On Monday, TheirTurn reported that the online grocery giant Fresh Direct, which serves the NYC metropolitan area, is making home deliveries of live lobsters, and we suggested that people ask the company to stop. In response to my email asking them to deliver frozen lobsters in order to reduce the amount of time they suffer, Fresh Direct wrote:

“I can definitely understand your concern. We do not send them frozen, as lobsters are considered fresher when cooked alive. The meat tends to be tougher when eaten any other way.”

Is avoiding “tougher meat” an acceptable justification for prolonging a lobster’s suffering through live transport before boiling him or her alive? How can anyone think any of this is okay? Novelist David Foster Wallace once said, “Is it possible that future generations will regard our present eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments?” Of course they will. If you haven’t already, please do yourself, the planet and the animals a favor: go veg.

Many of us are so focused on the unthinkable end of a lobster’s life – being boiled alive – that we forget that the journey that he or she takes to the pot is just as bad. After being caught in traps and dragged out of their homes onto boats, lobsters are transferred into restaurant or grocery store tanks where they suffer from hunger, low oxygen level, stress, confinement and overcrowding.

Fresh Direct summer promotion

In a summer promotion, food delivery giant Fresh Direct is selling live lobsters. Please contact Fresh Direct by phone or email to encourage them to stop prolonging the misery of lobsters by transporting them alive in delivery trucks. When TheirTurn subscriber and Brooklyn resident Rina Deych brought the cruelty of live lobster delivery to our attention, she added that the end of their lives is awful too — when they thrash around and attempt to escape the pot after we drop them into boiling water: “We are quick to demonize people in other cultures for boiling puppies and kittens alive, yet in our society, people think nothing of dropping a sentient creature of another species into a pot of boiling water.” Thank you, Rina.