Edible Ocean Bugs

This is a brief summary and analysis of "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace. The story is centered around the Maine Lobster Festival, where people congregate to eat that delicious insect of the sea, lobster. Wallace uses the Festival to talk about the history of the lobster as well as the ethics behind its preparation. It was interesting to learn that lobster itself used to be a "plebeian" food, compared with its status today. Apparently this is because it used to be amazingly abundant on the east coast, and readily available for dock workers, fishermen and the like. Nowadays, Wallace says, it is the "steak of the sea." One of lobster's merits is its perpetual freshness. Being a strange ocean insect-like creature, it is easy to transport and kept alive until it is to be cooked. Most people cook it alive, which raises a bunch of ethics issues. Lobsters are nowhere near human, but whether it is "right" or not to boil them alive to eat them is debatable. Also troublesome is that lobsters have no brain in their nervous systems and tough to euthanize, so boiling them alive really is the only option available to most cooks. All of this information was integrated well with the casually told story, and made the entire piece overall reasonably entertaining to read, even if a large part of it deals with ethic and morality, a subject I'm not particularly fond of.