Consider the lobster

Question 1

Author

Answer 1

David Foster Wallace

Question 2

Context

Answer 2

• 2004
• Prolific writer of late 90s and early 2000s
• Committed suicide
• Known for his fiction and nonfiction work because of the various ways it discusses the human condition - Sent to Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece on the event
• In submitting the article, it caused a great kerfuffle between him and the editor

Question 3

Format

Answer 3

• Magazine Article for the now-defunct food magazine Gourmet
• Asks us to engage with question of cruelty in an ethical context
• Places us in an unusual context
• Maine lobster Festival
• His writing in this context was strange
• His eccentric style would not be the first thing that would come to mind for a puff piece in a food magazine
• Result was not what was expected
• Audience
• Upper middle class
• Interested in good living and good food perspectives
• Not in a context of animal rights and ethics

Question 4

Overview

Answer 4

• Part 1
• Sets out facts
• Tells us about the festival
• Describes the festival in detail
• Where thousands get together to enjoy lobster in various ways
• Frivolous and ordinary
• Part 2
• Delves into question
• “Is it alright to boil a sentient creature alive, just for our satiating pleasure
• Philosophical

Question 5

Introduction

Answer 5

• “The enormous, pungent extremely well-marketed Maine lobster festival…
• Simple geographical description
• Typical journalism 5 Ws
• Establishes setting and context
• Outlines that the lobster festival is the collision between two socioeconomic worlds - Well-to do
• Historical
• Set up as informative journalism and travel journalism — intends to generate interest to go there - Why is Wallace imitating this form of writing/journalism
• Masquerading as neutral travel journalism while doing something else
• In order to capture the reader’s attention by lulling reader into a false sense of security

Question 6

Voice

Answer 6

• Appearance — travelogue
• Audience — Gourmet magazine of fine dining
• Expectation — to learn something about the lobster as a food item
• Humour — what purpose the humour serves

Continuing — historical backdrop

• Immigrants came here and found that lobster was abundant
• Cheap
• Poor man’s food
• Gives facts meant to spike readers interest
• Considered low form of food
• Laws put in place to stop too much lobster being fed to people in prison
• Narrates the transformation of the position of lobster in the Industrial Revolution - Something that can be canned and moved around on railroads
• Spread across USA in large quantities
• Used as food for soldiers
• National product
• No longer local to Maine
• Becomes a desirable commodity (places where they haven’t tasted lobster)
• Supply of lobster diminishes
• Price goes up
• Less accessible to people with less money, and more for people with more
• Becomes a ‘special event’’ meal
• Absurdity of having an entire festival dedicated to this thing
• A food stuff that at early 2000s is considered to be a delicacy
• Premium food
• Cultural oddity
• Understanding history allows you to understand the strange occurrence that this festival is - Contradiction
• Trying to sell lobster as a desirable thing
• Nutritional
• Accessible (as much as a Happy meal)
• Dry tone
• Absurdity of situation
• Commercialised
• The details of this event do not add up to a good time
• Everything is served out of styrofoam
• Big tables of strangers

Question 7

Turn of the essay

Answer 7

• “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle”
• Unmasking of writer’s true intentions
• Not to write an article bout an innocuous festival
• What we sacrifice ethically to prepare this food
• How we justify the way that we treat particular types of animals
• How we treat animals more broadly
• How we separate these animals from ourselves
• Animal
• Used as an allegory for a particular thing
• ‘Treat them like an animal’
• ‘I wouldn’t feed that to an animal’
• Value drop, and animal is a distinction in itself
• Lobster
• For practical purposes everyone nows what a lobster is
• Goes into details of what makes up a lobster — “you have an idea but…
• Etymology of the word
• Relation to idea of an insect and a bug
• The fact that it looks like a bug, is apart of what enables this distancing mechanism - Physical characteristics
• The way that we categorise something allows us to treat it in certain ways
• Little rationality in what we eat and what we don’t eat
• Previously we ate what was available
• Functionally there is little real distinction in what we do or don’t think is moral to eat - Subjective
• Beef in different cultural perspectives (Hindu vs Christian)
• Philosophical question
• What we eat and why
• If someone was to give you a hamburger
• You begin eating it
• Someone tells you it is not cow meat, but Golden retriever meat
• How does your relationship with it change

All the ‘filler content’ that we get, is meant to give us a certain understanding and position us and the subject in a very certain way.

Question 8

3 No of Justification

Answer 8

• 1. Normal 2. Natural 3. Necessary
• Alluding to ‘carnism’
• Ideology of the individual system of beliefs in which animals we eat and which animals we don’t - Teaches us to justify eating certain animals
• Set of ideas and ideologies
• Using the 3 Ns is the basis for carnism
• Embraced and institutionalised
• Family and State
• We do not pay attention to this as eating is inherent to our survival
• Fixed by what you are brought up eating, what is considered normal in your culture

How this works

• Is pushing the readers, an unlikely audience, to engage with something that they would not usually engage with through certain mechanisms
• A good opener
• To lead strongly would be off putting
• Readers would opt in or out immediately
• Decide whether they want to engage with it
• Meant to lull you into a false sense of security
• Amiable tone
• Maintains lighthearted tone
• Even when telling about things that are queer and dark
• Self-deprecating tone while poking fun at the festival (miserable experience)
• Humour is necessary to deliver the message without turning your reader away until you get too the grit of your message
• Rambling and dense
• Mastery of the subject matter
• Hook reader by giving them one thing that seems to be informative (they become interested) - Confront reader with a new idea/perspective/question
• Challenges the reader to be aware and attentive to what is going on in the world - “Isn’t being extra aware and attentive… part of what characterises a real gourmet?” - Seeming to be one thing and then another, shows power of literary essay
• What can become model for ethical action and engagement
• Make inflammatory point
• Intended response
• Make someone’s engagement with something change/shift/become more complex - Does not have to be everyone

Models with how we can read and write material that makes us feel uncomfortable.

Question 9

Reactions

Answer 9

• Many letters to editor
• Asking why they would publish something so distressing
• Different responses to being made to thank about something they have never thought about before How we read this essay and how it has the capacity to change lives