David Foster Wallace does not hide the reality in this article about the “Maine Lobster Festival” written for Gourmet Magazine in 2004.
But because he does not want to be “preachy,” and because he’s writing for Gourmet Magazine, and because he wants to keep on eating what he likes eating, he just raises the questions, but not the obvious answer, which is that killing and eating lobsters — or fish or chickens or pigs or cows — is horribly cruel and completely unnecessary for human survival or health.
To those who are honest with themselves, it is a clear case of gastronomy (or aesthetics) versus morality: my taste versus your hurt.
DFW thinks out loud:
“Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.”
I suggest another exercise:
“Try to imagine a Georgia Cotton Picking Festival in the 1850’s at which part of the festivities is watching wagons pull up and the live slaves get driven down the ramp and whipped onto the cotton fields or something—there’s no way.”
(With thanks to Jeremy Greenberg for link.)
The pro’s and con’s are all familiar, many times over. This is not an area in which to make a stake for intellectual or ethical originality. But that’s because the truth is obvious, dead obvious. And all the back and forth is just about not wanting to face it. (I didn’t face it for most of my life.)
But I am not so misanthropic as to believe that self-deception and psychopathy will win out over human decency in the end. We will face the truth, and we will do the right thing. The trouble is that as long as we keep dragging out the day of reckoning, it is not, as with cigarette-smoking, our own health and well-being that is at stake but that of billions upon billions of innocent victims, undergoing unneeded, unpardonable agony every minute for the sake of our preferred tastes and habits… That human decency will win out over ignorance, indifference and worse is their only hope.