Comments on: Day nineteen: Lobster murderfest

By: Jen

Jen — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:34:29 +0000

I am really not looking forward to this. As it is, I hate filleting fish because I don’t like dealing with anything that has eyes.

By: Jonas M Luster

Jonas M Luster — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:18:52 +0000

Welcome to the best kept secret in cooking – fish and seafood in general is quite a bit more aggressive and direct a death than, say, pork or beef products.

We eat it alive, we drive knives into their brains, toss their living bodies into boiling water, suffocate them until they die thrashing for oxygen.

Yet, strangely, pescetarians seem to consider it OK. Even animal health organizations seem to focus exclusively on land based animals.

Then, however, we need to put perspective onto this. Anyone who ever stepped on a cockroach, crushed a spider, flushed one down the toilet or the shower drain while still alive, swatted a fly, poured a drain cleaner down their sink, is guilty of destroying the same level of sentient life as a lobster.

And anyone who ever stepped on a slug or worm doesn’t do much more than kill a close member of the clam family of animals.

I’ve come to terms with my own eating. Instead of living a vegetarian life, absolving myself from the cruelty outside by not participating, I make bacon from local CSA pigs, hamburgers from my own, range living, grass fed, cows, chops from lambs that never saw a steroid injection, and don’t touch veal unless it’s SLM.

That way I not only don’t participate in the cruelty that is CAFO and mass farming, I bring other to not to, either. And if I slaughter things myself, I know it’s done in the most humane and painless way possible.

By: jennywenny

jennywenny — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:49:52 +0000

Shudder. Thats why I’m a vegetarian, although I do eat fish and lobster, so I’m even more of a hypocrite, but I feel like I didnt really ought to eat anything I wasnt prepared to kill…

I hope it works out, whatever you decide…

By: robyn

robyn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:14:27 +0000

Your description made me shudder. It reminded me of sitting in on the euthanasia of a family pet once. Not fun at all. Participating in the procedure made me have an enormous amount of empathy for Vet techs. I could never do their job.

Raising my own chickens has been an eye opener. (We are so far removed from our food sources as Americans.) I feel that the “ownership” of raising our own food or butchering our own meat, whether it be through fishing, game or domestic sources of beef and pork, makes me a better consumer. I am less likely to waste portions, or simply toss away food. Even keeping it in well wrapped packaging for freezing is important to ensure it doesn’t get freezer burned and be wasted.

Maybe this is how you approach this dilemma. It should never be easy to take a life, even an animals’.

By: Trix

Trix — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:32:48 +0000

I am utterly sympathetic to your plight. I could not kill a lobster, or anything else for that matter. That’s a large part of why I am a baking and pastry arts student (also returned to school as an “older” woman like you). While there are many things I’d love to learn in a kitchen culinary program, I’m just not willing to do or eat certain things, so I had to make a choice. I respect and understand your decision that you could suspend certain aspects of your “real” life for the sake of learning, but I think you kind of have to kill the lobster. It would be a little arbitrary to make that distinction at this point. Well, that’s my two cents. Best of luck – that’s gonna be rough.

By: taiyyaba

taiyyaba — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:11:00 +0000

I think you can handle it, my dear, and I think you could try, at least once. I think we’ve unfortunately lost the connection with what we eat when we just buy meat from the grocery store. Seeing the animal alive, and then killing it in a dignified manner, and then not wasting what you take from it – there is something beautiful about it. My family is Muslim, and when I was young we were not able to easily get halaal meat (sacrificed in a particular manner according to Islamic law) so I used to go with my parents to an abbatoir, who would let us sacrifice the animal ourselves. I never actually saw my dad make the cut, but I remember the immense respect he gave to the animal and to the process as a whole, making sure the knife was clean and sharp and that he made a quick and precise cut, etc. It makes you appreciate the meat even more.

anyway, my four cents. i’m sure you’ll make a good and respectable decision either way! good luck.

By: Helena Himm

Helena Himm — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:59 +0000

I could murder a lobster I believe, I haven’t done it because my partner and sister won’t be able to look into my eyes again if I do it here.

I had to go through that experience with Pork and Chicken… Fish, shrimp, oysters and clams, mussels too.. but the Lobster is always different than the rest of these Seafood, they keep moving.

I don’t think it would be worse than the pig, my cousin became a vegetarian they day we had to kill the pig, I had to do all the cleaning and butchering by myself, but I respect that.

I wish you the best and I think YES you will, should you? that’s the toughest question, it’s like asking yourself should I eat meat? I don’t do it anymore. I already know the answer.

Good luck =)