Consider the Lobster

TL;DR — Wallace’s Gourmet assignment on the Maine Lobster Festival, which becomes an essay on whether the lobster feels pain.

Gourmet, August 2004 — as printed, with the magazine’s own layout.

Gourmet sent Wallace to cover the Maine Lobster Festival. He filed a piece that spends its middle third on the question of whether it is all right to boil a creature alive for pleasure, and whether the reader’s discomfort at being asked is itself evidence.

The footnotes are the argument. Reading it in the magazine’s own columns, surrounded by festival photographs, is a materially different experience from reading it in the collection.

Where this came from

• Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread

7 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.