Tam Dinh on David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster"

I chose this reading based entirely on the title, that being “Consider the Lobster”. Other than shrimp, I do not eat any seafood. However I am absolutely fascinated with marine life and I love watching cooking/traveling shows that are about the sea and sea life, thus seafood. This text written by David Foster Wallace, someone who I’ve never heard of. He is apparently relatively famous today, however this piece was written back in 2003.

Wallace is sent, as a correspondent, to the annual Maine Lobster Festival. He starts off by listing all the honors and titles and sponsors that the event has garnered (I have heard of Food and Wine Magazine. Hell, I have a subscription). He does so to either build up hype or to poke fun at how serious this event has become. I suspect it is the latter. Throughout the piece he gives specific figure amounts and numbers. That helps build his credibility as well as helps the reader to really visualize and get some sense of the scale of things, such as when he says that “over twenty-five thousand pounds of fresh caught Main lobster are consumed” (526) or that  over “100,000” people attended the event, and in the footnotes there was a detail about how the U.S. produces 80 million lbs of lobster per year (530).

I like how Wallace incorporates a little bit of history and science within this piece, as opposed to only exploring lobster in the culinary world. I have heard that lobster was considered a low class food item in other centuries, however I did not know that “some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats” (527). That was a really interesting detail to me.

After Wallace sets up the stage of the event, he veers the article in the direction of the ethics/morality of killing and eating lobster. There was a smooth transition. He described the different tents and the general layout of the event; and, then he mentions the PETA picketers. It was around this point in the reading that I thought of foie gras (duck liver), which is something I am completely against. While chefs utilize the whole duck, the main purpose for the deaths of some is purely for harvesting their livers and making pates’ and such hoity toity entrees. The argument with lobster primarily lies with how they are killed (while the foie gras ducks, are purposely fattened throughout their lives so that their livers would be bigger and richer in flavor). As Wallace explains, lobsters can be 1. boiled alive 2. boiled in salt water, starting off with a low temperature and slowly raising it higher 3. stab it between the eyes quickly and sharply before cooking it (536-537). His description evokes emotion from the reader, which is of course the intention. His use of imagery and auditory senses (?) were very powerful, such as when he describes how the lobster claws clank against the pots and the whistling sounds that occur when boiling them. I felt as though I was in the room.

Wallace goes on to talk about pain and the science of what the lobster may or may not be feeling. This instantly reminded me of a reading I had in a past class regarding morality of animals. This is my attempt to paraphrase it (for further reading, refer to Carl Cohen’s “Do Animals Have Rights”)…it was about whether or not animals really have rights, if they cannot understand what morality is…how can they have rights?

This proved to be a real thought provoking article. I was scared that “Consider the Lobster” might not be about seafood but instead a metaphor for something, which would’ve been disappointing to me. At first I was skeptical about the author’s tone, I felt this cynicism from him about the festival; but I was surprised at how balanced the piece was overall. In the second to last paragraph, he explains that he is simply confused and really just wants the reader to “consider” the points he presented. I feel this text has definitely achieved that. I will never look at lobster the same way. I wonder how someone who does eat lobster feels after reading this…again, I don’t eat seafood and I’ve never tried lobster, so I read this with a clear conscious!

Overall, this was an interesting article and I enjoyed reading it. It had many facets: history, science, philosophy, culinary facts, etc. That is something I’m going to try to incorporate in my own writing… the various aspects that one topic is comprised of.