The humane way to kill a lobster

I had a nightmare the other night about killing my dinner.

In the dream, I held a huge butcher’s knife in my hand. I was a kitchen stalker, an unwilling executioner, yet a murderer nonetheless. 

There was guts and gore and brain matter. 

And it all actually happened.

Hours before, I had butchered a live lobster. Like a caveman.

The previous evening, my wife and I had purchased two skittering six-pound monsters. 

But to eat them, we had to kill them first. 

And that task fell to me.

So I did the deed.

And then I sat down at the table and consumed the results. 

Since then, I haven’t been about to think about food in the same way. 

And I don’t think I will ever be the same.

I’m not normally the hunter-gatherer type.

I was raised suburban, bought my meat at the grocery store like everyone else. By the time my meals reached me, they were dead, processed and packaged.

I didn’t grow up on a farm, where one quickly learns those graphic lessons about our lofty place in the food chain.

I never hunted, never dressed an animal I had just killed. I’ve run over numerous creatures with my car — squirrels, rabbits and, once, a cat — and felt bad about it for days afterwards.

Once, while traveling in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, I was hosted by a family who lived in a yurt in the middle of the grasslands. Our hosts served us lunch and I mistakenly opened the wrong door and came upon them killing a goat in the kitchen.

On a story in northern Nevada, I watched a woman-huntress skin a dead mountain lion on the floor of her home.

Both events sickened me.

But I ate the lamb meal in Mongolia and wrote about the mountain lion woman without editorial comment.

I eat meat regularly. And so I am complicit in this slaughter.

But nothing had prepared me for meeting this lobster, this sea beast, eye-to-eye.

The existential question: Do lobsters feel pain?

Do they, as many claim, scream when they are plunged into the boiling pot, just so we humans can enjoy a fancy seafood meal?

The question even morphed from the culinary to the literary realm when the late David Foster Wallace tackled the subject in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.

The so-called Lobster Institute (yes, you read that right) opines that such arguments are nonsense. The creatures don’t have vocal cords or any other means of vocalization, they say. 

Any noise you hear when the creature hits the pot, the lobster experts say, is probably just air escaping its stomach through its mouth, “but it’s nothing that even resembles a scream.”

They say killing a lobster is like squashing a big bug, delivering the death blow to a mammoth underwater mosquito.

Which is not necessarily reassuring.

OK, so maybe lobsters don’t scream, but do they merely suffer in silence?

Again, the jury is out.

Researchers say that invertebrates like the lobster have such primitive nervous systems — with a mere 100,000 neurons versus a human’s 100 billion — that they don’t feel pain.

That struggling they do when dropped into the boiling cauldron is more like a rote reaction to a new stimulus than any cognitive response.

Animal rights activists say we can’t be sure, since we’re not lobsters, so to give the creatures the benefit of the doubt, we must kill them humanely.

Countries like Switzerland, Italy and New Zealand enforce regulations in lobster killing, which means no live lobsters dropped into scalding hot water. And no freezing beforehand to make them lethargic before performing the preferred method: a deep and swift knife stab between the eyes.

My wife is from China and she loves seafood.

To her, a meal from heaven consists of fresh crab or lobster.

Me, I can take it or leave it.

The other day, we had taken a walk near a seafood shop and saw they were selling live lobsters at very reasonable prices.

My wife ordered two six-pounders. The attendant walked into the parking lot holding the creatures over his head like trophies.

I blanched, like I’d just been transported two million years into the past.

Where my wife saw a modern feast, I saw only prehistoric carnage.

She put the big shifting plastic bag on the floor of the car. 

And I’ll bet those two lobsters knew right then and there they were being taken for a ride.

“Can’t we just take them over to the shore and let them go?” I asked.

“No, you idiot,” my wife said. “Then someone else would catch them and eat them.”

When we got home, I began to Google my way to a strategy for the grim task ahead.

There was a lot of gore. Photos of people cutting the faces off crabs and smashing them with hammers. Then I found a good how-to guide for a squeamish novice like me.

The method: Plunge a knife down into the head and pull it forward, effectively killing the creature instantly.

Easier said than done.

When the time came, I was summoned into the kitchen. The water was boiling. The gallows were ready. There were no last rites.

I thought back to a scene years ago when a woman prepared some crab in my Los Angeles kitchen. One of the critters had nipped her with its pincer and her revenge was swift: she grabbed it and tore off the entire appendage.

I never forgot that moment.

Nor could I suppress the first time I saw my wife order live fish at an Asian market and watched the attendant club the thing a few times and then begin scaling it alive.

I did not want to see that, and I did not want to do this.

I faced the lobster, which perched on the kitchen counter, its claws taped. I felt like a matador, giving the bull no quarter, holding all the cards.

Then I did it.

I plunged the knife and the creature was quickly dead.

We ate a half hour later, but the food did not taste that good, not to me.

I teased my wife, as I always do.

“That lobster was not bothering anybody, just going it own way.”

She ignored me and cracked a shell.

I’ve been eating mostly salads since that night.

That way, my conscience is clear.

Because vegetables don’t feel pain, do they?