Remember Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in the lobster scene from "Annie Hall" where he freaked out and couldn't put the live lobster in the pot ... and it got away to behind the refrigerator where she killed it with a broom handle.
Here in New England, it is tradition for far tougher folks than me and Woody to go out lobstering , bring back traps filled with them, sell them to stores which then sell them to you from usually crowded tanks, all this while the lobster is still alive.
This is also tradition: You bring the live lobster home, your kids adopt it as a pet, the women leave the room cause its so freaking ugly as it crawls around, people get squeamish (especially non-New Englanders)that you're going to kill it by boiling it in water .....and then you toss Louie in, upside down and head first.
Then everybody comes to the table and doesn't give a shit anymore that the lobster was alive ten minutes ago, rips the thing apart, puts it's meat in drawn butter and say it is delicious because it's so fresh.A year ago, Whole Foods Supermarkets placed a ban on selling live lobsters because the chain is "animal compassionable". They aren't compassionable when they sell you the damn thing to eat which is why, hell-ooooo, they're selling it to you.
In an announcement yesterday, it turns out that Little Bay Lobster Company in New Hampshire has the cure.......they can now transport the lobsters individually in little lobster condos to minimize their contact with other lobsters and humans. This pleased Whole Foods executives so much that they're trying it at their one Maine store.
In their other 191 stores, the ban still exists because, I kid you not, longer journeys are "harmful to the lobster's well being".
Post condo- life, post Whole Foods "lobster well-being" illustrated above!Though they'll sell you the lobster live at their Portland, Maine store, they also are happy to use the "Crusta-Stun" which kills it immediately shooting 110 volts into the lobster. This process came not from New England, but from Flori-duh where it was called the "Bundy-Stun", though, frankly, I would have been more than happy to dump Ted into a pot of boiling water.
PETA is as happy as they can possibly be which isn't happy at all...ever. They aren't alone. The pro-Lobster "Crustacean Nation , an association made up entirely of lobsters, is not thrilled with the results either.
A spokes-lobster (above) said on a smuggled-out, underground video-tape from the tank in Portland, "It sounds good, but there's a dark side. Little Bay Lobster Company sold me one of their condos with an ocean view. What a ripoff. I could only see the ocean until the truck drove away from it. Next thing you know, I'm in a tank in Portland , Maine with a bunch of liberal idiots looking inside.....and the condo isn't worth half of what I paid for it. And then they took out this big gun with a cord, switched it to ON for my well being and......." His interview ended abruptly.
