If you haven’t already, please read Silence of the Lobsters – Part One.

Since lobsters don’t have brains or central nervous systems, the general consensus is that they don’t feel pain. Nor do they actually “scream” when being held over boiling water, since they don’t have vocal cords; instead the high-pitched whistle they make is steam being released from beneath their shells. A 2005 study financed by the Norwegian government (go, you highly-evolved Scandinavians!) reinforced this view. But after reading David Foster Wallace’s phenomenal essay Consider the Lobster (good for Gourmet magazine for having the balls to print his ruminations on comparative neuroanatomy, subjective experience, and sentience), I realize the jury is still out on whether they feel pain.

David Foster Wallace said it in a very David Foster Wallace way (in a footnote, naturally[ref]I really wish this man hadn’t offed himself.[/ref]):

The scientific and philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut.

My own gut tells me that lobsters suffer. In any event, they’re the only animals we must kill ourselves, if we wish to eat them at home. There’s also the subsequent dismembering.

I used to buy them sometimes, but I always refused to be the one to lower them into the pot. Instead I liked to place them on the kitchen floor and observe them as they shuffled around the linoleum. Like all animals, they fascinated me.

That was long ago. Today I don’t think I could buy another lobster, as much I once loved the taste. Of course, it may be that they were just a butter-delivery mechanism. That’s certainly possible, given my feelings for butter. But in any case, I’ll never miss the sound they make in boiling water. I say this despite knowing that the sound can’t be screaming, since they cannot scream.

My dad owned a restaurant from long before I was born till the day he died. Marty’s Seafood was a big fried-fish shack on the Connecticut shoreline. The tons of fish, lobster, scallops, clams, hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, onion rings, and other (mostly breaded and deep-fried) delights he served–working seven days a week year-round, and a good fifteen hours a day during the tourist season–added up to a living. I’m sure as he paid my college tuition, he muttered, “That’s a lot of scallops.”

I was practically weaned on his menu, and started bussing tables at age 8. I was paid a quarter per table, which made me nearly vibrate with glee. Later, during summers off from college, I waited tables, and then I left the place as fast as I could. Restaurant work was hard.

Decades later, I still have many vivid recollections of Marty’s, several of which my therapist finds fascinating. Some of my earliest memories of any kind are of my father carrying me through the steamy, greasy haze of the kitchen. But topping the memory list would be the lobsters, who were delivered through the back door in waxy cardboard crates on icy “bedding,” damp and bluish-greenish-brownish black. They were “claw-cuffed” with thick rubber bands, and they bubbled at the mouth a little, half-heartedly wiggling their spiny tentacles.

They arrived mildly stupefied, but when being lowered into the boiling cauldron, they put up an admirable, if disturbing, fight. The teenage cooks were told to remove them from the crate one at a time and lower them head-first into the water, so they would die quickly and wouldn’t “scream” (which sounded less like screaming than whistling). But these nudniks often did the opposite. They would hold a crate above the edge of the pot and try to dump in the lobsters all at once, which often caused the creatures to cling, in apparent desperation, to the sides of the crate. This response only delayed the inevitable, of course, and then once they were in the pot, they… well, what they did was, they thrashed around for about thirty seconds, clanking and rattling the lid. The boys certainly didn’t react with horror like the Julie Powell character in Julie and Julia, nor were they giddily afraid like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Instead they seemed not to notice.

But I noticed. It made me sick inside, like my bowels were melting.

Minutes later, though, wearing my pastel “Marty’s Seafood Restaurant” t-shirt, my permed hair pulled back in a high ponytail, I would carry the now-bright-red creatures into the dining area. With the “screams” of the recent past behind me, I would present the lobsters to the sunburned tourists, giving each a plastic bib, a nutcracker, a little ramekin filled with about half a stick of melted butter, and a handful of hand-wipes.

Silence of the Lobsters – Part Two →

In my previous post, In the Beginning, I described how my fantasy of forming an Animal Welfare Committee at the Park Slope Food Coop was stymied by the silence of the co-op’s meat buyer.

As the story continues, I decided to try my luck with the Environmental Committee, given that factory farming is a primary contributor to global warming. The way I figured it, they might sponsor an animal welfare sub-committee, or short of this, advise me on forming my own committee.

A word about the co-op and committees. The co-op is governed by a six-person Board of Directors, five of whom are elected by the members; day-to-day management is handled by paid General Coordinators. In addition, the Board has established a slew of member-run committees. These include the Diversity and Equality Committee, the Genetically-Modified Food Committee, and the Disciplinary Committee (which is responsible for “the review, investigation, and disposition of all submitted complaints of member misconduct”). You will think this crazy, or beautiful, or some combination of the two, but somehow it works. In a very “co-op” sense of “works.”

Speaking of working, the head of the Environmental Committee had great news for me: They had recently met with several co-op members involved in animal welfare through the ASPCA and The Humane Society, and they were helping these folks create a proposal for the creation of an Animal-Friendly Committee. Yes!

I was also put in touch with an Environmental Committee member who had conducted preliminary research on the subject. Among other things, she pointed me to The Facts About Farm Animal Welfare Standards—a 20-page summary of a report prepared by the Farm Sanctuary about animal product labeling, industry quality assurance practices, and third-party standards as they relate to farm animal welfare.

To summarize the summary’s summary:

• Food labeling and marketing claims are generally subjective and not verified.
• Animal industry quality assurance guidelines codify inhumane farming systems, fail to prevent suffering and distress, and do not allow for the expression of normal animal behavior.
• Humane certification standards disallow some cruel practices, but significant deficiencies exist in these as well. All in all, their impact on animal welfare has been minimal.

This was both exactly the kind of information I was looking for, and exactly the opposite of what I hoped to learn. Is bad news less bad when it is more or less expected? I’m not sure. In any case, I’m now waiting for co-op members to vote the “Animal-Friendly” committee into existence at a General Meeting, which should happen in the next few months. In the meantime… veggie burgers.

The obvious inspiration for this blog is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which for me is the book of Genesis for this issue. The film Food Inc. would be Exodus, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Leviticus.

Here’s the basic story: 98% of our meat comes from factory-farmed animals (that is, animals raised and slaughtered under excruciatingly inhumane conditions). Agribusiness works (and lobbies) hard to hide this reality from us, and our government all but blesses their efforts. Many of us know these things on some level, but we try not to think about them too much or in too much detail. Particularly at dinner time.

I am one of these many. This blog will chronicle my odyssey toward knowing how to feed myself (something that you’d think I would have learned in 40 years, but alas). Like the actual Odyssey, I expect it to be full of horror and deception, glory and faith, torture and—on a good day—redemption.

Hmm. The Bible and The Odyssey. I seem to have set very high expectations for my writing.

Here’s the thing: Like most humans, I love to eat. Truly, madly, deeply. To me, every meal (and snack) is a precious gift, a sensuous celebration. There is a region of my heart that will always belong to bacon. And cheeseburgers. And chicken soup.

The other great (non-human) love of my life is animals: not only the two remarkable cats that share our apartment, but every dog on the street, the sloths I encountered in the rainforest of Costa Rica, the lemurs on the National Geographic Channel, the pets at the shelter I volunteer at, and every other creature in the animal kingdom. There’s even a word for this: biophilia, the affinity humans feel for other life forms (the definition includes plants as well, but I’m not so into plants). I am a born biophiliac.

So after reading and watching Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, I finally resolved to only eat animals who had lived good lives and been slaughtered quickly and painlessly (which pretty much rules out eating the meat served in restaurants). I believed this was doable because I had the Golden Ticket.

It’s true. With my like-minded partner, Michael, I happen to live within crawling distance of The Park Slope Food Coop, one of the oldest and most successful member-owned and operated food stores in the country, with more than 15,000 members. Stocked full of organic this and cage-free that, and powered by a heap of admirable ideals, the co-op was going to be our one-stop source of meat and animal products, keeping us in a state of humane, carnivorous grace.

Or so I imagined. On my next shop, I checked out the labels on the chicken, beef, turkey, fish, eggs, cheese, butter, and milk. One kind of chicken had an official-looking seal that read “Certified Humane.” Most of the rest had some combination of the following terms: organic, pasture-raised, all-natural, minimally-processed, grass-fed, free-range, cage-free. I already knew plenty about the term “organic”—at least as defined and regulated (loosely, in both cases) by the USDA. In short, while it has some significance for human health (no hormones or antibiotics), it has little bearing on how animals live and nothing to do with how they die.

For the remaining terms, some research yielded bad news: food marketing claims such as “grass-fed” and “cage-free” have no regulatory definition by the USDA. The agency pre-approves product labels based on producer testimonials and does nothing to confirm compliance.

At this point, my idealism kicked in and I decided to talk to the meat buyer at our co-op. As I imagined it, he would have first-hand knowledge of the practices of the co-op’s meat suppliers. Inspired by my enthusiasm, he would suggest forming an Animal Welfare Committee—spearheaded by yours truly! I and my fellow committee members would create shelf signage that would decode and deconstruct producers’ labeling claims. This would lead to members making better choices and increase the demand for products from better producers.

My fantasy came crashing down when the meat buyer failed to return my phone calls and letters.

Several “cooperative” developments followed, but the big twist came a few weeks ago as Michael and I were sitting on our couch with our Amy’s All-American Vegetable Burgers. Between bites, he pointed out that Eating Animals may be the tipping point for this issue (at least in our demographic), and that there are doubtless many others with similar questions, frustrations, and struggles. “I think it’s a blog,” he said. “And I think you should write it.”

So here we are, somewhere in cyberspace, exiled from Ithaca. In truth, I don’t know if I can affect change at the co-op—or even in my own life. More to the point, I don’t know if anyone can make a difference for factory-farm animals. But I do know that exile is easier when shared. Please join me on the journey and let me know what you think.