I’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster” in the book of the same name, so I know why some people object to boiling live lobsters, just as I know the various reasons vegetarians and vegans object to eating animals. Some of the arguments do merit consideration and I respect that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about these things, but I remain an omnivore with an emphasis on the carnivore part and can’t get too worked up about the food chain. (I don’t eat lobster very often. It just isn’t something I think to order unless I’m in Maine or at a seafood place on the beach in summer, and even then I don’t usually order a whole lobster — eating it requires a bit more manual labor than I’m looking for in a relaxing meal.)

But carnivore or otherwise, and maybe for reasons that are not clear to me, there is something disturbing about the Lobster Zone game (pictured below) at Benny the Bums, a little seafood joint in Northeast Philadelphia. If the photo isn’t clear enough, it is just like those games kids play — the ones with a metal claw that you control with a joystick, which you use to try to pick up a prize or stuffed animal. Except in Lobster Zone, what you’re trying to pick up with the claw is a live lobster. It costs $2 per try and if you catch a lobster, they cook it for you for free. Buying a lobster dinner is in the $30+ range, so at $2 it’s a steal. Naturally, most people who play don’t win, so the restaurant is making far more money from people throwing away $2 than it loses on the rare occasions when someone wins a free lobster.

Maybe what I find disturbing isn’t that a living creature’s fate is left to a game of chance/skill — that pretty much describes fishing in general and could be said of all the lobsters caught and cooked in restaurants.

Maybe what I find disturbing isn’t the entertainment component — some people at the restaurant watched as others played. Why should I care how people entertain themselves? So what if Lobster Zone subverts a children’s game, one featured in that paragon of nostalgia and childhood, Toy Story, and uses it to allow people to hoot and cheer as their friends try to catch their dinner? Rooting for someone to win a free lobster might not be as civilized as attending the opera, but it beats forcing gladiators to hack each other to death with swords for our entertainment (which perhaps beats the latest season of The Bachelor – it’s hard to say).

Maybe what I find disturbing isn’t that people go after a particular lobster — that’s nothing new. Picking the specific lobster you want to eat from the water tank is common at many restaurants and even supermarkets. At least the claw game gives the lobster a chance (a good one) of not getting caught on any given attempt.

Maybe there’s nothing disturbing at all and Lobster Zone is just odd to me, unexpected, blatant, and really it’s no different morally or culturally from ordering and paying for a lobster. Maybe the feeling that it is disturbing would go away if only the lobsters could be more like the talking cow in the The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which is bred to desire to be eaten and says to Arthur Dent: “May I urge you to consider my liver? [...] it must be very rich and tender by now, I have been force-feeding myself for months.” Arthur, disturbed by the cow offering up its various body parts, wants only a green salad. The cow, rolling its eyes, tells him that it knows “many vegetables who are very clear on that point. Which was why it was decided to cut through that whole problem by breeding an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.” 

Apparently, eating a cow that wants to be eaten is morally preferable to eating a carrot that doesn’t want to be eaten. The brilliance of Douglas Adams aside, probably there would be nothing controversial about Veggie Zone.

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