thread of lobster moral support

well i have heard that too -- that lobsters do not feel the pain really anyway, their nerve systems are not the same as a mammals'. also i am already aware that lobsters don't scream but rather any noise is steam escaping from their shells. i wasn't aware that they'd just die on their own if i kept them as pets tho!

All lobster discussions, especially those surrounding the ethics of boiling mudbugs, should start with the excellent and heavily annotated David Foster Wallace Gourmet article at
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster

Ten pages of this stuff:
Consider the Lobster
Originally Published August 2004

The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry. What’s called the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther north than Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is, as you can imagine, unimaginable.) The region’s two main communities are Camden, with its very old money and yachty harbor and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs, and Rockland, a serious old fishing town that hosts the Festival every summer in historic Harbor Park, right along the water.

Tourism and lobster are the midcoast region’s two main industries, and they’re both warm-weather enterprises, and the Maine Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of the industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud. The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme was “Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster.” Total paid attendance was over 80,000, due partly to a national CNN spot in June during which a Senior Editor of a certain other epicurean magazine hailed the MLF as one of the best food-themed festivals in the world. 2003 Festival highlights: concerts by Lee Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade, Sunday’s William G. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed after preparation in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available are lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried lobster dumplings. Lobster Thermidor is obtainable at a sit-down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for public downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs. Your assigned correspondent saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own parents—one of which parents was actually born and raised in Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is potato country and a world away from the touristic midcoast.

For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are. Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae. There are dozens of different kinds worldwide, of which the relevant species here is the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. The name “lobster” comes from the Old English loppestre, which is thought to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for locust combined with the Old English loppe, which meant spider.

Moreover, a crustacean is an aquatic arthropod of the class Crustacea, which comprises crabs, shrimp, barnacles, lobsters, and freshwater crayfish. All this is right there in the encyclopedia. And an arthropod is an invertebrate member of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all of whose main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs.

The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea-insects. Like most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period, biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as well be from another planet. And they are—particularly in their natural brown-green state, brandishing their claws like weapons and with thick antennae awhip—not nice to look at. And it’s true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff, although they’ll also eat some live shellfish, certain kinds of injured fish, and sometimes each other.

PLUNGE THE TIP OF A SHARP KNIFE STRAIGHT DOWN RIGHT BEHIND THE LOBSTER'S EYES

This; I think this is the best advice possible, even if some people have biological second-guesses about it. Straight down and then forward between the eyes to the front, bisecting the head. If the goal is to minimize unpleasantness for the lobster, this seems like the best shot.

If that's the goal, I would also skip the freezer part. How does the freezing help the lobster? Personally I would much rather face the guillotine than spend the night in a meat locker that freezes me senseless before facing the guillotine; I don't know how the freezing is that much of a perk.

(My favorite detail from -- I think -- that Wallace article: up until not long ago, lobster was considered in New England to be disgustingly common ocean-bug food, to the point where a law had to be passed stating that it was inhumane to serve the inmates of asylums lobster meat more than three times per week.)

ok wait, I should not recount factual things from memory, because my brain will supply the wrong details:

Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, 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.

so asylums = prisons and three = one

i always think abt that low class food factoid like daaaamn

btw this is common knowledge in new england and we dont need yr fancy dfw

deep-fried lobster dumplings

WS

oh right, the objection to the knife-head method is that the lobster's nervous system is dispersed and bundled, so you may only effectively be knocking out the main frontal bit, not the ability to feel pain elsewhere

still seems better, though, somehow, than freezing the lobster, poking holes in its shell with a fork, and then putting it in a microwave that boils it from the inside

i think my wife researched it last year when we had lobster and the knife-head method is considered the best for minimum lobster unpleasantness

Does the wound ooze or squirt when the knife goes in? Serious question.

i don't think it does if you get em right between the eyes

oh god what the hell

Ha, I just saw Lydia Bastianich do it a few days ago -- there was a mild briny gush, is all, like what you'd find inside shelled seafood

ally should liveblog imo

i will take a video!

incidentally the "feed it to crazies and prisoners in the 18th 19th century" line overlooks the fact that canning/preservation wasn't so hot back then and this was hardly boil-em-up-n-eat-em red lobster shizz.
Try and imagine how nasty month old salt cured lobster tail would taste.

or more likely YEARS old lobster tail

that is actually pretty much the next paragraph of the thing

the main problem would seem to be ... we normally eat mammals, and, being mammals, we can be pretty sure of the most humane methods of mammal-killing; we have no such idea with lobsters, which is odd and unsettling

Boiling is one of the simplest ways to cook a lobster, and is probably best for the squeamish that don't wish to cut up a live lobster with a knife. Some say that you can 'hypnotize' a lobster by rubbing the top of its head or its abdomen, thereby pacifying it before boiling. The theory is that the adrenaline produced by a frightened lobster adversely affects the texture and flavor of the meat. I have never seen or tasted any evidence of this, but if you want to cover all possible bases, go ahead and hypnotize your lobster. It is important to select a pot big enough to hold enough water to cover the lobsters completely. Bring the water to a rolling boil and add 1 tablespoon salt per quart of water. Put the lobsters in claws first and begin timing from the moment the water comes back to a boil.

you should give your lobster a swedish massage, put it in the freezer, take it out, cut its head open, and then microwave it

They're delicious giant insects and that freaks people out i guess.

just boil the damn thing

well i don't have one yet

if you did it would be dead by now

maybe you could get a lobster and post on ILX until it dies, that seems humane

lobsters live to be 100 years old according to some ppl on this thread tho

not in yr apartment they don't

there is an ilx poster who is a lobster: t or f?

2009: dead pools out, lobsterwatch in

I had a bio prof in college who once told a story about "friends" of his trying to keep a lobster alive in their dorm room back in his own college days. I think they filled an aquarium w tap water and then dumped lots of salt packets from the dining hall into it and stirred, then added lobster. The story ended with, "Today we're going to talk about why that lobster died."

true i am lobster consider the facts and you will see it is obv so obv

how long does it take before they die? a couple days?

im going to live forever

I don't know, actually. Do they have any capacity for breathing air? I would have assumed they could only breathe in water but stories of them running around kitchen floors appear to disprove that idea.

haha she's srsly gonna do this

consider the lobster

yeah this is what i was thinking -- they have to be ok to be out of water for quite a period considering it isn't like you bring them home from market in a little water baggie like a goldfish!

xpost
Proof 1: bound claws make use of shift key and punctuation difficult

iirc they need to stay damp, if they dry out it's trouble for them

I might just be making that up tho

i heard that ten seconds before they die, they shoot lazers out of their eyes--can't remember where i read that

The question of whether or not lobsters can experience pain is unresolved. Because of the ambiguous nature of suffering, most people who contend that lobsters do have this capacity approach the issue using 'argument by analogy' — that is, they hold that certain similarities between lobsters' and humans' biology or behavior warrant an assumption that lobsters can feel pain.[12]

In February 2005, a review of the literature by the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note that "there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed." This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.[13]

However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released in the same year reported that "scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering," primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes when painkillers are applied. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence for their capacity for pain.[12]

A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. Acetic acid was placed on the antennae of 144 prawns; the animals responded by rubbing the affected areas. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to the survival of all animals, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.[14]

lol scientists

"that's not pain, it's a reflex to noxious stimuli"

In February 2005, a review of the literature by the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note that "there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed. Furthermore, lobsters be fukkin tasty nom nom nom."

the pain i feel through not having lobsters in my belly is sure greater than anything these simple ass animals can experience

^ knife right between the eyes of truth

when u think about it-- what is 'pain'

suggest noxious stimuli

is there an ortolan thread on here anywhere?

sorry for interrupting max

were you about to blow our minds?