Boiled Alive

I always found there to be a certain cruelty in eating lobster. Crabs too, while we’re at it. All crustaceans. David Foster Wallace thought as much, to the considerable chagrin of Gourmet readers back in 2003. There’s something unsettling about the knowledge of the preparation method for good shellfish. The thought occurs to me whenever I walk through the supermarket, my own eyes met by an array of black-beaded stalks piled on top of one another. The lobsters rest in a tank (whether or not their state of mind could be considered resting), stacking and pushing through their aqueous prison, claws bound. Often I stand close to them for a few minutes, wondering if they know their impending fate. I wonder if I could hear their tiny pleas behind the glass and water if only I were to lean in close enough. I wonder what they think about the giant eyes peering back at them.

Chinese restaurants are not shy about the reality of killing for food. Anyone who’s ever been will be familiar with the streetside windows of hanging ducks, the inside tanks of opalescent fish suspended in neon blue, and of course, the neighboring tanks of shellfish. My younger self thought nothing of these displays (and to be fair the aquariums in these restaurants contain decorative species rather than menu items), watching these creatures amble through their bubbling cages, absentmindedly picking through my plate for bones. Mortality and food are hardly synonymous at that age.

We visited my mother’s relatives in China every couple of years. While there the experience was a cavalcade of mosquito bites, cicada screams, malignant summer heat, and cigarette smoke—all garnished with an assortment of sumptuous banquets. The Chinese are good at eating. Rice, vegetables, and steamed buns were all fine with me. They were familiar. Meats and fish, dressed in blankets of soy sauce and beds of ginger, were just as welcome. It helped that my mother made sure to integrate Chinese cooking into our Americanized home back in New Jersey. I was game for anything short of entrails (that sort of refined palate comes with time). 

During one such banquet we were introduced to an old college friend of my mother’s. Although his words came to me with a delay, my mother having to translate the Mandarin into English, I knew that we were in good company. Mom’s friend had a wide smile that showed off his teeth.

We were at a seafood restaurant. The table was set with an ocean of fish, greens, and tofu, homogenized into a savory mist that hazed over the room. Midway through our meal, a waiter emerged from beneath that mist, placing tins of boiling water before the three adults at the table. Then he set a bowl of shrimp in front of them. Live shrimp. The little guys were grey and wriggly, their many legs unable to lift them up from their sides as they squirmed. I watched as my mother picked up a shrimp with a pair of chopsticks, its grey body flailing in the air. I followed as she lowered its body with knowing precision. Then she dunked it headfirst into the water. 

The wriggling stopped. After a minute or so, my mother pulled her chopsticks up, the shell of the submerged crustacean now a bright orange. Besides the color change, the shrimp looked no different than when it was alive, its eyes the same black dots jutting out to either side. Only now it was stiff. My mother’s friend looked at his shrimp for a moment, recently tanned, and smiled. His teeth parted and then met again, taking the critter’s head with it. My mother did the same.

Mom, Dad, and Mom’s friend all continued this process of grabbing, boiling, and then eating. After watching the first few rotations I couldn’t look anymore. My older brother was fine, and carried on with his meal. Later, Mom parted my hands from my eyes, holding a whole shrimp in front of me, freshly killed. “Try one”, she said. I didn’t.

On occasion my mother would come back from the Asian supermarket with a large plastic bag, its contents moving. She left these bags on the counter, a large pot of water heating up beside them. “What’s that,” I would ask. “Crabs,” she replied. Sure enough, when I leaned over the counter I saw them—a pile of moving bodies, those same beady eyes. I had always thought that crabs in nature were red in hue, not blueish-gray.

It’s said that the screaming sound that escapes when a crustacean is boiled is just steam, but it doesn’t feel like it. The muddled scraping of legs against metal as they try to crawl out doesn’t help.

There’s a particular savagery to the act of eating crustaceans. First, they are stored en masse in featureless tanks. Then they are selected, transported in buckets and coolers before their still-moving bodies are tossed into the roil. When they are finally eaten they are ripped apart, shells split in half with greased hands, limbs torn off and cracked with a vice. The resonant crunch rattles through the air and through the bones of those sittng at the table .

One night my brother and I had our neighborhood friends over for a playdate. Mom was making crabs in the kitchen. I tried to ignore the scene as we screamed and ran around the house, but my eyes kept shifting to their periphery. Then I heard a scream from where Mom was cooking, followed by the sound of a rattling pot lid. One of the crabs had managed to climb its way out of the water; its reddened claw punched through the surface of the pot. Somehow the thing had crawled onto the countertop, then jumped onto the floor. Blistered, yet alive, it turned itself towards us. For a moment we all stood still. Then the crab took chase in our direction.

Us kids ran in circles, pursued by crab, until we retreated to the basement. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, I saw the creature’s tiny head peak out over the top. We made eye contact right before my father was able to dome it with a metal bowl.

In the aftermath, after having regained my breath, I asked if I could look at the crab. It was still alive, but it had given up on its furious skittering. My father handed me the bowl, which I took with both hands. I asked him if I could take the crab outside. It didn’t feel right to throw it back into the pot, after it had fought so hard to live. Somehow my parents agreed to humor me, letting me take the crab-filled bowl out into the creek in our backyard before turning it over. I can’t imagine that the poor thing lasted much longer after that. It was half-cooked and possibly flipped onto its head rather than its legs. It was dark at the time.

The last meal that my mom made before I left for college was lobster. She meant well by it. After all, the now elevated status of lobster as a gourmet and celebratory dish was not lost on her. As everyone else sat at the table, my older brother poised with a metal cracker in his hand, my father seated in stoic preparation, my mother proud of the feast set before us, I left the room. For a moment I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. 

It’s not as if I wasn’t aware of the process. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t eaten meat and fish and even shellfish already. I still do. But something about the sight of it, seated among ears of corn and surrounded by voracious onlookers made something deep in my gut turn. I thanked my mother and apologized, not wanting to offend her as I reached for a cob and looked down at my empty plate. 

I don’t kill things. When the ants speckle the kitchen counter or when the crickets crawl up from the basement vents of my family home I take them outside. When I accidentally step on a garden snail during a run, hearing the soft snap of its shell caving in beneath my heel, I stop, feeling guilty and afraid of ending another life in my wake. I even let mosquitoes get a good few bites in before I either look for them or end up just sleeping on the downstairs couch. Killing is not something that I believe in. It is something cruel that humans do because they can more often than because they need to.

And yet I myself am not a vegetarian. The hypocrisy feels obvious. I consume meat regularly, thinking of how many ways I can prepare chicken breast as I go about my day. I savor the numerous ways in which game, poultry, and fish can be cooked, reminiscing on Peking duck and pork ribs, ahi tuna and barbequed eel. 

There is less of a feeling of responsibility when the animal in question has already been butchered. Food bought in a grocery store or restaurant is already dead—save for seafood. I know that if I were to order a Maine lobster, its death would have been on my hands. That sinful feeling is one of proximity. It is one that forces me to confront the consequences of my eating habits. It is the guilt I feel as a gourmand, the guilt that I push past as I order a fresh lobster roll in Boston, dying to know the taste, to tick off an item on my bucket list. It is a contradiction that may very well push me to vegetarianism some day. But then I think about all of the wonderful flavors that I will be missing.

But then I think of those black pearled eyes staring back at me.