Consider The Lobster

“Consider the Lobster” is about many topics, but most of them hinge on the ethics of consuming meat, specifically lobster. The main question Wallace asks and returns to arises at the Maine Lobster Festival but is relevant for all home cooks: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (243). Wallace will not simply let someone dismiss the idea of lobster suffering out of hand, as when Dick (and festival literature) states “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part” (245). If that were true it would be a convenient way to dismiss the ethical stakes of the experience of pain, but even still might not be enough to justify the consumption of meat.

However, Wallace argues that lobsters do feel pain, or something like it, and he provides evidence in the form of meticulous details about the physical structure of lobsters, showing that they have characteristics that allow them to feel pain. Though they may not perceive pain in the same way we do, they contain “nociceptors and prostaglandins,” which cause the stimulus of pain (245).