- [Narrator] If you walked into a kitchen and saw a pig
cooked alive on the stove, you'd probably be horrified
and lose your appetite.
Yet this is how millions of lobsters meet their fate
in American kitchens each year.
Some people even relish choosing
which lobster's time is up at restaurants
or markets across the country.
But is a lobster really any different
from the other animals that we eat?
Why do we boil lobsters alive and why do places
even sell live lobsters?
Well, come to find out this seemingly barbaric way
of cooking lobsters could actually save your life.
Turns out, humans were boiling lobsters alive
thousands of years ago.
The first recorded case came from recipes
attributed to the famous Roman cook,
Caelius Apicius, in the first century.
American chefs later adopted the process by 1880
when they discovered that the dish looks and tastes better
when the animal is boiled alive.
It wasn't until later that we realized this also
reduces the risk of severe food poisoning.
And it's all because of these little guys.
They're a type of Vibrio bacteria and they thrive
on the decaying flesh of lobsters and other shellfish.
If a lobster dies you only have a few hours
before these bacteria show up to the party.
And once they're in, it's nearly impossible
to get rid of them.
Even cooking lobster meat won't kill all the bacteria.
So it's safer just to keep the animal alive
right up until you serve it.
If Vibrio bacteria end up in your system, it's not pretty.
You can experience abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting,
fever, chills, and sometimes even death.
Luckily, there's a pretty good way to tell
if you've got meat that is gone bad.
Just smell it.
- I can smell the ammonia.
- Yeah, you can smell that?
And that's what that man's just eaten.
That's ammonia, that's what releases.
The body starts to decompose, it's been pulled apart,
and then decompose.
- That's what makes it bad--
- [Narrator] So boiling lobsters alive saves us
from a world of pain, but what about the lobsters?
For starters, lobsters don't scream when you boil them.
In fact, they lack lungs and don't even have
the proper biological equipment to form a scream.
What you do hear is air and steam escaping
from their shells.
In any case, we don't do this to chickens or pigs
because it's pretty obvious that they can feel pain.
For lobsters it's less clear
if their primitive nervous systems and brains
even know what pain is.
When a lobster thrashes around in the pot
does it mean it's in agony?
Or is it simply a reflex response
to the boiling water, not a conscious action?
Turns out no one really knows.
So more research is needed.
Regardless, some say this uncertainty
is exactly why we should think twice.
Lobsters we just don't know whether
they have conscious experiences or not
but there's a thing in ethics that we call
the precautionary principle.
When not knowing, we should err on the side of caution.
If there is a potential for something
to have the ability to suffer,
then we should treat that possibility very seriously.
So boiling lobsters alive is not a good idea.
- New Zealand and Switzerland certainly agree.
They've gone as far as to make it illegal
to boil lobsters alive.
Should America follow suit?
Let us know in the comments below.
(upbeat music)