People mentioned that lobsters in a lobster tank in a restaurant are essentiall starving, they dont have anything to eat (hence the need to band their claws to keep them from turning on their roomates).
I’m willing to accept they will be boiled and eaten…but, doesn’t it seem more humane to give them some kind of ‘lobster chow’? Wouldn’t there be an advantage in keeping the animals well-fed leading up to eating them, so they’d be less emaciated and able to be stored in the tank longer? That, and you have at least some control over what the lobsters themselves are consuming, assuming they aren’t getting fed little pellets of arsenic-laced mercury or something
Or is their multiple-day fast part of what makes them taste so good?
Let me preface this by saying I don’t eat seafood and really know nothing of what is involved on the restaurant side of keeping live lobster on hand…
My guess would be that if they don’t feed them that it considerably cuts down on keeping the tank clean and well maintained which may be a sizable expense. Especially if it invovles periodically draining the tank to scrub it.
Also, how long are the lobsters kept on hand? You mentioned multiple days, but I hear a lot of seafood places talking about having their lobsters flown in fresh daily. Yes, I said I don’t eat seafood, but I do sell a lot of it (99% frozen) and I know I have no problem getting in live lobster any day of the week except possibly Sunday, but I’ve never asked since I don’t handle it. I don’t know how much inventory they keep on hand though. If I had to guess, I’d would say 2-3 days does sound about right. That way if they have a bigger then expected rush, they don’t run out one night and each day can just replenish what they sold the night before (actually there’s probably a 2-3 day lead for ordering/shipping).
Lasty, do they not feed them? Is that a fact or just something you randomly heard somewhere (again, I don’t frequent seafood places, it could be common knowledge and I wouldn’t know it)
You can wash the shit off. It seems cruel to me too.
I was watching an episode of Chopped last night on Food Network. They got live, soft shell crabs to work with. A couple of them them floured the things and threw them on flat pans and started frying them while they were still alive. That was fucked up. They were waving their legs and claws around, and nobody acted like there was anything unusual or disturbing about it. I say stick a knife in the brain, man. Act like human beings.
Lobster is typically best within 24 hours of capture, I highly doubt that they keep them int the tanks for long.
The bands are to prevent them from fighting each other, it is a territory issue and not hunger.
They have a bad rap for being cannibals because they can sometimes have lobster shell in their GI tract but most experts tend to think that is from them eating their own shell after molting.
Okay. In addition to cleanliness (of the tank) that’s also going to be so that customers to have to see their dinner getting crapped on or swimming around in a cloudy shit filled tank. Yeah, you can wash it off and cook it…it’s still gross and unappetizing. It’s one of those things that if you see it, it’s gross. If you don’t see it, you don’t even think about it (most people don’t anyways).
Aren’t you supposed to feed oysters and snails a diet of cornmeal for a couple of days before you eat them? If you eat them right away, their taste will be affected by the food they’ve recently eaten.
Maybe it’s the same thing with lobsters. You have to “flush” any food out of their system before cooking them.
People have claimed a difference in taste from fish raised from a fish farm and ones caught in the wild, usually stating the wild caught ones to be superior in taste. Lobster is one of the few foods that are totally from the wild and perhaps part of that is to keep it that way. By feeding the lobsters you may influence the taste.
For the cruelty part, yes you want to prevent unnecessary cruelty while still being able to eat wonderful foods. The question is how to balance those two.
There’s a GD-style ethics element to this discussion, but so far the thread is mostly about the practicalities of why a restaurant would choose not to feed lobsters. At least for now, I’m moving this to Cafe Society.
I wonder if there has ever been a blind taste test between lobsters thrown live into boiling water, and lobsters which are killed first, then thrown in.
