Lobsters and the Media

New York Times illustration
by Ji Lee (photo: Daniel Root)

In the New York Times on Sunday, food critic Frank Bruni wrote an article titled "It Died for Us," in which he argued that the decision by Whole Foods to discontinue the sale of live lobster dovetailed with a heightened awareness about where our food comes from and whether it was produced humanely -- a subject he went on to discuss in relation to a variety of animals.

The illustration accompanying the article showed a red lobster in a coffin with flowers, labeled "100% Humanely Killed Fresh Maine Lobster."

The illustration was amusing. But the picture -- and the article -- made an assumption: The lobsters that will be processed for Whole Foods in the future will be killed humanely, and they will come from Maine.

I made similar assumptions in my own article on the Whole Foods decision in the July issue of Boston magazine, which went to press in mid-June and which is just now hitting newsstands.

But since then, what has struck me is how none of the journalists who have written about the Whole Foods lobster ban -- including myself, at least until the past week or so -- have probed far enough behind the Whole Foods corporate press release.

To my knowledge, the stories on the lobster ban in the mainstream press have not questioned the official Whole Foods position that the lobsters will be harvested in a sustainable fashion and killed humanely. And now the news cycle has already moved on. I doubt any major media outlet will be revisiting the story.

I decided to write a letter to the New York Times to challenge our assumptions. The letter was published in today's paper, along with some other letters on the subject. Here is the full letter I sent; unfortunately, the Times only published the second paragraph.

To the Editor:

Whole Foods "humanely killed" lobsters won't be coming from Maine. Maine's several thousand small-scale independent harvesters protect the oversized broodstock (mother and father) lobsters that help repopulate the fishery. But Whole Foods will be selling only processed lobster meat from Clearwater Seafoods of Canada, which operates large-scale corporate boats that do not protect oversized broodstock lobsters.

The lobsters prepared for Whole Foods will die inside enormous automated crushing machines. The lobsters are loaded alive into a cylinder and the water around them is compressed to several times the pressure found in the deepest trenches of the ocean. Tests by animal-welfare experts are underway, but it is not yet clear how long the lobsters suffer inside these high-pressure processors before they die; attaining maximum pressure requires 30-45 seconds. While perhaps more humane than boiling alive, it is certainly not more humane than pithing a lobster with a kitchen knife before you put it in the pot.

Trevor Corson
Washington D.C.
The writer is the author of a book on lobster biology.

I must add, folks: I find it extremely ironic that I have ended up sounding a lot like PeTA and David Foster Wallace. Don't worry -- I still believe in splitting lobsters in half with a kitchen knife, cooking them, and eating them.