Crabs and Avoidance

When we talked about Consider the Lobster in class at the beginning of this week, I would have never expected to come home to a box of them sitting in my living room. I vaguely remembered my dad telling us a few weeks ago he ordered 10 pounds of snow crab for us to eat in the coming weeks. I disregarded what he told us and completely forgot all of it. When we read the piece in school I kind of distanced myself from the piece because I thought to myself how since I would never go to the Maine Lobster Festival I wouldn’t have to worry about the ethics of the huge boiler or boiling them alive since I would never have to do it or order it in a restaurant anytime soon. When I got home from school that day though, seeing that huge box in my house, made me feel really shocked. I just never assumed that I would never really have to worry about the ethics of boiling lobsters if I didn’t buy or consume any. Even though it turned out to ultimately be a box of crabs instead of lobsters (which in my opinion are basically almost the same thing,) it made me think about how “some cooks take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait till the whole process is over” (Wallace 327). It makes me think of how the cooks who cook the lobsters this way know it’s wrong in a way that the lobsters are still clawing at the pots, but in order to avoid feeling bad, they walk to another room and pretend it’s never happening. So the tea is that’s what so many people do in their lives, they pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening by avoiding it and trying to forget it, even though it still is happening.