Across the pond from us here in New England, the United Kingdom is considering a ban on boiling live lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans. The push to include these ocean dwellers under animal welfare laws comes from activists that insist the creatures are sentiment beings, meaning capable of feeling pain. As it stands right now, the legislation only includes vertebrate, animals with backbones. However in 2006, under the Animal Welfare Act, there is a clause that could provide inclusion for these invertebrate if there is "sufficient evidence” of sentience. According to the British Veterinary Association, there is a “decade of compelling scientific evidence of their ability to feel pain”. With that being said the UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs has created a study to review available scientific data on sentience in decapods, otherwise known as crustaceans. They said after the review, "we will carefully consider the results of this review which will be published in due course.” Right now the bill is in the committee stage in the House of Lords. You can read more about the specific bill here...
Here in New England, we take our lobsters very seriously. The summer season might as well be called lobster season because every waterfront restaurant down the Eastern Coast from Maine to Connecticut brings out the seasonal lobster rolls and it's hard to miss a place where you can get a lobster roll in New England. You start to see the stereotypical lobster bakes all across New England and with that you're served boiled lobster, usually corn on the cob, maybe some sort of salad like pasta salad or potato salad, and coleslaw. Oh, then of course the "buttah", you have to have the lobster dripping in "buttah". Bottom line, New England likes their lobster and probably kills the most amount of lobsters in the country if not the world. How do they kill their lobsters? Mainly by boiling them. Of course there are other ways but that's a main way of doing it. With that being said, two questions for New Englanders, 1) Do you think boiling live lobsters is inhumane? 2) Would you be okay with your government telling you how to cook your lobster?
I'm a pescatarian, so I now eat seafood but I have always had a hot take on lobster cooking. From a very early age growing up here in New England I have memories of my mother taking live lobsters and boiling them in a huge pot to which they then sounded like they were screaming...I was of course horrified and would be very upset. I usually would have to leave the room or house because it was that distressing to me. I felt guilty about eating the lobsters that I just saw murdered. I always thought it was a weird, uncomfortable thing. I truly believed they were crying or screaming despite people's comments that that was just air compressing and that they could not feel pain. I always thought, isn't there an easier way? Well apparently there is...experts and activists say to to stun it where you put it into a state of unconsciousness until death or to kill it immediately, do not drag it out like a boil. Experts say these are the ways to kill a lobster humanely:
- Stun it electronically using a special device such as a Crustastun before killing
- Chill it or freeze it for at least 20 minutes before boiling
- Splitting it along the longitudinal midline on its underside (recommended to do after stunning but more humane and quicker than boiling)
Do you do any of these techniques when preparing to cook a lobster? It seems that chilling or freezing the lobster for 20 minutes or so to numb it seems a heck of a lot better than to throw it in the boiling pot with the lobster thrashing about. Look at the freeze as sedating or drugging the lobster to feel no pain. I personally will not buy live lobsters or kill them to eat but I would use this technique if I ever found myself in the situation of having to cook them. Needless to say I'd be okay with this ban if it came to New England but something tells me if the government proposed this in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Maine it would be like the second revolutionary war! No one tells New Englanders how to cook their lobster! Or at least that's the impression I get...what do you think?
-Producer Lightning