Written by Ryan Sublett
Several years ago, Switzerland passed an order to stop all boiling of live lobsters. This is not an enforceable order, so it suggests more about increasing empathy towards food animals than about how people should prepare their food. I grew up in a home where when we had lobster for dinner, we brought it home live, and my dad would put it on the floor so the children could play with it before he dropped it into a pot of boiling water. We stopped eating lobster mostly because it fell out of taste for our family, but especially in the case of my mother, we also felt guilty for the lobsters’ pain. She would even put them into a bathtub of warm water, which would knock them out gently, so they didn’t feel the boiling water. Our proximity to the deaths of our lobsters puts the industrial production of food into perspective. Many people don’t have any kind of relationship with their food before they eat it, so the lobster occupies a unique position in our society.
The power dynamic between humans and lobsters, as with most human-food relationships, is centered around the wants and needs of humans. Lobsters aren’t often seen as having any agency or feeling, but the path from fishery to table provides the lobsters with a level of health, not afforded to other farmed animals. As the largest lobster industry in the United States, Maine has a complicated but effective lobstering system. Before they’re caught, lobsters are allowed to live however they like, i.e., they’re not bred or raised in captivity, and environmental regulations protect the lobsters’ habitat so they may thrive adjacent to the human sphere. The lobster fisheries are colloquially split up into territories belonging to factions or gangs, with several lobsterers belonging to any single gang. To prevent monopolies over any fisheries, the person selling the lobsters must be on the ship for any catch to be considered legitimate. Therefore, each lobsterer may be in charge of only one boat at a time, creating plenty of distribution of lobster wealth. In the territories surrounding the coast and islands, each territory only belongs to one faction or gang. with complete control over the lobstering water, a gang can exercise control over the lobster population’s profitability. Catching for size improves the health and productivity of the lobster population because the lobsters are allowed to grow larger and reproduce, essentially feeding the industry indefinitely. In the open water, a common pool resource management strategy is employed. Nearly every lobster above the smallest legal catch size is taken in to be sold because if they’re let go, they’ll just swim into another lobsterer’s trap. This means the lobsters caught are often both smaller and migrated from the managed areas. Additionally, common practices to make sure the lobsters survive until their retrieval improve the wellbeing of the lobsters by keeping them from reaching an early death. However, the intention is always to keep the lobsters fresh until they are eaten. Ultimately, these practices show the intertwined wellbeing of the lobsters and the lobster workers. If the lobsters are better quality, they can sell them for more money, and the best way to improve the quality of the lobsters is to keep them alive and healthy as long as possible.
“…the intertwined wellbeing of the lobsters and the lobster workers.”
The human-lobster relationship can be better examined as a novelty in comparison to the factory farms of land food animals, particularly the pork industry where the process has been especially exploitative. Pigs spend their entire lives in manmade corrals, a stark contrast to the free lives of the lobsters until they’re harvested from the water. The goal for the factory farms is to be an entirely self-sufficient system where everything is as automated as possible. The only things they spend money on are their few employees’ wages and feed for the animals. When most of their resources come from within the system, they can maximize their profit from selling the pork and its byproducts. Similarly, after a lobsterer has established their claim on a fishery, their primary costs are payment of their few employees and the occasional repair or replacement of their equipment. The control we take over the lobsters is restricted to after they have been caught. Before that, they are not directly managed by humans, contrasting the hogs in captivity with uneventful, short lives, decorated by disease and despair, ensured by the farm’s efficiency quota. The lobsters have unrestricted access to the waters they inhabit, and after they’re caught, their value is contingent upon how long they can remain alive and healthy.
In his talk with the Multispecies Politics course at William & Mary, Blanchette discussed how acts of rebellion by the workers in the factory farms indirectly improved the lives of the hogs being exploited for their meat. While small acts like making intentional blunders disguised as accidents were intended to lighten the workers’ load, they did ultimately reduce the rate of pig slaughter. This demonstrates the lack of actual power the pigs have, that any improvement or lengthening of their lives comes from the accidental consequences of the hog workers’ actions. In contrast, the lobster’s life has a greater effect on the jobs of the lobsterers. The policies in place to ensure they don’t accidentally kill the lobsters before they’re ready, like each trap having a wooden side that will rot away over time allowing the lobsters to escape if they’re not retrieved soon, actively makes the lobsterers’ job harder. Regardless of whether the trap is abandoned, the wooden side will rot away and need to be replaced, adding an extra cost to the budget. While it is ultimately because a dead lobster cannot be sold for the same price, attempts to keep a lobster fresh also tend to maintain lobster health and prevent premature death.
Therefore, the reason we take the living lobsters home is because they are easy to keep alive, maintaining their freshness. However, a consequence of this is showing lobster enjoyers that they are eating a living, breathing animal. In this age of animal rights and general philosophical consideration for beings unlike oneself, the proximity of the life of the lobster to the plate of the eater does more than just ensure its freshness; it provides a line of communication between humans and lobsters. The Swiss government enacted the ban on boiling live lobsters exactly and only because of the growing awareness of the lobster’s pain. They didn’t stop people from eating lobsters, but they specified that the way of killing the lobsters must be more humane. Now, people must kill their lobsters “by electric shock or by ‘mechanical destruction’ of their brains,” (mechanical destruction meaning you take a knife and quickly slice it through the belly, neck, and head of the lobster). Not only does this keep the lobsters from a long painful death in the boiling water, but it places the death of the lobsters literally into the hands of the consumers. While it can’t be guaranteed that people do it this way, anyone willing to conform to the law is more likely to be influenced by the more intimate destruction of the lobster.
“It places the death of the lobster literally into the hands of the consumers.”
The traditional western view of nonhuman life is one of rigid categories and objectification. Western colonial ideologies often separate personal relationships and histories of nature from scientific functions and usefulness. Large populations of people live in urban and suburban areas where contact with nature is limited and framed as an inconvenience. This paired with sterile teachings of nature in schools makes personal relationships with nature difficult to form and even harder to maintain. This was my community growing up, and it’s also the community of many people who regularly cook or eat lobsters. Other than the occasional basil or oyster, the lobster is the most common food reaching the consumers alive. The other meats are all slaughtered before packaging. The promotion of this liberal consideration for the lobster could be a rejection of the western values which have been engrained into our food and animal relations as western city and suburb dwellers. The lobster’s presence allows for the simple recognition of the lobster as a being with feelings. Lobsters are one of the only organisms aside from pets which are willingly brought into our homes and restaurants. Similar to pets, we therefore get close interaction with the end of their lives instead of just after their deaths. These interactions with the living lobsters have allowed for easier consideration of their lives compared to other animals, but it’s brought about by considering the quality of food they can bring us by dying. Essentially, the maximization of profit from lobsters has promoted greater consideration for the lives of the lobsters which is ultimately decreasing the demand for lobsters and the profit we get from catching and eating them. It’s a negative feedback loop. While the lobsters don’t exercise any agency over what we do with them, their value to us as a desirable food source is what caused our consideration for the quality of their lives and deaths.
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