Killing me softly with lobster tale

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist  |  June 21, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/06/21/killing_me_softly_with_lobster_tale/

``Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed."

``But not on us!" the Oysters cried,

Turning a little blue.

``After such kindness, that would be

A dismal thing to do!"

Lewis Carroll 's poem ``TheWalrus and the Carpenter" is probably the greatest seafood saga of modern times, and a prescient tribute to thenotion of ``humane" degustation. The oyster-loving Walrus courteously invites a flock of bivalves out for an evening stroll, distracts them with talk of cabbages and kings, and then slurps them all up.

The poem is a satire. But you know what they say. If you wait around long enough, yesterday's satire becomes today's absurd reality.

Comes now Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Inc., which recently announced it would house its lobsters in individual, ``condominium"-style pens before passing the luckless crustaceans on to customers. (In the kinds of communities where Whole Foods plants its flag, condominiums for lobsters are a much easier sell than affordable housing for people.) Then last week Whole Foods abandoned the condo idea and stopped selling live lobsters altogether.

The huge chain still sells ``select raw and cooked frozen lobster products" from companies that promise to treat the lobsters really, really nicely. This means killing the lobsters using water pressure instead of boiling them to death.

Oh, frabjous day! I'm having my skull crushed instead of burning in pitch. Thank you so much, enlightened suburbanites, for caring so much about me!

The better-heeled portion of the American bourgeoisie has a new motto: First, Do No Harm. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about a man who built a million-dollar luxury house from salvaged wood, and commissioned a custom dining room table , made from a ``wind-fallen elm." Shortly afterward , I read in the Independent newspaper about a boutique hawking wedding gowns stitched from ``peace silk," ``made from silkworms that live out their life cycle rather than being boiled alive."

These same brides sometimes opt for ``carbon offsetting" honeymoons, ``where they fly abroad . . . but work on panda conservation in China to ease their guilt," according to the newspaper. If you can't offset, you can at least aspire to a ``carbon-neutral" wedding, which means the guests from Seattle are advised to arrive by bicycle, not jet plane.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just wait for trees to fall down so we could build houses for people? Wouldn't it be great if millions of chickens and cattle could be convinced to sign up for voluntary euthanasia programs so we could eat meat? Wouldn't it be nice if those nasty insurgents who are killing our sons and daughters in Iraq would just come talk to us over some Organic and Fair Trade Certified Monkey King Jasmine Green Tea, always available at you-know-where? What a wonderful world it would be.

Do No Harm ideology hit an apogee last year when actress Radha Mitchell sat down for an interview with Lynn Hirschberg of The New York Times. Gassing on about her dirty movie ``High Art," Mitchell ate a poached egg with the yolk removed. ``She is a vegan," the Times explains, ``but still eats the whites."

So what happened to the yolk? Does not eating it wish it out of existence? Should I really feel better about killing sentient animals because some executive assures me they're feeling minimal pain? I interrupted a telephone interview with Margaret Wittenberg , Whole Foods' vice president of quality standards, who was expatiating on the ``very calm and peaceful environment" of humane slaughter, to ask if it would be OK for her to kill all the people in her office, as long as she did so humanely?

``That's really a stretch," she said. ``We are talking about animals that are raised to be eaten."

Perhaps. But killing is killing. Either live with the fact that we are high-level predators who like to eat the flesh of animals lower down the food chain or stop the slaughter altogether. Otherwise, we are Carroll's blubbering, hypocritical Walrus:

``I weep for you, the Walrus said:

I deeply sympathize."

But his high-flown sentiments were wasted on the animals he had just devoured.