s, and their Labours;
And in return much Work supplies
For that Bright Midwife of the Skies.
Lobster with Cavear in fit Places,
Gives won’drous Help in barren Cases;
It warms the chiller Veins, and proves
A kind Incentive to our Loves;
It is a Philter, and High Diet,
That lets no Lady sleep in Quiet.37
A few years later poet John Gay composed ‘To a Young Lady’, in which the narrator sends a gift of an aphrodisiac (a lamprey) to a maid he is courting. An aunt explains to the young woman that the man is trying to seduce her. In explaining these types of foods, she says: ‘If I eat lobster, ’tis so warming,/That every man I see looks charming’. The narrator ends:
In this, I own, your aunt is clear;
I sent you what I well might spare:
For when I see you, (without joking,)
Your eyes, lips, breasts, are so provoking;
They set my heart more cock-a-hoop,
Than could whole seas of cray-fish soup.38
Chef Jasper White explained the lobster’s allure this way: ‘It is the briny-sweet taste of the sea, where all life began, that is so intensely satisfying and sensually stimulating.’39 Beyond the often feminine ascriptions to the ocean and her creatures, there is also perhaps something sexual going on visually, subconsciously, with the bright red at the table, as a food, as a quencher of carnal appetite: think red heart, Valentine’s Day, red silk sheets, women in red dresses, lips, nipples and so forth. Lord Byron, though surely no exemplar, wrote in a letter that ‘a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster sallad & Champagne, the only truly feminine & becoming viands’.40
In the early decades of the twentieth century New York restaurant owners created luxurious establishments with elaborate interiors called ‘lobster palaces’. Around Times Square and Broadway these palaces served champagne and lobster late at night, after the theatre. Lobster was especially expensive, and here wealthy society could mingle with showgirls and the theatre crowd, the rich and the famous. The palaces were sensual, highpublicity restaurants that winked at covert trysts and men’s parties in private rooms. Historian Lewis Erenberg wrote: ‘The lobster palaces, as they were called because of their gilded interiors and gay late-night lobster suppers, merchandised an opulent experience of material pleasure and hoped-for naughtiness.’41 Around this time an older wealthy man with a young attractive woman on his arm, whom we might call a ‘sugar daddy’ today, was known as ‘a lobster’.42
A lobster dinner paired with sex is common in contemporary popular culture, too. As film-critic and oceanographer Andrew Fisher has pointed out, the scene in Flashdance (1983), where the young dancer (Jennifer Beals) salaciously sucks on lobster meat while she moves her foot under the table to stroke the crotch of her date, perhaps inspired a similar scene in the romantic comedy Splash, released the following year.43 In Splash the sexually uninhibited mermaid (Daryl Hannah) lustily eats her lobster right through the shell, crunching as Allen (Tom Hanks) tries to propose marriage to her at a fancy restaurant. As the formal guests in suits and sparkling gowns steal glances, she says: ‘That’s how we eat lobster where I come from.’44
Overleaf: The lascivious allure of the lobster is shown in Pierre Outin’s 1870s Stealing a Kiss.
Previous page: An 1890s American theatre poster that evokes sex, money and absurdity, presumably for some type of burlesque show. The erotic, sadistic pun here is that a ‘lobster’ at this time was a name for an older, wealthy man – a high roller – who wined and dined showgirls, often with a lobster dinner.
Daryl Hannah in Splash (dir. Ron Howard, 1984) is a sexy mermaid who, unaware of cultural norms ‘on land’, crunches straight into the shell of a lobster at a fancy dinner. |
An ideal example is in a pulp novel by Shirley Jump titled The Angel Craved Lobster (2005) in which a young woman named Meredith moves to Boston from a small farming town in Indiana. She wants to lose her virginity with a variety of new experiences, but she falls in love instead. By the end of the novel, the man, who won’t indulge her lust because she is too special, proposes marriage to her over the lobster dinner that he’d been promising for most of the story. The novel includes seafood recipes throughout, narrated by different characters. As we reach the climax of the book (loss of virginity and engagement), Jump writes, slathered with double entendre:
Meredith’s When-the-Mood-Is-Right Lobster Stew
3 tablespoons butter
1 pound lobster meat
1 cup heavy cream
3 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
Paprika
An illustration by Dahlov Ipcar for her 1962 children’s book, Lobsterman. This lobstering family has no anxiety about boiling the animals alive. |
Pull out all the stops now with the most decadent dish you can create. This one is rich . . . in everything you’ve been denying yourself. Melt the butter and fry the lobster meat until it’s warm and heated through. Add the cream and milk, gradually, stirring it carefully over low to medium-low heat. Don’t rush it! The end result will be worth every second you put into it. Season with salt and pepper, then let this simmer gently for about 15 to 20 minutes. Sprinkle a little paprika on top. Since this dish is so indulgent, be careful who you serve it to. He might just come back for seconds. And thirds. And . . . more.45
Lobster as a food is unique due to a combination of factors. It remains a meal for the wealthy or something special for someone of average means. Away from the ocean lobster might be considered as indulgent as caviar or filet mignon. Clawed lobster has been a regular dish at the White House46 – a reminder that it is one of the few dishes that North America can claim as superior to other parts of the world, and geographically privileged for its larger specimens. A few lobster recipes cooked at five-star restaurants are so famous that you probably recognize them by name, such as Lobster Newburg, Lobster Thermidor and Lobster Fra Diavolo. Even today in Rockland, Maine, in August, a take-out lobster roll costs four times more than a large fully stacked cheeseburger in a fast food restaurant (a fact infuriating and befuddling to most lobstermen getting very little from the wholesaler). The shell of a cooked lobster is colourful and adds serious pizzazz to any table. Lobster is caught wild and does better than nearly all other fisheries from most environmentalists’ perspectives. It is a nutritious food, at least excluding the melted butter. The approximately 100 gm (3.5 oz) of meat you get from a 450 gm (1 lb) lobster has fewer than 100 calories, and it has less cholesterol and fat than the same amount of skinless chicken or turkey breast. Lobster meat also comes with a nice portion of omega-3 acids, which are commended these days as good for our hearts.47 Lobster has been called ‘the ultimate white meat’.
When you’re presented with a whole bug, however, this food is cumbersome and messy. Lobster ‘in the rough’ is an event. Lobster is also one of the few animals in most modern homes that is purchased alive – with two eyes and with two claws unavoidably likened to human hands. The live lobster in the kitchen or cooked on the plate is a final vestige of what it is like to butcher or kill our own food. Other than crabs, Louisiana crawfish and a few small fish species, nearly all other animal foods are cooked and cleaned, headless and limbless, before most diners in developed countries ever see them in the market or on their plate. Lobster as a food is therefore fraught with contemporary ethical dilemmas.
The belief that boiling a lobster alive for best taste and safety goes back to the ancient Romans. In the fifteenth century, Platina wrote: ‘This animal alone does not have good flesh unless it is cooked alive in boiling water.’48 This has carried into modern times, as exemplified by French author and chef Dr Edouard de Pomiane who remembered in the 1930s how plentiful and cheap the clawed (homard) and spiny (langouste) lobsters once were off the coast of Brittany. He ate them every day and prepared them differently each time. He believed that boiling the lobster alive was best – ‘one must admit that no complicated method of preparation is half as good as fresh-caught lobster simply boiled in sea water, cooled and served with mayonnaise’ – yet he took the time in his instructions to tell you to ‘plunge the live lobster into fast-boiling water so that its sufferings shall be as brief as possible’.49 A dish like ‘Homard à l’Américaine’, which he thought too rich because it drowns out the taste of the lobster, requires the animal to be cut into pieces while still alive. Pomiane directed you to plunge a sharp knife in the lobster’s head, which he believed kills it instantly.
Woody Allen in Annie Hall (dir. Allen, 1977) shows how the inability to face cooking a lobster alive can stand for a lack of masculinity. |
Yet the boiling of the lobster alive has been a preoccupation of modern eaters, as evidenced by the joke gifts sold in Rockland or some of the floats and costumes at the festival’s parade. Author David Foster Wallace gave a characteristically cerebral and cynical account of the Maine Lobster Festival in a 2004 issue of Gourmet. He comments on how a western beef festival would never include any giant slaughterhouse floor or anything the equivalent of the ‘World’s Largest Lobster Cooker’, where you can watch your dinner steamed alive – perhaps, as Wallace put it, like some sort of ‘Roman circus or medieval torture-fest’.50
Films such as Annie Hall (1977) and Julie & Julia (2009) both feature scenes of frantic, comic attempts to get over the fear of putting living lobsters into a pot at home. These two movies include the killing of lobster as related to gender roles. In Annie Hall the first scene of a young couple having fun together is at a beach house, trying to put the lobsters in the pot after they have escaped the bag and are crawling over the kitchen floor. Annie (Diane Keaton) is the first one who eventually handles the lobster, but Alvy (Woody Allen) actually drops it in the boiling water. Later in the film the scene is replicated with another girlfriend but here the woman mocks Alvy for not being able to boil it without a fuss: ‘They’re only lobsters. Look, you’re a grown man, you know how to pick up a lobster.’51 The scene in Julie & Julia, based on a chapter titled ‘They Shoot Lobsters, Don’t They?’ in Julie Powell’s memoir of the same name, has Julie’s husband (Chris Messina) come into the kitchen to rescue her while she whimpers, frightened, in the living room. The lobsters in their death throes had literally flung off the lid. The husband slams the lid back on, holding it there proudly. In contrast, during another scene in the film, Julia Child (Meryl Streep) first proves herself in France by unabashedly cleaving a live homard while the male culinary students cower behind her. One telling difference between these two films is actually in the credits, because the latter ends with a mention of the American Humane Association. In turns out that although many lobsters were sacrificed to make the lobster dishes for other scenes in the movie, AHA members monitored the filming of the boiling alive scene in Julie & Julia. The lobsters weren’t actually dropped into a killer pot. It was a cool mist that supplied the ‘steam’.52
Cover of PETA flyer as part of a 1999 ‘Let lobsters live!’ campaign. On the other side actress Mary Tyler Moore is quoted: ‘A lobster who is being boiled alive will frantically scrape the sides of the pot trying to escape the pain ... To me, eating a lobster is out of the question.’
The concern with the morality of boiling a lobster alive goes back to at least the nineteenth century in Western culture, as exemplified by Baron Bolland’s parodic poem ‘The Negro’s Dying Blush’ (1835) and the writings of the humanitarians at the turn of the twentieth century who debated as to whether or not the lobster feels a level of pain that we as supposedly sensitive, caring people should avoid.53 The dilemma can become a question more for philosophers than scientists, although several experts claim a kinder method of killing a lobster. Dozens of scientific experiments have been conducted since about 1915, if not earlier.54 The studies almost all involve killing a bunch of lobsters in different ways – often comparing boiling to variations of chopping, freezing, saltwater immersion and/or slow boiling from cold water – and then monitoring the doomed lobsters’ responses in ever more complex methods. After killing some 54 lobsters in four different ways, marine biologist Elizabeth Murray of Oxford concluded in 1962: ‘From the point of view of kindness to the lobster, it is hard to say which is the best method of killing, because it is impossible, and probably will always be impossible, to say whether the lobster is suffering pain or not. Therefore, to give the animal the benefit of the doubt, the quickest methods are probably the best.’55 Is the real question, to be honest with ourselves, not how it is done, but more, if we should kill the animal at all? Which plunges us briskly into much larger questions of ranking animals, vegetarianism and animal rights.
In Wallace’s article, titled ‘Consider the Lobster’, he goes back and forth about the issue. He considers how cruelly other animals are treated for our food, the neuroscience involved with pain and the lobster’s nervous system, the very definition of pain, the inconvenience of even having to consider that what he’s doing is ethically wrong and trying to resolve for himself the ever-contradictory remarks by all sides. Each year representatives from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) protest at the Maine Lobster Festival. He wrote that he heard a woman once got half-naked and painted herself like a lobster to call attention to the injustice. Wallace arrived here:
Suffice to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or the restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut.56