Who's the Real Gourmand/e?

David Foster Wallace interrogates the issue of animal abuse in his article “Consider the Lobster” (2006). Since his article was first published in a culinary magazine he visits this question via the politics of eating lobster. The issue of eating animals in one sense comes down to longstanding questions concerning aesthetics and morality. There is already an established field in which these two aspects of philosophical inquiry are understood to be intimately intertwined. In life, however, it is convenient to separate the two when it comes to our everyday eating practices; but is this reasonable or responsible? As Wallace points out, particularly in the case of gastronomy, a very large part of the appreciation and experience of eating is the deep level of thinking and knowledge about the food one is ingesting – and yet there is a huge voluntary blind spot in one’s thinking about food preparation (in the case of meat, ‘preparation’ is a euphemism for killing) about the practices of bringing beef to the table, onto the fork, and into one’s mouth.

“For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and –presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?... After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?” (Wallace 2006:253-254).

In the case of some individuals this line of question is not cause for concern or worthy of serious consideration. For these individuals Wallace presses further: “is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?” (Ibid). That is, how much thinking about eating animals is, actually, not thinking about eating animals?