Emily Weinstein, writing in the Times’ fallaciously named “Mark Bittman on Food” column:
I, on the other hand, had never put a live lobster in a pot of boiling water before. I love the moment when a whole boiled lobster is put before me at the table, the red of shell and the craft of gently but decisively dismantling it, drawing out claw and tail meat and dipping them in drawn butter. Doing the cooking, and not just the eating, seemed to be a rite of passage, something I had to do at least once.
The problem was that I was actually kind of afraid of putting them in the boiling water. It wasn’t the thought of killing a living creature — to me no meal could be more celebratory than one that begins with a cocktail and a round of raw oysters, which are live when they’ve shucked and served. And it wasn’t a moral issue. I am a meat eater, and no matter how lovely the life of an animal was, someone, somewhere, still had the task of dropping it in the proverbial pot. What I feared was kickback — the lid blowing off, hearing the sound of lobsters screaming, or something unimaginable, and worse.
A woman lacking even the barest shred of empathy. Link.
Update: Mat Thomas just blogged a lengthy response to Weinstein’s piece. (Via Messina.) Link.
