Consider The Lobster By David Foster Wallace Analysis

"Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace explores the ethics of consuming animals and the disconnection that humans often have with the origins of their food. He analyzes this idea by telling the reader about the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF), an annual event held in Rockland, Maine, that celebrates the state's lobster industry and features a variety of activities and events. Wallace offers up the MLF as a prime example of the unethicality of lobster consumption as lobsters are sentient beings capable of feeling pain. However, if Wallace wants his readers to consider that it is unethical to consume lobsters, why does he include a section in his essay where he explains that lobsters might not feel pain?

Throughout his essay, Wallace considers

He uses this to help argue lobsters may not have the necessary brainpower to experience pleasure or suffering in the same way that humans do. However, he also acknowledges that lobsters have nervous systems and respond to stimuli in ways that suggest they are sensing something. He writes, “The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain (4).” Wallace makes a point that lobsters do not have an essential part of the brain which gives the sensation of pain, but he quickly disproves this by explaining that this idea is “false” and “fuzzy”(5). While Wallace is simply a journalist, he offers up immense scientific research to help build his argument, some of which can contradict himself. While he disproves one of his scientific claims, Wallace continues to explore the unethicality of killing lobsters while grappling through his theory about lobsters genuinely feeling

The live lobsters are simply dropped into pots of boiling hot water, which does not allow them the opportunity to fight to live before they are killed. He is quick to point out that this method of killing lobsters is a lot different than the way in which most of us kill animals for food in our grocery stores. Wallace writes, “The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water…A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over”(5). The argument he makes in this section of the essay is based on his belief that lobsters do not experience pain and distress in the same way as humans do. Wallace believes that even though lobsters may be killed very quickly and easily, this does not mean they do not experience agony and suffering while this process