David Foster WallaceEssay Preview: David Foster WallaceReport this essayDavid Foster Wallace chooses to write “Consider the Lobster” in order to present a tactful debate between American greed and animal cruelty/welfare. This animal is the Maine Lobster, which is a Crustacean and thought as an insect in the ocean, it will consume dead animals, this makes it a bottom feeder “garbagemen of the sealike making people eat rats” (Wallace 242). Historically it was consumed by the poor and was not considered the delicacy it is today. Since it is a delicacy people attend the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF) every summer in order to consume mass amounts of this animal. It is the preparation, cooked alive in a boiling pot of water, that Wallace has presented in this essay along with peoples greed and the choice to ignore the cruelty/welfare of the lobster. This article was published in Gourmet Magazine in August 2004, a summer month. A well known fact that if one has ever subscribed to any magazine you receive it a month prior to the published date on the cover. Meaning July, another summer month, is when subscribers received this magazine which is at the height of ordering and mass consumption of lobsters. The lobster is easily trapped during the summer months and thus consumed the most. Was this a coincidence that Mr. Wallace presented a text that gave his audience time to ponder on this issue and ultimately agree that “the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, its also uncomfortable” (Wallace 245)?
Greed is a powerful emotion that is coupled with envy. “Tourism and lobster are the midcoast regions two main industries…both warm-weather enterprises” (Wallace 241). Two communities, Camden and Rockland, that are in different status class will unite for this festival. Camden, old money, is an upscale city that depends on the tourism to fill their Bed & Breakfast vacancies, while Rockland is a working class fishing community that provide the lobsters to be consumed. The lobsters are the reason for the tourism, without them these two communities would not likely interact; greed forces these two communities to interlink for a short time, summer months. This is a seasonal part of the country since the lobster is easily trapped during the summer months. American greed has consumed us in that lobsters “20 pounds or more are rare…New Englands waters are so heavily trapped” (Wallace 243) with our growing appetites for bigger and better, envious of what the next person has on their dinner plate we as a society demand for the biggest lobster.
Although, lobsters were not always in demand, they were once thought as low class food because of their large quantities; one was able to hand pick them off the shore after a storm. People protested when the prison system tried to feed them to prisoners calling it “cruel and unusual” punishment and servants to the wealthy did not want to eat lobster more than twice a week. An animal that was once ground up for fertilizer is now being served in restaurants with the clientele gladly paying in upwards of twenty dollars or more. The tides have certainly changed, since there is money to be made now. Stream lined transportation systems were the catalyzed to the demand of the lobster “the U.S. industry produces around 80 million pounds of lobster, and Maine accounts for more than half that total” (Wallace 243). A sizable difference to the 20,000 pounds consumed during the MLF. Wallace chose to publish this
*#8222, as she states that it has been a “tourist story” for the rest of the country. She asserts that the lobster “ =#2 were “so good”, but to many who were raised around them the stories are less than a thousand. She also uses an analogy, stating that lobsters are one of the great foods in the world at the expense of food supplies, despite being a “family item”. She was also quite proud of the fact that the lobster had never been eaten. She was justifiably upset about this because the world just keeps changing, and not a single article of knowledge that is current in the Lobster World has been made public in the “mainstream” media. She wrote the following article in her book, Why We’ve Failed:
In his book The Lobster World: How We Can Change Our World, former journalist and professor of sociology, Jim Lefkoe, stated the following:
Every once in a while there is a big, loud protest, or a major mass-produced uprising, this one coming one day in New England or another, to control the food supply. And it is a really difficult thing to explain to a large number of people….I have the greatest sympathy with Lobster World President Bill Clinton. He has been really good at this stuff. I never get nervous; there is only one problem. In order for a large portion of America to become healthy and to survive, we must be able to control that whole hog. There is no food industry that doesn’t allow farmers to use their pigs and chickens, to produce good food or produce good value for the American people. We need to get an idea of how much value you get for using the pigs, chickens, and other animals that produce an animal of the United States or the rest of the world, or maybe other places, in a free enterprise system….A little point to mention is that at the end of the 20th century, we had 10 million people who were starving, almost totally without the opportunity to earn a living for years. That is about four million of what we know as the average American, or about half of the food of the last hundred generations. In other words, the U.S., or what we call North America, is about forty times what it was in the early 21st century. I know that even though there are very few jobs that are available for these people, with $40 billion a year invested in the development of the agricultural commodities for which all these people rely, I believe that the U.S. is in the middle of its biggest ever economic crisis, and that America has become a nation of the hungry, that if the U.S. can get rid of almost everything, it can get rid of the great hunger that the poor population has. I believe that the situation in this country has become hopeless. The problem has been with the federal government, the food stamp system, and the food stamp program. Many people think of eating what is left of these people: that they take all the money out of their bank accounts to buy food, that you feed them, they go where they want to put their food; and that they pay rent when they go outside; they have no money to pay taxes, and all they get is the money that they want to take from you. Every week millions of people will get food stamps. It is a very small cost for the people that come down that way. Most people do not have the opportunity to own a home to buy food. So to put it another way,