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 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 alive into shreds 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 David Foster Wallace’s 2005 essay “Consider The Lobster”, he discusses the dreadful cooking process of boiling lobsters alive. These lobsters are sentient creatures, and feel pain the same way we do, yet we treat them and slaughter them like they don’t matter. 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 Ross Anderson, it talks about how different species of

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animals, like crows, elephants, and chimps, are 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 consumer’s 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. 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 consumer’s 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 do so and groom these animals to a life of dying just to be consumed is just 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. DFR brings up a great point in his essay “Consider the Lobster” when talking about the festival saying( “is it alright to boil a sentinatal creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure” Pg.503). Here Wallace makes a great and seemingly obvious statement/question. It’s very easy to get comfortable with normality. I would imagine 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 year 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. These animals can feel things the same way we do. Take

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farm animals for example. Cows and pigs for example are born into these farms with the sole purpose of getting as big and fatty as possible to later be killed and eaten by most likely 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 Anderson talked about mammals as being “Widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively high brain size”.