Whole Foods and Lobsters

Whole Foods has decided to stop selling live lobsters and soft-shell crabs. They are claiming that it is because there was nothing they could do to make the sales humane and that they will only sell frozen lobsters or products with previously-cooked lobster in them.

Despite the cover of animal rights however, what is really happening here is that people didn't want to see lobsters who were about die right in front of them. They prefer to have no knowledge about where their meat is coming from. Whole Foods, which claims to reconnect people with the natural processes of their food, is doing exactly the opposite. By submitting to the demands of their customers over the treatment of lobsters, but by still selling them in other forms, they play into one of the greatest problems in food production today: the separation of humans from how their food is grown. It would be one thing if they were to ban all sales of lobsters and soft-shell crabs entirely. That would be a move worth making because it would say that there is no way to treat these animals humanely in the process of them turning into food. But by just making them disappear in their live form from the stores, they are just sweeping it under the rug so there customers don't have to deal with the fact that there consumption creates great suffering to animals.

I have said before and will continue to say that I have no problem if people choose to eat meat, but they should have to witness the killing of the animals they are eating. We should all be forced to take field trips to meat processing plants. Or at the minimum, go to the farms where animals are grown, under whatever kind of humane conditions, and watch an animal die. Nothing would reduce meat consumption as effectively as this.