Views on the Lobster from "the most important novelist of [our] generation"

Vancouver's Blue Water Cafe just won rave reviews from Jacob Richler in Macleans Magazine for serving Ocean Wise seafood--without the lecture. With wild salmon stocks plummeting to alarming all-time lows, perhaps all little education is not such a bad idea. As (the late) David Foster Wallace learns in "Consider the Lobster", seafood consumption gives one a lot to consider:

"Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe: Some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts in the pot...

"...Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. “Thus,” in the words of T.M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “it is that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.”

Read the whole piece here