In life there are pros and cons to every day to day decision you make. On one hand you may get self pleasure from buying a nice outfit from Shein which seems to be really cheap for the quality you are receiving, but along with that pleasure there may be some regret and grief when you learn the people that made that clothing for you are young kids stuck in a sweatshop for the rest of their lives, and this realization might make you rethink the decision entirely. It’s hard to think about how your decisions affect other people and groups when it makes you happy or satisfied, but certain things along your life will make you do just this. When indulging on your favorite meals you probably don’t think about where it came from. I mean, why would you? Who wants to take a bite out of a wonderful steak cooked to perfection and think about it getting butchered in a slaughterhouse? The food industry has been one over time that hasn’t been thought about and no one really cares to think about these animals growing up and living in horrible prison camp like conditions. In late writer David Foster Wallace’s 2005 essay “Consider The Lobster”, he discusses the dreadful cooking process of boiling lobsters alive. These lobsters are creatures that feel pain the same way we do, yet we treat them and slaughter them just for our own culinary enjoyment (DFW 503). He also goes into detail about the Maine Lobster Festival, how hundreds of thousands of people make their way up to the coast of Maine to essentially witness a massacre of thousands of lobsters and indulge in eating them after. In another reading we read during our time in class “What The Crows Know ” by editor and journalist Ross Andersen, it talks about how different species of animals, like crows, elephants, and chimps, are

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just as if not more intelligent than us humans. With this being said, it really is a double edged sword. While the killing of animals for food is an uncomfortable thing for most people to process, the nutrients as well as the unique tastes of foods that come from animals are hard to replicate from artificial sources, and artificial foods diminish our ability to prepare and enjoy meals/foods together. Even consumers like myself don’t always see the other dark side of my decisions such as the mistreatment of farm animals from the time of their birth.

Many people will argue that there is no humane way to kill and harvest animals. You have to admit some of the ways we groom these animals to a life of dying just to be consumed is wrong and below how a living organism should be treated. As mentioned earlier, the Maine Lobster Festival is an event where people come together to eat a lot of lobster, twenty five thousand pounds of lobster in total actually. DFW brings up a great point in his essay “Consider the Lobster” when talking about the festival. He asks, “is it alright to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (DFW 503). Here Wallace makes a great and seemingly obvious statement/question. It’s very easy to get comfortable with normalized traditions around food, such as the ease of boiling lobsters. I would imagine for the people attending this festival it’s a tradition for them, maybe their family has been going to this for a number of years and it’s a joy for them to drive up to Maine every summer to attend this gathering. But on the other hand you have to take your blinders off and stop and ask yourself if what you’re doing is right.. Even though lobsters are widely acknowledged to be best when cooked alive, there has to be a way to sacrifice a little bit of taste and freshness to better respect these animals. Take farm animals for example. Cows and pigs are born into these farms with the sole purpose of getting as big and fatty as possible to later be killed and eaten by mostly humans. These animals more likely than not know the trajectory of their life, and realize they are living in essentially a prison. In “What

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the Crows Know”, Ross Andersen talked about mammals as being “Widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively high brain size” (Anderson). People might try and argue that they’re just animals but they share a lot of the same characteristics we do. It would be silly to imagine those poor lobsters don’t realize when they get thrown in the boiling water, or farm animals don’t realize their fate when their friends are magically disappearing everyday.

The question that will arise from that argument is what can we do as a society to help fix this issue? Farming is hard, a lot of the techniques used and beliefs stem from hundreds of years of being in the field and passed down from generation to generation. But you must ask yourself the question: is this being considerate of the other parties involved? The lobsters shoved in tanks at grocery stores with no room to move at all. The farm animals that are shoved GMOs down their throats their entire life, and with not any room at all to move and feel comfortable about their everyday life. I’m not trying to paint these people in these industries out to be the bad guys, heck they have a family to feed themselves and participating in these practices is how they make a profit so they can do so. Still, there has to be a better way, humans have been eating meat dating back to the start of our species. The difference was instead of going to your local grocery store to buy a nice steak or half a pound of lobster, you had to go hunt for it yourself. These wild animals are given a way better chance at life then the ones in these highly industrialized farms. It used to be fair, humans had to earn their food through a hard hunt in the wild, while animals had a fair chance of getting away being able to use their landscape to their advantage. I would argue even though the results were the same, these animals were given a better fate than growing up in a farm all their life and dying anyway.

In his article DFW mentions that “there are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other”. (DFW 510). By no means am I saying people should go and get a spear or bow and walk into your backyard and try to pick off a deer running by. What makes it more unrealistic now more than it was hundreds of years ago is the fact that