Blog Post #1
October 28, 2009 by mcarolina
For the longest time I have eaten lobster, looking at the dish as no more than another animal killed to satisfy my hunger. But I never thought about how it was killed or in all reality cared how it was killed as long as I was able to have my luxurious lobster meal. My problem was that in my mind I was not able to imagine somebody cooking lobster it sort of just appeared on my dinner plate and I was satisfied. Before this class if someone would of asked me was the lobsters alive before they are cooked I would of definitely said “No”. My problem was not hat I was uncaring but more that I was uninformed these are not things that the customer sees going into a large restaurant the food is made in the back so all the customer knows is what comes out on the plate. Since my reading of David Foster Wallace’s text “Consider the Lobster” I have come to the conclusion that i will take a stand and not eat lobster anymore. In my mind gaining this knowledge now makes me look at myself in the past as being kind of immoral and uncareful so now I think my mind automatically questions itself when a big slab of meat is on my plate and questions run through my head such as “How did this food get here?” and “Was it properly killed or did it suffer a painful death?”.
Even though I am not the person or the people who force feed animals and slaughter them, as a consumer I still feel kind of guilty because my demand for the food makes the companies have to produce on a large scale and in return they can not be mindful of every little lobster or every cow because they have a certain quota to meet to keep their factories live and running. Sometimes the thought passes my mind who’s more guilty the people who are doing the killing or the people that are consuming the food, I mean I understand the severity of torturing animals so I gladly changed my diet but everybody else is not going to just up and change their diet because of some information they were given. Also, in all reality people have to eat, they can push for food to be properly killed before they eat it but if it is not they can not just give up eating. This class has open my eyes to the fact that as a human being on planet earth I am apart of a big slaughtering problem, but since i know that now im making it my business to change it. No more lobster for me.
I also never thought about how lobster was prepared. I had no clue of the whole process and if someone told me lobsters were boiled alive I wouldn’t have believed them. This class has led me to start asking questions about how food is prepared, which is something I never did in the past. I feel you posed a key question, are the people who are eating the food guilty or are the people who carry out the killing guilty. I wonder what humans would look like if a radical movement was carried out and the killing of animals was made illegal.
I agree, I have never thought about how the lobster was prepared. I haven’t experienced actually killing and cooking a lobster before. That has always been my parents’ job because they are the ones who cook. But after reading Consider the Lobster, I learned about how the lobster suffers in its cooking process. After reading the article, I actually observed when my parents were cooking some lobster. It was pretty gruesome but not as much as I expected. The lobsters were already almost dead because my dad had brought them earlier in the day. I don’t think they made any noise in the pot, I think the clattering actually came from steam. During dinner that day, I ate the lobster, but not as much as I usually do. Something made me lose my appetite, but I wasn’t sure what.
I agree with you 100%. Ever since I read “Consider the Lobster” I have not eaten a lobster. David Foster Wallace went into such detail about how the lobster is killed and brought to light that they feel pain and uncomfort just like humans do. I feel that the person consuming the lobster have a bigger role in preserving lobsters than the poeple who kill them. The less people who eat lobster, the less lobster people will have to kill.