Lobster Rant

First and foremost, I must apologize. I've been a terrible blog author as of late. Here is it almost March and my last post was the middle of January!! For shame. I've had quite a lot of moments where I think about a recipe I have tried or a topic I want to rant about only to forget about later on. But I have had lots of distractions - planning a wedding, adding another dog to the family, getting a new job, etc. etc. Anyhoodle, enough excuses. Here's the point of this post -

Over Snowpocolypse II, I went up to my parents house to help shovel snow. While all toasty and warm next to the fire during one of the evenings, we decided to watch a movie. The movie ended up being Julie and Julia. The Julia Childs parts of the movie were pretty adorable - the Julie parts however, were just mildly irritating. Especially when you have a movie about eating and the damn actor cast as her husband didn't know how to eat food like a civilized human being. BUT! That's not my beef. My beef is when Julie is tasked with making lobster. If you haven't seen the movie it goes something like this:

So girlfriend is clearly upset that she has to kill these poor little guys. Honestly, they look like aliens to me and I doubt I would be able to eat them without thinking about how ugly they are. I didn't eat crustaceans when I was a meat-eater for that specific reason. "I don't eat shellfish. Mom always says, 'Don't ever eat nothin' that can carry its house around with it. Who knows the last time it's been cleaned.'" Extra points to whoever guess where that's from.

Back the the point at hand - instead of killing the lobster in a "humane" way, if you can call shoving a knife between an animals eyes and slamming it down, bisecting the critter so it can't "feel anything", Julie decides to shove them into a pot of boiling water. Nice. That's much better. Anyone else notice a clear disconnect between how she feels about killing the lobster and what she is actually doing?

The guilt she feels over killing the lobsters outright with the knife is so great, and she even apologizes before she dumps them in the pot of boiling water. Why is this guilt about killing another creature for food so tremendous at that point in time, yet moments later she is busy stuffing her face with the lobster she could barely look at? I have a feeling that this is the way most people would react because, let's face it, killing an animal, regardless of what type of animal it is, is not something most people would particularly enjoy. But I find it quite disturbing that she can go from one feeling to the next without a moment of "wait, if I can't kill this creature, should I really be eating it?" And I also think that how most people would react to the truth about their food. Would the majority of Americans be able to kill a pig in order to enjoy bacon? Or a cow in order to eat a burger?

I really hate preachy vegetarians/vegans so I apologize if this rant comes off as pompous and self-righteous. And I know it's just a movie and it shouldn't ruffle my feathers so much. But this scene in the movie really struck a chord with me. I worry that people just watched this scene thinking, "aww, poor Julie can't kill her lobsters, aww she is so sweet." There was something about this scene that really illustrated the clear disconnect between what we eat and our awareness about what goes into what we eat.