The Plastic Lobster

Is there any end to how ridiculous this animal rights/health food spectacle will get? Whole Foods Market, the four billion-dollar-a-year corporation that pretends it's a neighborhood grocer, has recently banned live lobster sales. In a statement released June 16th, they claim:

"Although we discovered significant improvements are possible from capture up to in-store tank conditions, we are not yet sufficiently satisfied that the process of selling live lobsters is in line with our commitment to humane treatment and quality of life for animals."

Apparently, the upscale supermarket chain did some extensive testing to make sure that lobsters were comfortable living in a small tank with 20 of their closest friends and rubber bands around their claws. I don't know if they surveyed the crustaceans or what, but it turns out that what really make them red with anger is that they can't breathe too well sitting for months in, effectvely, puddles of their own excrement.

What I'd like to know, is who in their right mind gives a shit about oversized marine bugs? What, it's okay to boil the suckers alive, but putting them in cramped spaces is crossing the line? I smelled something fishy, and it sure wasn't lobster poop.

A much more believable reason, I think, is that profit margins are negligible for a low-turnover, high-maintenance product like live lobsters. Keeping those things alive costs more way more than just stocking the frozen meat, which by the way Whole Foods still does. But of course, profit margins are not a dignified enough reason for the yippie demographic, whose priviledged pseudo-communist sensibilities usually find all this talk of profits exceedingly distasteful. So Whole Foods went on a staged "fact-finding mission" to expose the dirty underbelly of lobster trafficking. Call it euphemistic muckraking. I call it a steaming pile of buoyant lobster shit.

Nevermind that lobsters don't have central nervous systems, or brains bigger than the size of a pea, or that a Norwegian study recently demonstrated that lobsters cannot experience pain. This has nothing to do with actual study, and everything to do with making symbolic gestures toward placating PETA, who run a lobster liberation website, among other pea-brained follies. So instead of looking like a big bad business, Whole Foods comes out looking like animal rights champions. Too bad it cares less and less about the rights of actual human beings.

I'll admit, I don't shop at Whole Foods, even though I am a vegetarian and love the taste of organic food. They charge more for their products than all but the upper-middle class can afford to spend, and their price-gouging is reprehensible considering the everyday low prices of Trader Joe's. But shopping at Whole Foods has never had anything to do with lofty ideals of social and environmental awareness. No, people shop at Whole Foods because they want to congratulate themselves for being such responsible consumers, buy into trendy activism, and perhaps atone for their middle-class guilt. It's the classic benevolent, kitschy trickle-down mindframe that fuels Whole Foods' fire.

And don't even get me started on PETA. Those hypocritical bastards can go suck on a lobster's claw, while it whimpers ever so softly, "Put me out of my misery."

The Plastic Lobster