Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

The line is associated with David Foster Wallace’s essay on the ethics of eating lobster, written after he attended the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, Maine. In the piece, Wallace describes the festival’s celebratory atmosphere and the industrial-scale cooking of lobsters, then pivots to the moral discomfort raised by boiling animals alive. He frames the question as one that polite diners and food writers often avoid, pressing readers to confront whether culinary pleasure can justify causing intense suffering to a creature that may be capable of pain. The essay’s broader aim is to expose how cultural habits can anesthetize ethical reflection.

The question is deliberately blunt and prosecutorial: it strips away gourmet rhetoric and tradition to reveal a stark moral calculus—pleasure versus possible suffering. By emphasizing “sentient creature” and “gustatory pleasure,” Wallace contrasts the lobster’s potential capacity to feel with the comparatively trivial human benefit of taste. The phrasing also implicates the reader (“our”), making the issue collective rather than abstract. As in much of Wallace’s nonfiction, the point is less to deliver a final verdict than to force sustained attention on what is usually ignored, showing how convenience and appetite can function as ethical blinders.