Consider the Human

           Although I found David Foster Wallace's essay Consider the Lobster decidedly very interesting, I did have a number of objections to the main point made in the essay. Per my understanding, the essay was about getting readers to simply consider their choice of high-class shellfish, and its implications in the human rights community.

           But when I speak now, I speak for the lobster lovers out there (my parents, not so much myself)--for many of the readers of Gourmet magazine, thinking about the "moral status....and physical suffering"(Wallace) is precisely what they don't wish to think about when biting into the tasty flesh of their favorite shellfish.  After all, to consider the "rabbit-like death scream"(Wallace) of the lobster makes it much less appetizing and palatable--or if it doesn't change anything, you may want to get your appetite checked.

            My parents have been to the Maine Lobster Festival before, and their retelling differs greatly, in connotation and in image, of Wallace's.[1]  Furthermore, I've also been to the lobster-eating-festival-party state that is all of Maine.  I mean, there is lobster everywhere. To the point of gluttonous excess.  Two weeks of lobster meals later, the smell of lobster is enough to make you break into a cold sweat. Not the excited kind either. In a situation like that, avid lobster fans seem even less likely to agree with Wallace's call to gustatory action.

           Of course, this may have been the overarching purpose of Wallace's essay in the first place.  In which case I applaud its boldness: for its incredible apophasis, as well as for the biting irony of the essay's context.

~Chris

[1] If any of you ever go to Maine, be sure to try their blueberry soda, or blueberry pie along with your lobster. If there's a place where good taste-buds go when they die, we have our answer. Its one of those things where you think you've lived up until the moment you eat it, but then you realize you haven't.