Lobster Clause

In an essay about the Maine Lobster Festival that he’d been commissioned to write, the late David Foster Wallace asked, quite seriously, that we consider the lobster. I’m not sure what the editors of Gourmet magazine were expecting when they’d hired Wallace, but what they and readers got was an exhaustive inquiry into the ethics of boiling an animal alive. Now I know my daughter is starting to read, but I’m thinking she’s still a bit young for tackling Wallace’s dense prose. (We’ll probably wait until she’s five.) Every time we pass the lobster tank at our local grocery megastore, though, Olivia does something that makes me wonder if and how Wallace got in her head.

She insists that we make a wide, semicircle route around the lobster tank, for spotting the ruddy crustaceans crammed in the tank, their fate that of the dinner plate, is enough to make our empathic child cry.