Jackson Milano

Prof. Miller

English 110 H

28 March 2023

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 children working grueling hours in a sweatshop. This realization might make you rethink the decision entirely. It is sometimes hard to consider 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 the cow that was butchered in a slaughterhouse? The food industry is oftentimes overlooked when it comes to the conditions under which certain foods make it to grocery stores and ultimately your plate. Animals around the world are subject to living in slaughterhouses, farms, and within cages prior to being killed. 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 humans 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 an equal number 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, ]he discusses how different species of animals, like crows, elephants, and chimps, are just as intelligent as humans. With this being said, the food chain from the perspective of a human 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 all together.

Many people will argue that there is no humane way to kill and harvest animals. However, most everyone can likely admit some of the ways we groom these animals to a life of dying just to be consumed can be viewed as a moral dilemma 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. The festival attracts as many as 25,000 people annually. 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 attending 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 considered to taste 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 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. 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 than the ones held captive in 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. It can be argued that 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). At one point humans were considered wild animals. In “What The Crows Know” by Ross Andersen he talks about how we aren’t much different then the animals we are eating saying  “We last swam in the same gene pool that evolved into fish about 460 million years ago, more than 100 million years before we split from birds”(Andersen). As this quote isn’t referring to the exact animals humans eat, it is discussing how all animals, including humans, can trace their ancestry to a common ancestor. What can be taken away from that when it comes to hunting for our food instead of industrialized farming is that every other animal that eats meat has to hunt for it. Humans, and domesticated animals by humans are the only ones that don’t.  By no means am I saying people should go and get a spear or a bow and walk into your backyard and try to kill a deer for dinner. But it does spark the question: why have other species been able to hunt for their food in the wild, while we can just run down to Whole Foods down the road for our nutrition? What makes it more unrealistic now than it was hundreds of years ago is the fact that it’s just not what we are accustomed to doing today in the twenty-first century for the majority of us. Now, more than ever it would be incredibly difficult to switch to methods like hunting that all of the human species used to be accustomed to just because of how different the way of life is. There is no way someone living in the middle of Chicago could go hunt a wild animal because of how urban and industrialized the world around us has gotten. There isn’t as much nature as there used to be. On top of that most people just wouldn’t have it in them. It takes a certain type of person to go and kill a wild animal, that’s why it is more comfortable to just avoid the process entirely and go to a grocery store to buy your cuisine. Besides in a few cultures and societies that hunt for their survival, and others that hunt as a hobby, the art and practice of hunting is getting lost as each generation goes by and the techniques necessary to hunt down a wild animal.

To conclude, the killing of animals can be extremely uncomfortable for most people to process and that’s why some neglect to acknowledge it entirely. In the case of lobsters, it’s the process of how these animals are killed. It makes you ask the question of if it is right or not? Industrialized farming is also a practice that has made people feel sick to their stomach when consuming meat or seafood. There are some alternatives that could be used instead of these practices but most of them come with issues of their own. This leads me to ask the question, when does human decency come between tradition? Also in terms of industrialized farming is it always better to be constantly evolving or was the practices that were done before us the best way to do it?