Festival Culture In Consider The Lobster

Catching, cooking, and of course, eating-- the recipe for humans to join the food culture and indulge in a satisfying meal. The industry blurs the line between the “catching” of living creatures, concealing the horrifying slaughterhouses, but then glorifying the process to serve fresh seafood. Apart from our anticipation for those salty dishes, it seems absurd to take time to consider the journey through pain the fresh crustaceans took and the liveliness the food once had before reaching our table. Wallace sharply approaches the readers of Gourmet through an unavoidable question, asking if our personal satisfaction overpowers the humane ethics and morals in boiling a creature alive. By encouraging his readers to interpret their own answers based on his intensely disturbing he successfully lures the readers into his moral inquiry with him.

Wallace, having acknowledged the context of the festival and the question of pain, utilizes the scene to set up startling comparisons and relations, stirring up uncontrolled reactions.

Wallace calls the reader to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival, using sarcasm to mention the “World Largest Killing Floor or something,” which grabs their attention from this ridiculous hypothetical comparison, but it forces the reader to pause to question the difference or rather the lack of difference. Th

It makes them stop from how ridiculous this comparison, but when they think further on this comparison, they start to notice the differences.

With a blunt tone, Wallace calls the reader to imagine a Nebraska Beef festival, using extremely descriptive phrases “live cattle driven down the ramp” and “slaughtered The bluntness of the comparison brings a shock value to the article that everyone has no reaction to hundreds of lobsters cooked alive as a celebration, but with the absurd and gruesome thoughts of slaughtering, the beef market would be non existent. His comparison between the mass slaughter of the lobster and any other animals accurately conveys the hypocrisy displayed from their horrified reactions uses this comparison to accurately convey how hypocritical peoples’ attitudes are surrounding the yes they hold a nonchalant attitude but find other animals slaughter horrifying. Further, Wallace goes into great detail about the gruesome killing process of the lobsters, intensifying the cooking scenarios with an elaborate and disturbing. He further intensifies the uneasiness of the reader, but directly comparing the lobster’s actions as a human hanging onto dear life struggling to survive as it gets boiled alive. Wallace, however, was still not finished with his comparison, but he then directly shifts as if he's talking to us and he wants us to and our relations to lobster becomes apparent. After this disturbing description, there was no way to dispose of this thought as it continues to haunt the reader, with no remorse that it will haunt the reader and they will never think the same ever again. This horrifying description strangely initiates compassions, through instilling fear, disgust, and disturbance within a reader from his analogous imposed pain and experience. These two comparisons are so effective in that it doesn’t immediately reveal the meaning, but it illuminates subtle differences of the two objects compared to the show the unexpected reactions from the comparisons.

Wallace, having acknowledged the culture of the festival and the question of pain, utilizes the context to set up startling comparisons and relations, stirring up the controlled reaction. Wallace calls the reader to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival, using sarcasm to mention the “world Largest Killing Floor or something,” which grabs