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“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our
gustatory pleasure?” This is the question posed by the renowned
author David Foster Wallace in “Consider the Lobster,” his
August 2004 feature on the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet
magazine. Wallace, who has been hailed by critics as a literary genius,
wrote this article “to work out and articulate some of the troubling
questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community
pride of the Maine Lobster Festival.” Gourmet editors may
have gotten more than they bargained for, but Wallace’s words echo
the concerns of thinking people everywhere.
For Wallace, the Maine Lobster Festival inspires an unflinching inquiry
into the ethics of boiling an animal alive. His article highlights two
specific coping mechanisms that people adopt when confronted with the
reality of animal suffering—avoidance and denial. Wallace admits
that his “own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to
avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing.” However, upon
arrival at the Maine Lobster Festival, he found that “there is no
honest way to avoid certain moral questions.”
Wallace’s article explores the excruciating pain that lobsters feel
when they are boiled alive, taking both scientific
evidence and his own observations into account. He expands his analysis
to consider the question of eating meat in general, as well as the deeper
question of how humans relate to other animals. Click
here to read the full article.
More About David Foster Wallace
Hailed by the Boston Globe as “probably the most
important novelist of his generation,” David Foster Wallace
is widely recognized as a modern literary icon. The 42-year-old
author has written both fiction and nonfiction works, and his most
recent novel, Oblivion, has received resounding critical
acclaim. Other notable works by David Foster Wallace include the
best-seller Infinite Jest: A Novel and Brief Interviews
With Hideous Men. Wallace graduated from Amherst College and
Arizona State University, and he received a MacArthur Foundation
fellowship, also known as a “genius grant.” In 1998
and 1999, he received the Outstanding University Researcher Award
for his work as a professor at Illinois State University. Wallace
currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
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