I don’t know about getting them stoned, but I do remember reading recommendations decades ago about letting them swim in a bucket of champagne for a while before tossing them in the pot. I’m not convinced that they really need to be alive to be cooked for them to taste good. It always seemed kind of cruel to me.
29 thoughts on “Merciful Lobster Cooking”
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There’s an obvious solution of pithing them, as in Frederick Pohl’s novel, Homegoing:
“I’m sorry, Obie. I guess I just don’t like pithing cubs.”
“What’s the matter, Sandy? You’ve done it before.”
“I didn’t like it then, either,” Lysander confessed.
“But we have to pith them,” Obie said reasonably. “For their own sake, you know? It keeps them from being too smart.”
Lysander blinked at him. “What do you mean, too smart?”
“Oh, too smart,” Obie said vaguely. “Can you imagine how horrible it would be for them if they grew up with, you know, some kind of rudimentary intelligence? So you’d know that you were alive only so you could be killed and eaten?”
“They can’t be that smart!”
“Not after we pith them, no,” Obie said smugly.
“But— But— But it’s wrong to kill intelligent creatures, isn’t it?”
“They aren’t intelligent. That’s why they’re pithed.”
“But you’re telling me they would be, if we just didn’t pith them. There has to be a better way! Can’t the gene-splicers arrange them so that they aren’t intelligent?”
“Oh, Lysander,” Obie sighed. “Do you imagine they didn’t think of that? They keep trying. But it always spoils the taste of the meat.”
I consider lobsters to be just larger bugs. Step on them, boil them, I don’t care.
Now octopi and squids are an entirely different matter and I won’t touch them.
Octopi are amazing as well as are cuttlefish. Have you ever seen their otherworldly color- and texture-changing displays?
Squids are quite tasty, but the little octopi commonly eaten look too much like spiders.
I have a deal with seafood. I don’t eat it and it doesn’t eat me.
I do remember once seeing a hilarious short movie where the story was told by a lobster from a first person lobstercam POV.
Starts with the lobster in a tank with others at a restaurant regretting having got in to an inviting looking lobster pot in Brest Harbour while trying to hide so he doesn’t get taken out to be put in boiling water. “take him, take him!” He ends up in the kitchen about to be boiled whereupon the lady kitchen hand’s husband comes in and shoots the chef for messing with his wife. In the confusion the lobster falls on the floor and makes good his escape. Last seen making his way up some steps to a sign saying Brest 50km. Lobster says to himself ” the boys in Brest Harbour will never believe this”.
Unfortunately I’m unable to find it anywhere. Anyone else seen it?
> I have a deal with seafood. I don’t eat it and it doesn’t eat me.
Ha! Me too. It probably began with squeamishness toward “stinky” seafood, but when I started snorkeling a lot in Florida and the Bahamas as a kid, I also made that deal. And yes, I know the “deal” was consented to by only one party, but the other party has yet to violated the terms. (Though my sister did have her arm swallowed nearly up to her elbow by a VERY LARGE grouper who mistook the tail end of the gauze she had wrapped as a flash diffuser for her small 110-film underwater camera as a fish food. She was spit right back out with tooth scrapes on her arm, but for her pains she did get a blurry, indistinct photo from the belly of the beast!)
I couldn’t find your short film, but I did find this one of a French woman trying to show a lobster a good time before having him for dinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sReQrbJVc6c
If you don’t think the lobster knows what’s happening, why do you need to put a lid on the pot? It cracks me up that people declare that “lobsters don’t feel pain” because “they don’t have pain receptors.” Just watch their reaction to being boiled. When I accidentally step on a dogs tail, the dog responds in a way that I interpret as “pain.” I don’t actually know that the dog feels pain–maybe it is just reacting to its environment. But the reaction tells me all I need to know. So, please see first sentence above. Can we find a more humane way to cook lobsters?
Just plunge a knife behind what passes for its brain. Not sure what else you can do, but I think the notion that they don’t feel pain is nonsense, just as I believe the notion that late-term feti don’t feel pain is.
In the 80s, when I heard that doctors thought that infants couldn’t feel pain, and didn’t need anesthesia for surgery, I realized that the medical profession consisted of morons.
Did they miss the part about where the doctors themselves a newborn on his or her butt to get them crying, and hence breathing?
https://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/no_country_for_old_men_00464.jpg
I steam them, myself. I think it’s quicker. And yes, it could be cruel if in fact they can feel pain. But they taste SO good, that I’m willing to make the sacrifice. (Maine lobsters that is, no others need apply)
I’m a little skeptical about them feeling heat as pain. There would be no reason for a beast like that to have evolved temperature sensing ability, being in pretty much an isothermal environment. Isn’t rationalization wonderful in the service of gourmand syndrome?
I just choose to not sympathize with food. After all, if you don’t think plants react to life threatening events and do thing to survive; then don’t tell me you understand evolution.
Oh, I agree. I’ve been mugged by Brussels sprouts, had my tires slashed by some broccoli, and been sent threatening letters by asparagus. Vegetables have definitely evolved to defend themselves, and I fully understand that.
You should cut back on the mushrooms.
Yeah, plants communicate, travel, feel pain, bleed, ect. Anyone who eats a plant based diet out of morality are hypocrites and deluding themselves.
Are you cynically suggesting that because the plant cannot communicate vocally or travel individually, then you don’t think it feels pain? I don’t think plants have a nervous system to transmit pain. But I do consider the plant’s cells to be living tissue that will defend itself even if ineffectively, do you disagree?
I only note this, because if we want to humanize lobster and cows, such that we emote with them and wish them no harm; and therefore must find humane ways to destroy them, then we are on the same path that leads people to hug trees.
I don’t hug trees, and I eat lobster in whatever method makes it all the tastier. I understand the emotions. I’m not big on taking life, and therefore am very grateful to the fisherman, the rancher, and the chef that make my meals enjoyable. I emote with the humans.
“There would be no reason for a beast like that to have evolved temperature sensing ability, being in pretty much an isothermal environment.”
That’s incorrect. Here’s a paper on just how sensitive they are:
“Thermosensitivity of the Lobster, Homarus
americanus, as Determined by Cardiac Assay”
STEVEN H. JURY* AND WINSOR H. WATSON III
Zoology Department and Center for Marine Biology, University of New Hampshire,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/39aa/7e15c840091227eae634c11bab4281998cb0.pdf
For a rather fun treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Consider The Lobster”, in which Wallace covers a lobster festival for Gourmet Magazine. To the consternation of Gourmet’s editors and readers, Wallace writes comedically about the lobster festival before unexpectedly taking a hard right turn and discusses at great length whether lobsters feel pain.
Regarding MfK’s point, Wallace says ” Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.”
Regarding Rand’s solution, Wallace says (and unlike the above point, I don’t know if what Wallace say is true) “But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.”
Consider the Lobster is easy to find on the web. Here’s a pdf link, but you can find plaintext versions as well:
http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
“There would be no reason for a beast like that to have evolved temperature sensing ability, being in pretty much an isothermal environment.”
That’s incorrect. Here’s a paper on just how sensitive they are:
“Thermosensitivity of the Lobster, Homarus
americanus, as Determined by Cardiac Assay”
What I had originally said was that “I’m a little skeptical about them feeling heat as pain.” They may be able to resolve small temperature differences in order to find the best living conditions. But that doesn’t translate into sensing pain upon large temperature changes. Humans have experienced tremendous temperature extremes in the course of our existence, and current evolutionary theory suggests that we incorporate our experiences in our DNA.
A lobster never has the experience of touching a hot stove. Nor did they ever have the experience of escaping a forest fire. The latter sets the extreme limit of environmental tolerance for surface fauna. Human beings have evolved in that context, and know only too well how much heat hurts. Lobsters have evolved in a very, very narrow temperature range, and have no particular reason to have evolved the machinery to produce pain out of excessive temperature.
Nevertheless, I have no doubt that Bob-1 can make an effective argument as to why boiling lobsters requires universal socialism.
Regardless of whether lobsters feel “pain”, the question of whether lobsters are capable of sensing large temperature differences and the question of whether lobsters respond by avoiding very hot object can be tested. In the following study, crayfish were used, and the crustaceans were offered the opportunity to touch a hot soldering iron. If the crustacean declined, a soldering iron was briefly brought to the crayfish.
The results: 100% of crayfish tested reacted immediately to the touch of a soldering iron
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4400587/
for a fairly bizarre paper.
They also tested the lobsters with wasabi – no spoilers from me.
MfK, here’s my overall reaction to your evolutionary argument: there is evolutionary advantage to develop the ability to sense and avoid *damage*, and if extreme heat causes damage, the lobster might be able to sense that damage. And in fact, as the paper I linked to above describes, a Maine lobster’s crawfish relatives do have that ability, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Maine lobsters do as well.
By the way, I’m not motivated by humane concerns in commenting – I just think this question is at an interesting intersection of philosophy and science.
Entirely correct — there is every reason to be able to sense damage, and if extreme heat and cold cause damage (and they do), then the reaction to it is what could be called a reaction to pain. Sub-Saharan primates, including black and ‘yellow’ (San) Africans have no exposure to extreme cold, yet are still exquisitely able to sense it and want to avoid it, and they also react to having a war frozen just like northern Europeans do — it hurts, and could hurt a bloody lot if used improperly on purpose. Lobsters react violently to extreme heat and try to escape it with all their might.
It takes a special kind of obtuseness to argue that 1) they can’t sense it, and 2) it doesn’t hurt.
There is lobster anaesthesia.
http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5731.html
To live in this world, you must kill and eat other life.
Worrying over the killing method is proof you’re not really hungry.
Yup, for some reason people think humans shouldn’t exist and that would make everything better but the relationship you mention would just continue on without us. Considering all the good humanity does, and the potential to do good, the universe would be worse off without humans.
Concern for not causing unnecessary suffering (i.e., providing a quick death) is only ethical and smart. Anyone unconcerned with that is halfway to being a sadist. No thanks.
When I was younger, I worked in a restaurant for many years. We served lobster on some occasions. The chef would take a pick and hammer it into its ‘brain’ to kill it before he boiled it. Nobody ever said it tasted differently.
I think there’s a simple reason lobsters are kept alive. Living animals don’t spoil so the food keeps longer. They’d do it more with all the other animals we eat, if they could figure a way to do it cheaply.
This is true. Lobster meat spoils quickly.
I used to work at a seafood chain, and if we found a dead lobster in the tank, it was tossed. They go bad quickly and there’s no way to know how long it’s been dead in the tank.
Doctors mistakes are in the grave and struggle to seek recourse.
I went full carnivore on the weekend. Never felt better. Let the cows eat all the greens for us. The leafy grassy goodness is stored in their muscle in a form more easily absorbed by our guts. Win win.