Although Wallace’s assignment was to write on the lobster festival—and he took liberties with the assignment and wrote, instead, about the cruelty of boiling lobsters alive—he couldn’t help expanding his examination to other animals as well. What he found could not have soothed the palates of meat-eating Gourmet readers.

While he considers lobsters going insane and attacking one another, hence the need for bands around their claws, Wallace adds a footnote about other animals: “Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed ‘debeaking’ broiler chickens and brood hens in modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most Gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related practices like dehorning cattle in commercial feedlots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth . . . Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken,” Wallace writes. “Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done.”

When we cook lobsters at home, we kill them ourselves—on the other hand, the other animals we eat are raised in windowless sheds and warehouses, where their suffering is hidden. These animals never see the sun or breathe fresh air until they’re crammed onto trucks bound for slaughter, and we don’t see these animals until their neatly wrapped body parts appear in the grocery store’s freezer section.

Wallace admits that he was largely unaware of the “horrible things” that animals endure before they arrive on our plates. Through an “elaborate editorial compromise,” PETA’s “Meet Your Meat” video, “in which you can see just about everything meat-related you don’t want to see or think about” was not named in his article, but Wallace does say that he found “this unnamed video both credible and deeply upsetting.” You can watch “Meet Your Meat” here.

It’s never been easier to choose a cruelty-free, vegan lifestyle. You can find amazing resources, including recipes like “‘Lobster’ Bisque” and vegan “Paella” at www.vegcooking.com.

Request a free vegetarian starter kit to make the switch today!

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