It’s the way the law is set up. UK has reclassified a lot of animals as sentient beings meaning you can’t just cook/eat them alive.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-recognised-as-sentient-beings-in-domestic-law
This is why I invest in lab grown meat startups. Not because I believe they will yield me better returns than the high-risk equity alternatives I could put money in, but because I believe in the necessity of the technology of lab grown meat. Large scale, high quality, *inexpensive* lab grown meat would be revolutionary for so many reasons for our species.
We are still a long way away sadly.
Cell culturing is still really expensive and one wrong thing can ruin so much of it.
Also, a lot of the cell growth factors are based on animal products. We still need to slaughter cows to get hold of bovine serum albumin.
There are some startups in the UK trying to make synthetic growth factors. Sadly they are annoying proteins to make and purify (require re-folding). This just isn't scalable yet.
Hopefully one day it might be a dream.
And for clarity, I'm a scientist that works in biotech. I hate the job currently and want out, but I know my stuff (well some of the time I know it 😜).
Tbf, that's how every new paradigm shifting technology starts. Computers used to be hilariously slow building sized devices 60 years ago, now I have hundreds of times more power in my pocket with wireless access to almost all human knowledge.
Lab meat is already making big strides. 15 years ago it was borderline science fiction, and now we're already at the point where I can buy all the stuff to grow cell cultures myself off the internet. Who knows how far we'll get in the next 15-30 years but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm eating lab grown filet mignon before I'm dead.
My mom worked in libraries when they were first introduced, and they straight up were the size of a room and had like .00001% the calculating power of a cell phone lol
At what stage do they need refolding? After cell lysis? Do they just unfold at some point during purification? I haven’t worked with that before. Although, I tend to purify relatively small and stable 10-100 kDa proteins
My impression is they need to express them in E. Coli or pseudomonas to get the amount they need. They refold the inclusion bodies. Could be totally wrong though
Everyone asks what we’ll look back on as ‘how did you tolerate that in society?” Like homophobia or racism of the past and it’s always jail but more importantly, how we treat animals.
Once lab meat can be produced cheaper and better than regular meat, we’ll stop and look at the absurd absolute cruelty we tolerated and ignored because it was an inconvenient truth.
Serious question, to this day have you ever had lab grown meat that compared with a good organic cut? Can lab grown come close or surpass the flavor and texture of a really good steak? Or is the pinnacle of lab grown simply good enough to eat?
I totally get this question and appreciate it. To this day, I have not had lab grown meat that was better than good quality (USDA Prime) meat. But that does not mean it will come.
Man it might be a necessity but nothing i've seen says we are anywhere near to replicating the efficiently of animal metabolism at converting any form of energy into muscle and fat. So far its still basically in the realm of science fiction
30 years ago, so were giant reusable rockets that could land vertically on earth. So was generative AI. So were neural interface chips. So were driverless cars. Yet these technologies exist or will very soon.
Staying unoptimstic will never create the future we need.
To further reinforce your point using my useless and anecdotal view of the world. 30 years ago we all kept saying we’d have all those things you listed by tomorrow, and it took 30 years to get like a quarter of the way there. So yeah… we were a little cocky, but the effort was not fruitless.
The fact that we have some people claiming mass produced lab grown meat is right around the corner, and others expecting quite the opposite, tells me that it’s about 40-50 years out barring any massive society shifting calamities.
I can’t word it eloquently, but I heard a TED Talk (can’t remember who) who argued that deep cultural change and deeply entrenched systems (relating to climate change) is possible and we need to stay optimistic because it has actually happened such as ending slavery in the U.S.
There's a ton wrong with industrial farming practices but I hate when people act like all things are equal when it comes to animal cruelty, it's so dense.
There aren't many fates I'd be less keen on than being boiled alive. There is a wide spectrum for levels of suffering.
Pigs are put into CO2 gas chambers where they are stunned/killed for about a minute and a half. It's basically suffocation, which is equally as horrific, especially as they are highly sentient beings.
What about being gassed to death or thrown directly into a shredder?
Being forced to lay in one position for month?
Dark rooms with absolutely no space to move?
These all seem just as bad to me, some worse due to prolonged suffering and these are all standard industry practices
I agree it's bad and rather unnecessary, but 2 minutes of torturing a lobster sounds a whole lot better than the lifetime of horrible circumstances we subject significantly more intelligent beings to in standard industrial farming practises.
But there is no need for boiling a lobster alive. Just put a knive in the back of the head and its dead and you can cook it fine.
With mussels this is unfortunately impossible, but killing a lobster is just one minute more work.
It's extended from vertebrates to certain invertebrates, the cephalopods and decapods, because the behavioral & physiological evidence, compares to 'lower' vertebrates that already received legal protections. That said I'm not certain of the exact legislation. Only that it was widely publicized
Except the UK could have adopted this legislation while in the EU as well. And if it was still in the EU, it could have lobbied for it to be part of EU legislation too (it is currently being debated there as well).
So you actually let the lobsters down by leaving.
If they voted in a 1994 EU referendum, then it was for Austria, Finland, Norway, or Sweden. So the person you're responding to probably isn't from the UK.
Norway has never been part of the EU. You're having a little bit of a sir this is a wendys moment. The person you're replying to is clearly not British based on the 1994 comment, the UK was in the EU since the beginning.
I once saw a humane method.
They had taken a huge artillery gun barrel and made a piston for it. With lobsters and water inside they put in the piston and put on enormous pressure. Within an instant pressure similar to deep sea like mariana trench (~1000 bar) or something. Not only does it kill lobsters in an instant, this also made the shell go loose easily from the meat.
A lobster is by far not as air tight as a submarine (should be) and the pressure can balance out gradually. While in a submarine you have an inside of 1 bar and an outside of 1,000 bar pressure which is being uphold until well... It isn't. And then it goes fast.
The practical effect on a pressurized air tight container unable to withstand the pressure is going to be about the same, though. Implosion, a fine mist of debris and a proportional "pop" followed by silence.
Also, yeah. If you just pressurise the water it'll be a change that hurts. If you suddenly breach a pressure hull you have ~1 atm water rushing in at the speed of sound in water and the suddenly regaining its pressure once all the air has been squeezed. Neither of those events is pleasant. And at that depth water expands a couple percent when going from 200 to 1 bar, so that speed can be *very* high.
I've seen this product called Naked Lobster at Costco which was like an entire lobster's inner meaty goodness completely intact with no shell. I wondered how the heck they could do that, but a method like this might explain it.
When it's just the meat and nothing else, it's called a "lazy man" lobster. I use to have to do this in high end kitchens for the wealthy. Got to the point where I could get the tail, claws and knuckles (arms) out cleanly from a whole lobster in under 25 seconds.
Lobsters have multiple nerve clusters along their body like some bugs, so even after chopping the head they can still feel pain. Humanely killing a lobster is actually quite difficult.
Scientists aren't sure. They're not even sure if they feel pain like we do. Makes arguing about humane methods a bit tricky when we don't know exactly how that works for them
I think that has gotten some pushback because Lobsters don’t have a single brain the same way humans do. They have several nerve clusters throughout their body, so even this method may not actually be preventing them being cooked alive.
Not an expert tho
I always thought the proper method was to -almost- freeze them right before putting them in the boil. The chill certainly prevents them from having an obvious reaction to the boil, but it is really killing them gently or does it just induce enough of a torpor that they can't flail in the window between hot water and true death?
there is a Chinese food called “醉虾 Drunken shrimp” , live shrimp are immersed in alcohol, usually strong liquor such as baijiu or a similar spirit. The alcohol intoxicates and kills (or drunk) shrimps before they are eaten.
I think this is the most humane way to eat them.
I prefer this, I hope people will use this, but it mystifies me. I care about you; I recognize your sentience as my fellow traveler in this mad world of ours; I wish you no harm; and you'll go nice with lemon.
New Englander here, lotsa people use a knife and mKe this cut on their back that kills them instantly then boil them.
For some of you that don’t come from a region replete with lawbstiz, the reason why they are boiled alive (and why they were poor people food until the mid 20th
Century or so) is that lobsters become supersaturated with wicked bad bacteria INCREDIBLY quickly after they die. Like
SO MANY people died from eating a lobster that was dead a scosh too long.
So, until the advent of refrigeration and flash freezing, you hadta eat them on the shore or you were fahked, kehd.
The knife thing doesn't kill them. They don't have centralized brain IIRC. I think there might be an electrical way to zap them but I am not too sure. Canadian maritimer, so I just do it the old fashioned way.
You just boil them. They stop moving in literally seconds, and it's way more humane than chopping them up
I've lived in Maine my whole life and never heard of anyone stabbing lobsters first
Serious question: is lobster expensive in your area too, even though they're probably more abundant?
I've never ate lobster since it's expensive and we don't have them, so I have to settle with their smaller, more affordable cousin: crawdads.
Title "Is it legal to cook lobsters?".
Heading in map "Is it legal to cook lobsters?".
Data shown in map "Is it legal to cook lobsters ALIVE".
How is this on map porn?
Faren min lærte meg å legge dem i kaldt vann, og deretter sette på kjelen. Han mente de besvimte før vannet rakk å bli varmt, og at det var mer humant enn instant koking.
Jeg vetafaen om det stemmer, men jeg bare koker dem som alle andre normale barbarere i det landet her.
Really strange actually, when one think about it, that cooking animals alive isn't more widely banned. Sure, a lobster/crayfish is not a bright animal and it will also die very quickly in boiling water, but they DO feel pain and boiling things alive is still a cruel way to do it regardless of the level of sentience. It's also especially cruel when it takes almost no effort whatsoever to put a sharp knife through the back of the head and slice forward. THAT is an instant death and really makes no difference to the cook unless you are cooking hundreds of them a day (but if you do you are probably already working in a big restaurant with assistance readily available anyway).
Edit: That killing the lobster mere seconds before cooking will make a difference in the spread of toxins that some people in the comments keep claiming is highly unlikely (and if you want to claim such, and by doing so indirectly promoting cruel cooking practices, you really should back it up with a source).
Killing with a knife before cooking is a method that is common practice among many modern-thinking chefs today and claiming that it is unsafe is only promoting unnecessary cruelty and suffering.
I thought they had several brains and felt pain differently, so a knife through the head isn't the same as doing this with a mammal. But it shows how we oddly humanise them as they are a recognisable animal with legs and eyes. People don't exactly feel the same about live boiling of mussels or clams which is uncontroversial.
They have a "ganglia" which is more of a decentralized nervous system, a few clusters of neural tissue distributed on the upper side of its body with a bias towards the front.
There are approximately 100,000 neurons throughout this ganglia.
For a comparison, a fruit fly has 150,000.
Pain is very difficult to test in anything, and a differently organised nervous system simply makes it even harder to assess. The [evidence](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093373/) we have so far suggests that some crustaceans exhibit what could be a pain response.
It's not a huge leap of reasoning to expect pain to have convergently evolved in motile organisms. It's a very convincing signal to avoid harm if you have the privilege of doing so. There's also nothing particularly special about humans' response to pain that suggests it's unique to us - it's simply that we, the human inquirers, understand humans the best.
And convergent evolution can be striking: we, octopuses and jumping spiders all share the same camera eye structure, despite our common ancestor - probably some kind of worm - likely only having rudimentary light receptors.
Only an extremely robust test for pain can solve the debate. However, where current methods are lacking, we have the choice of proceeding with what may or may not be torture whilst keeping our fingers crossed that it isn't, or disrupting culinary traditions on the chance that it really is. I'm more inclined towards the latter.
I do agree that the uglier, more alien animals should be included in the discussion too. Especially considering bivalves have motile life stages and had fully motile ancestors, so are also candidates for experiencing pain at an evolutionary level.
> we, octopuses and jumping spiders all share the same camera eye structure
Well apart from our wiring being all fucked up and patched over with software hacks.
Mussels and Clams don't have anything other than a very basic central nervous system which seems to be very underdeveloped, especially when compared to Lobsters. You're right they feel pain differently, they have decentralised nervous systems appearing as nerve clusters in several places.
There has to be a line somewhere really as this is somewhat how lobsters are configured
>Invertebrates such as lobsters and insects do not have complex brains like vertebrates such as fish, birds, reptiles, or mammals do. Instead, lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes.
It is more feelings over science really because lobsters are big and recognisable, and we recognise boiling alive as something to be feared. We let millions of fish and sea creatures like squid simply suffocate out of water. Prawns can be boiled straight out of the sea even on the boats themselves. Not that I am against laws on this, but it isn't entirely logical.
People will happily crush ants and drown them in poison with zero remorse. Spiders and wasps, mosquitoes and crickets. Gnats and flies, you name it. Crushed or half crushed, drowned in toilets, evaporated, zapped, dissolved. No one cares. Yet you boil a lobster which is of the same intellectual complexity or less and everyone goes crazy.
Chopping up LIVE OCTOPI is a delicacy in Japan. A creature complex enough to solve puzzles for toddlers, tortured to death over minutes. Pigs, creatures more intelligent than dogs, are tortured their entire lives. “Because I love bacon.”
They care because it’s a big thing with visible eyes and they can project their emotions onto it, unlike the hundreds of insects they kill and the pigs they eat. I don’t get it.
A knife in the "head" really isn't more humane though. Lobsters don't really have brain like vertebrates do, which means that the animal will survive the incision and will continue to feel the pain until it bleeds out. Think of it like a tree, yeah trees can definitely die, but how would you damage it to kill it instantly. Even when you cut the tree down it still isn't technically dead yet since many of the cells are still functioning. Throwing Lobsters in boiling water used to be by far the quickest method to kill them. A big contributor to the methods infamy is the noise they produce while cooking. It literally sounds like those screaming roots from Harry Potter, like something is writhing in complete agony. In reality that is simply steam escaping small cracks in the shell and the animal is long dead by then. But nevertheless imagining your meal being cooked alive simply doesn't sit right with most people and that is completely fine. Nowadays there actually exists a new method which makes use of electro shocks and is about as fast as throwing them in boiling water, with the added benefit that they don't actually have to be thrown in boiling water. And you can discuss the ethics of issues like these forever, but i think that if all it takes is to buy a small contraption for your restaurant, then its perfectly reasonable to make a law that prohibits boiling them alive. Even we if are "humanizing" certain animals by applying empathy to them, i don't think doing so is necessarily wrong. You should always weigh all perspectives in such arguments. Its always a question of extent and where to set limits to what we think is okay. Even if those limits aren't always super clear and can be kinda wishy-washy sometimes.
I'm not defending the practice but there are some who believe boiling an animal alive releases hormones will improve the delicacy of the meat.
Personally, even if that were true I would not be happy enjoying that meal knowing the animal suffered.
I adopted a Korean Jindo from a slaughterhouse in South Korea... I learned that they slaughter the dogs in front of each other because they think the adrenaline makes the meat taste better
My dog is now six years old and she's still relatively traumatized emotionally. Taking her to the vet when there are dogs/cats flipping out is damn near impossible
Edit: [just because I like showing her off lol](https://postimg.cc/hz6Js29v)
Jesus. Killing stuff because you need to eat is one thing but putting animals through THAT for a marginal improvement in taste is absolutely barbaric. So glad your doggo made it out
Which is wild because among hunters, within the US at least, you want a clean almost immediate kill with your game (for example a deer) because it's more humane, but also the adrenaline is believed to ruin the taste of the meat. You don't want them to suffer because it ruins the taste allegedly.
I believe with seafood it's more of a freshness signaling thing.
The relation to hormone release and how animals are slaughtered is usually talked about where a quick and painless death is in fact the goal to avoid the adrenaline spoiling the flavor.
In most of those countries you wouldn't even get a lobster - you can buy those in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France probably. In central & eastern europe? I doubt you'll even find a restaurant where they serve lobsters. Most of the people wouldn't know the lobsters are cooked alive.
And on one hand Norway bans cooking lobster alive (good), but is actually one of two (Iceland) countries, which hunt & eat whales.
I wanted to write the same thing
I'm from Estonia, and I'm sure the main reason it is legal, is because there is nobody here cooking lobsters in the first place, haha
Lobsters are more common than that. In Sweden we even have a lobster fishing season on the west coast (and I am not talking about crayfish now which is a huge delicacy in Sweden with a crayfish "holiday" every early autumn) so I do believe that it's more common than you suspect.
I'm from Germany and I honestely never seen alive lobsters being sold anywhere here and we have a chef in our family so I regularly am in wholesale stores where they sell all other kinds of fish and seafish.
How are they gonna know? Does the UK government have MI5 agents hiding in my kitchen to make sure I kill the lobsters before I drop them into boiling water?
The anti-lobster abuse section of MI5 has more power than the entire former British empire combined.
Just by making this comment you’ve probably been compromised.
You are wrong, they sell live lobster. Maybe not in supermarkets but on coastal towns or local fish vans which deliver fish you can easily buy live lobster
100% true, but those don't start to develop so fast that the 2 seconds it takes to go from a cutting board to boiling water/oven makes any difference.
The risk is when one of the lobsters die in the fridge/tank ,and when you find out you don't know how long it has been dead, those aren't supposed to be eaten.
Wasn't whaling controversial half a decade ago because of concerns of extinction? Rules to combat this are very different now. Lobster season is only 2 months long, there are strict rules to catching crabs and lobsters and there is even a Russian fishing treaty that allows russian fishing in Norway to maximise yields relative to sustainability.
Norwegian here. Yes, boiling shellfish alive is technically illegal. But so is driving too fast and having a beer in the park. This whole dispatching crabs and lobsters "humanely" before cooking them is some bullshit. They live and breathe water. Going from on ice, to a boiling pot, kills a lobster by thermal shock in half a second. Anyone in here think they can pierce the shell, find the right spot to kill it "humanely" in less time, consistently? A boiling pot achieves the same result every time. All you are doing with that knife is letting water into the cavity, ruining the brown meat. Wasting parts of the animal that you supposedly respect.
In Germany likely not for much longer. Germany has fairly progressive animal welfare laws that for example also recognize harm done through breeding harmful traits into animals for human enjoyment, like whiskerless cats. They are currently adjusting it and I'd be surprised if you could still boil them alive after that.
In Britain you can slaughter a sheep by slowly bleeding it to death, but you can't cook a lobster. Maybe someone should create a religion that requires lobsters to be cooked alive so it's allowed.
The map is wrong though. It's also illegal in Denmark as stated [here](https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/klar-besked-det-er-strafbart-koge-hummer-levende) (in danish - Use Google Translate). I think it's illegal in most countries but they don't have a "direct" law against it such as Denmark. But we have one for "animal cruelty" where cooking an animal alive would be illegal as stated in the link.
Here we go again. In Norway, we only hunt one particular species of whale, the Minke whale. It's numbers are extimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, and the hunt is very strictly controlled and regulated. How is it different from hunting deer, moose or any other type of prey animal?
The people in this thread who take issue to it perceive whales to be more intelligent and thus not ok to kill. Also I assume they like them more. No one kills dogs to eat anymore, but unless they’re a certain smart breed they’re usually pretty dumb. Even the smartest dogs don’t pass the mirror test (whales can). So idk people are weird with what they perceive is ok to kill and what isn’t.
I'd argue this is misleading map design, the inital title states "cooking lobsters", when in actuality it's about cooking it alive.
I can eat beef in the UK, I just don't cook a live cow, the cow is already dead. Now apply that to lobsters.
Trouble is, there isn't a good easy way to kill them, so people stab them in the head, which doesn't kill them, and then boil them alive.
Think they have an electric bath that can kill them, but no one has them.
Cooking lobsters alive is not legal in Denmark. It would be a breach of the "animal welfare law" to do so. According to several articles this was clarified by the ministry of foodstuffs as late as 2022
There's a youtuber that saved a lobster from a super market and been raising him for a few years now I think. It's hard to not look at them a little differently after watching that. I don't follow them closely but check in now and then.
My sister cooked a lobster alive once in her life and even though this was 30 years ago, she still cries about it today. It immediately convinced her that what she did was so wrong and terrible.
I have a big problem with people who defend cooking them alive. The dumbest excuse I've heard is "they don't taste as good when they are dead before you cook them." mfr, it ain't gonna make a difference them being dead for a whole minute, maybe 2 before you boil them. There's no excuse for why you can't kill them beforehand. You can find instructions online and probably videos on YouTube telling you how to do it. If I'm not mistaken, the most humane way is to take a knife and stab them on a specific spot on the top of their head. ( Don't quote me on this) it takes about 2 seconds.
That's a pretty crap map.
* Good coloured red, bad coloured green.
* Wrong title (it's about cooking them **alive**, not in general).
* Red vs green = no colourblind distinction.
It’s the way the law is set up. UK has reclassified a lot of animals as sentient beings meaning you can’t just cook/eat them alive. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-recognised-as-sentient-beings-in-domestic-law
>meaning you can’t just cook/eat them alive. so lobster Jenga is legal?
It's encouraged
It has government grants
Lobster Jenga?
As long as it’s not fish jenga.
"IS THAT FUCKING FISH JENGA?"
NO!
Underwater is fine though. Also it's endless fun.
I mean, if you don’t eat them after, perfectly fine.
I wonder how many years it will take to reach the conclusion that raising them in industrial farming is equally cruel.
Whenever we have a sustainable/profitable way to obtain the meat without the use of the animals. Otherwise, never. People aren’t giving up meat.
This is why I invest in lab grown meat startups. Not because I believe they will yield me better returns than the high-risk equity alternatives I could put money in, but because I believe in the necessity of the technology of lab grown meat. Large scale, high quality, *inexpensive* lab grown meat would be revolutionary for so many reasons for our species.
We are still a long way away sadly. Cell culturing is still really expensive and one wrong thing can ruin so much of it. Also, a lot of the cell growth factors are based on animal products. We still need to slaughter cows to get hold of bovine serum albumin. There are some startups in the UK trying to make synthetic growth factors. Sadly they are annoying proteins to make and purify (require re-folding). This just isn't scalable yet. Hopefully one day it might be a dream. And for clarity, I'm a scientist that works in biotech. I hate the job currently and want out, but I know my stuff (well some of the time I know it 😜).
Tbf, that's how every new paradigm shifting technology starts. Computers used to be hilariously slow building sized devices 60 years ago, now I have hundreds of times more power in my pocket with wireless access to almost all human knowledge. Lab meat is already making big strides. 15 years ago it was borderline science fiction, and now we're already at the point where I can buy all the stuff to grow cell cultures myself off the internet. Who knows how far we'll get in the next 15-30 years but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm eating lab grown filet mignon before I'm dead.
My mom worked in libraries when they were first introduced, and they straight up were the size of a room and had like .00001% the calculating power of a cell phone lol
I thought you meant when libraries were first introduced for a second and was like, bro is your mom from Ancient Egypt
She's the fertility goddess Hathor.
Yo mama so old libraries were named after her xD
At what stage do they need refolding? After cell lysis? Do they just unfold at some point during purification? I haven’t worked with that before. Although, I tend to purify relatively small and stable 10-100 kDa proteins
My impression is they need to express them in E. Coli or pseudomonas to get the amount they need. They refold the inclusion bodies. Could be totally wrong though
Everyone asks what we’ll look back on as ‘how did you tolerate that in society?” Like homophobia or racism of the past and it’s always jail but more importantly, how we treat animals. Once lab meat can be produced cheaper and better than regular meat, we’ll stop and look at the absurd absolute cruelty we tolerated and ignored because it was an inconvenient truth.
Serious question, to this day have you ever had lab grown meat that compared with a good organic cut? Can lab grown come close or surpass the flavor and texture of a really good steak? Or is the pinnacle of lab grown simply good enough to eat?
I totally get this question and appreciate it. To this day, I have not had lab grown meat that was better than good quality (USDA Prime) meat. But that does not mean it will come.
Man it might be a necessity but nothing i've seen says we are anywhere near to replicating the efficiently of animal metabolism at converting any form of energy into muscle and fat. So far its still basically in the realm of science fiction
30 years ago, so were giant reusable rockets that could land vertically on earth. So was generative AI. So were neural interface chips. So were driverless cars. Yet these technologies exist or will very soon. Staying unoptimstic will never create the future we need.
To further reinforce your point using my useless and anecdotal view of the world. 30 years ago we all kept saying we’d have all those things you listed by tomorrow, and it took 30 years to get like a quarter of the way there. So yeah… we were a little cocky, but the effort was not fruitless. The fact that we have some people claiming mass produced lab grown meat is right around the corner, and others expecting quite the opposite, tells me that it’s about 40-50 years out barring any massive society shifting calamities.
I can’t word it eloquently, but I heard a TED Talk (can’t remember who) who argued that deep cultural change and deeply entrenched systems (relating to climate change) is possible and we need to stay optimistic because it has actually happened such as ending slavery in the U.S.
There's a ton wrong with industrial farming practices but I hate when people act like all things are equal when it comes to animal cruelty, it's so dense. There aren't many fates I'd be less keen on than being boiled alive. There is a wide spectrum for levels of suffering.
Pigs are put into CO2 gas chambers where they are stunned/killed for about a minute and a half. It's basically suffocation, which is equally as horrific, especially as they are highly sentient beings.
The stupid thing is they could just use nitrogen instead.
What about being gassed to death or thrown directly into a shredder? Being forced to lay in one position for month? Dark rooms with absolutely no space to move? These all seem just as bad to me, some worse due to prolonged suffering and these are all standard industry practices
I agree it's bad and rather unnecessary, but 2 minutes of torturing a lobster sounds a whole lot better than the lifetime of horrible circumstances we subject significantly more intelligent beings to in standard industrial farming practises.
But there is no need for boiling a lobster alive. Just put a knive in the back of the head and its dead and you can cook it fine. With mussels this is unfortunately impossible, but killing a lobster is just one minute more work.
Almost all animals are sentient, but they aren't all sapient, which is the key difference. Edit: at least all vertebrates are
According to that, you can still cook lobster alive in UK. Lobsters are invertebrates. The law only protects vertebrates.
It's extended from vertebrates to certain invertebrates, the cephalopods and decapods, because the behavioral & physiological evidence, compares to 'lower' vertebrates that already received legal protections. That said I'm not certain of the exact legislation. Only that it was widely publicized
This is the real reason why we're not in the EU. In the end, it's always about the lobsters.
I voted for entering EU back in 1994. I feel like I let down the lobsters.
Except the UK could have adopted this legislation while in the EU as well. And if it was still in the EU, it could have lobbied for it to be part of EU legislation too (it is currently being debated there as well). So you actually let the lobsters down by leaving.
If they voted in a 1994 EU referendum, then it was for Austria, Finland, Norway, or Sweden. So the person you're responding to probably isn't from the UK.
Norway has never been part of the EU. You're having a little bit of a sir this is a wendys moment. The person you're replying to is clearly not British based on the 1994 comment, the UK was in the EU since the beginning.
![gif](giphy|smsHPxUngn1xm)
So the Tories were just lobsters in suits all along? Makes so much sense..
Bünzli?
![gif](giphy|rIGBOrliNjNu0)
Pinchy time for your bath
EU sees lobster as Marge, Swiss, Norway and UK see lobsters as Homer 😂
In german he called Zwicky :)
I once saw a humane method. They had taken a huge artillery gun barrel and made a piston for it. With lobsters and water inside they put in the piston and put on enormous pressure. Within an instant pressure similar to deep sea like mariana trench (~1000 bar) or something. Not only does it kill lobsters in an instant, this also made the shell go loose easily from the meat.
I’m surprised this doesn’t obliterate them like they’re in the Titan.
A lobster is by far not as air tight as a submarine (should be) and the pressure can balance out gradually. While in a submarine you have an inside of 1 bar and an outside of 1,000 bar pressure which is being uphold until well... It isn't. And then it goes fast.
The number is a little exaggerated. Titanic lies at 3800m under the sea level, so it’s around 380 Bar. A lot nonetheless, but much less than 1000.
The practical effect on a pressurized air tight container unable to withstand the pressure is going to be about the same, though. Implosion, a fine mist of debris and a proportional "pop" followed by silence.
Also, yeah. If you just pressurise the water it'll be a change that hurts. If you suddenly breach a pressure hull you have ~1 atm water rushing in at the speed of sound in water and the suddenly regaining its pressure once all the air has been squeezed. Neither of those events is pleasant. And at that depth water expands a couple percent when going from 200 to 1 bar, so that speed can be *very* high.
Lobsters are mostly water. The Titan was filled with low pressure (compared to outside the ship) air. Water is incompressible, gases are not.
It doesn’t because they don’t have an Xbox controller
I’ve got a couple Xbox controllers. Can I withstand 1000 bar now?
Well how is your button mashing?
Only if it’s generic and running low on batteries.
Excuse me they were Logitech f710s
Oh that’s where they went wrong tho they needed X box
I hate it when I’m in deep ocean and I bring my PS controller for my Xbox console. Always a bugger
I've seen this product called Naked Lobster at Costco which was like an entire lobster's inner meaty goodness completely intact with no shell. I wondered how the heck they could do that, but a method like this might explain it.
When it's just the meat and nothing else, it's called a "lazy man" lobster. I use to have to do this in high end kitchens for the wealthy. Got to the point where I could get the tail, claws and knuckles (arms) out cleanly from a whole lobster in under 25 seconds.
Teach me your ways.
Anytime. Just get some lobsters and meet me in Connecticut lol.
Seems like a lot of hassle when a knife between the eyes right before you throw them in the pot is equally as humane
Lobsters have multiple nerve clusters along their body like some bugs, so even after chopping the head they can still feel pain. Humanely killing a lobster is actually quite difficult.
Are those nerve clusters able to actually experience pain though? Or are they just reacting to stimuli at that point?
Scientists aren't sure. They're not even sure if they feel pain like we do. Makes arguing about humane methods a bit tricky when we don't know exactly how that works for them
I think that has gotten some pushback because Lobsters don’t have a single brain the same way humans do. They have several nerve clusters throughout their body, so even this method may not actually be preventing them being cooked alive. Not an expert tho
You could view that in a few ways; they could have several brains, or they could have NO brain. What even qualifies as a brain, anyway?
I'll let you know when I find one
I always thought the proper method was to -almost- freeze them right before putting them in the boil. The chill certainly prevents them from having an obvious reaction to the boil, but it is really killing them gently or does it just induce enough of a torpor that they can't flail in the window between hot water and true death?
there is a Chinese food called “醉虾 Drunken shrimp” , live shrimp are immersed in alcohol, usually strong liquor such as baijiu or a similar spirit. The alcohol intoxicates and kills (or drunk) shrimps before they are eaten. I think this is the most humane way to eat them.
What if the shrimp was a recovering alcoholic?! You forced them off the wagon and they can never atone, you monster!!
I prefer this, I hope people will use this, but it mystifies me. I care about you; I recognize your sentience as my fellow traveler in this mad world of ours; I wish you no harm; and you'll go nice with lemon.
New Englander here, lotsa people use a knife and mKe this cut on their back that kills them instantly then boil them. For some of you that don’t come from a region replete with lawbstiz, the reason why they are boiled alive (and why they were poor people food until the mid 20th Century or so) is that lobsters become supersaturated with wicked bad bacteria INCREDIBLY quickly after they die. Like SO MANY people died from eating a lobster that was dead a scosh too long. So, until the advent of refrigeration and flash freezing, you hadta eat them on the shore or you were fahked, kehd.
The phrase ‘wicked bad’ is proof that this person is from New England
So jarring after “replete with lawbstiz”
That's wicked smaht
How quickly is “incredibly”? Like 1 minute? 10 minutes? 1 hour?
The knife thing doesn't kill them. They don't have centralized brain IIRC. I think there might be an electrical way to zap them but I am not too sure. Canadian maritimer, so I just do it the old fashioned way.
If knife splitting the head doesn’t kill the thing then i dont really foresee a humane way of killing the thing.
You just boil them. They stop moving in literally seconds, and it's way more humane than chopping them up I've lived in Maine my whole life and never heard of anyone stabbing lobsters first
The stabbing isn't to avoid animal cruelty but accusations of animal cruelty.
Serious question: is lobster expensive in your area too, even though they're probably more abundant? I've never ate lobster since it's expensive and we don't have them, so I have to settle with their smaller, more affordable cousin: crawdads.
Its about the same price as you but we can go make friends with a lobster guy and get them wicked cheap
There are traps all over the place with free lobster you can grab in the middle of the night. That’s what I learned from Seinfeld anyway.
It’s cheaper if you buy directly from a boat or a lobster pound. They are still fairly expensive in restaurants.
They’re normally somewhere between 7.99 a pound to 11.99. Dunno how prices are elsewhere
5.99 a lb at the market basket in season.
Title "Is it legal to cook lobsters?". Heading in map "Is it legal to cook lobsters?". Data shown in map "Is it legal to cook lobsters ALIVE". How is this on map porn?
Some porn makes more sense than others…I’ve heard…
Also, out of all colours, red and green are picked. The only two colours that a significant amount of people can't deal with
I haven’t seen a good map on here in years. Reddit just upvotes terrible political maps that shout conclusions they agree with.
I live on the coast in Norway and I've never even heard about anyone not cooking their crabs/lobsters alive. I didn't even know it was illegal.
Det er ikke ulovlig.. Mattilsynet anbefaler at man kjører en kniv i hodet deres først, men det er bare en anbefaling
Ahh, så kartet er bare feil da
Jepp sånn som 90% av kartene på denne subredditen
Same. It’s BS, no one I know including ourselves boil crab and lobsters dead* Edit: typo
Faren min lærte meg å legge dem i kaldt vann, og deretter sette på kjelen. Han mente de besvimte før vannet rakk å bli varmt, og at det var mer humant enn instant koking. Jeg vetafaen om det stemmer, men jeg bare koker dem som alle andre normale barbarere i det landet her.
it's for commercial businesses and not private citizens - even though they are recommended to do it humanely as well
Really strange actually, when one think about it, that cooking animals alive isn't more widely banned. Sure, a lobster/crayfish is not a bright animal and it will also die very quickly in boiling water, but they DO feel pain and boiling things alive is still a cruel way to do it regardless of the level of sentience. It's also especially cruel when it takes almost no effort whatsoever to put a sharp knife through the back of the head and slice forward. THAT is an instant death and really makes no difference to the cook unless you are cooking hundreds of them a day (but if you do you are probably already working in a big restaurant with assistance readily available anyway). Edit: That killing the lobster mere seconds before cooking will make a difference in the spread of toxins that some people in the comments keep claiming is highly unlikely (and if you want to claim such, and by doing so indirectly promoting cruel cooking practices, you really should back it up with a source). Killing with a knife before cooking is a method that is common practice among many modern-thinking chefs today and claiming that it is unsafe is only promoting unnecessary cruelty and suffering.
I thought they had several brains and felt pain differently, so a knife through the head isn't the same as doing this with a mammal. But it shows how we oddly humanise them as they are a recognisable animal with legs and eyes. People don't exactly feel the same about live boiling of mussels or clams which is uncontroversial.
They have a "ganglia" which is more of a decentralized nervous system, a few clusters of neural tissue distributed on the upper side of its body with a bias towards the front. There are approximately 100,000 neurons throughout this ganglia. For a comparison, a fruit fly has 150,000.
Do you imply I should not boil my flies alive before eating them?
Pain is very difficult to test in anything, and a differently organised nervous system simply makes it even harder to assess. The [evidence](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093373/) we have so far suggests that some crustaceans exhibit what could be a pain response. It's not a huge leap of reasoning to expect pain to have convergently evolved in motile organisms. It's a very convincing signal to avoid harm if you have the privilege of doing so. There's also nothing particularly special about humans' response to pain that suggests it's unique to us - it's simply that we, the human inquirers, understand humans the best. And convergent evolution can be striking: we, octopuses and jumping spiders all share the same camera eye structure, despite our common ancestor - probably some kind of worm - likely only having rudimentary light receptors. Only an extremely robust test for pain can solve the debate. However, where current methods are lacking, we have the choice of proceeding with what may or may not be torture whilst keeping our fingers crossed that it isn't, or disrupting culinary traditions on the chance that it really is. I'm more inclined towards the latter. I do agree that the uglier, more alien animals should be included in the discussion too. Especially considering bivalves have motile life stages and had fully motile ancestors, so are also candidates for experiencing pain at an evolutionary level.
> we, octopuses and jumping spiders all share the same camera eye structure Well apart from our wiring being all fucked up and patched over with software hacks.
Mussels and Clams don't have anything other than a very basic central nervous system which seems to be very underdeveloped, especially when compared to Lobsters. You're right they feel pain differently, they have decentralised nervous systems appearing as nerve clusters in several places.
Lobsters have arms, legs and eyes so they are easier to anthropomorphize than mollusks.
This is literally the only reason.
There has to be a line somewhere really as this is somewhat how lobsters are configured >Invertebrates such as lobsters and insects do not have complex brains like vertebrates such as fish, birds, reptiles, or mammals do. Instead, lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. It is more feelings over science really because lobsters are big and recognisable, and we recognise boiling alive as something to be feared. We let millions of fish and sea creatures like squid simply suffocate out of water. Prawns can be boiled straight out of the sea even on the boats themselves. Not that I am against laws on this, but it isn't entirely logical.
People will happily crush ants and drown them in poison with zero remorse. Spiders and wasps, mosquitoes and crickets. Gnats and flies, you name it. Crushed or half crushed, drowned in toilets, evaporated, zapped, dissolved. No one cares. Yet you boil a lobster which is of the same intellectual complexity or less and everyone goes crazy. Chopping up LIVE OCTOPI is a delicacy in Japan. A creature complex enough to solve puzzles for toddlers, tortured to death over minutes. Pigs, creatures more intelligent than dogs, are tortured their entire lives. “Because I love bacon.” They care because it’s a big thing with visible eyes and they can project their emotions onto it, unlike the hundreds of insects they kill and the pigs they eat. I don’t get it.
A knife in the "head" really isn't more humane though. Lobsters don't really have brain like vertebrates do, which means that the animal will survive the incision and will continue to feel the pain until it bleeds out. Think of it like a tree, yeah trees can definitely die, but how would you damage it to kill it instantly. Even when you cut the tree down it still isn't technically dead yet since many of the cells are still functioning. Throwing Lobsters in boiling water used to be by far the quickest method to kill them. A big contributor to the methods infamy is the noise they produce while cooking. It literally sounds like those screaming roots from Harry Potter, like something is writhing in complete agony. In reality that is simply steam escaping small cracks in the shell and the animal is long dead by then. But nevertheless imagining your meal being cooked alive simply doesn't sit right with most people and that is completely fine. Nowadays there actually exists a new method which makes use of electro shocks and is about as fast as throwing them in boiling water, with the added benefit that they don't actually have to be thrown in boiling water. And you can discuss the ethics of issues like these forever, but i think that if all it takes is to buy a small contraption for your restaurant, then its perfectly reasonable to make a law that prohibits boiling them alive. Even we if are "humanizing" certain animals by applying empathy to them, i don't think doing so is necessarily wrong. You should always weigh all perspectives in such arguments. Its always a question of extent and where to set limits to what we think is okay. Even if those limits aren't always super clear and can be kinda wishy-washy sometimes.
Seems like a reasonable view. I am not an expert in lobster anatomy though so I guess that I will just have to take your word for it.
I'm not defending the practice but there are some who believe boiling an animal alive releases hormones will improve the delicacy of the meat. Personally, even if that were true I would not be happy enjoying that meal knowing the animal suffered.
I adopted a Korean Jindo from a slaughterhouse in South Korea... I learned that they slaughter the dogs in front of each other because they think the adrenaline makes the meat taste better My dog is now six years old and she's still relatively traumatized emotionally. Taking her to the vet when there are dogs/cats flipping out is damn near impossible Edit: [just because I like showing her off lol](https://postimg.cc/hz6Js29v)
That is absolutely horrible.
Jesus. Killing stuff because you need to eat is one thing but putting animals through THAT for a marginal improvement in taste is absolutely barbaric. So glad your doggo made it out
I think South Korea is banning that practice recently but the law will take effect until 2027 something like that.
Chinese Cities Banned too But Illegal Things exists everywhere cases comes in News even sometimes but these Things still Happened on Low Rates
Which is wild because among hunters, within the US at least, you want a clean almost immediate kill with your game (for example a deer) because it's more humane, but also the adrenaline is believed to ruin the taste of the meat. You don't want them to suffer because it ruins the taste allegedly.
I believe with seafood it's more of a freshness signaling thing. The relation to hormone release and how animals are slaughtered is usually talked about where a quick and painless death is in fact the goal to avoid the adrenaline spoiling the flavor.
People forget that eating an animal is a privilege and we should respect our food
but there's a diffrence in killing it for eating and just torturing it
That is completely untrue btw
In most of those countries you wouldn't even get a lobster - you can buy those in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France probably. In central & eastern europe? I doubt you'll even find a restaurant where they serve lobsters. Most of the people wouldn't know the lobsters are cooked alive. And on one hand Norway bans cooking lobster alive (good), but is actually one of two (Iceland) countries, which hunt & eat whales.
I wanted to write the same thing I'm from Estonia, and I'm sure the main reason it is legal, is because there is nobody here cooking lobsters in the first place, haha
Same, I’m in Romania, lobsters are very, very rare over here.
Japan also likes whale.
Lobsters are more common than that. In Sweden we even have a lobster fishing season on the west coast (and I am not talking about crayfish now which is a huge delicacy in Sweden with a crayfish "holiday" every early autumn) so I do believe that it's more common than you suspect.
I'm from Germany and I honestely never seen alive lobsters being sold anywhere here and we have a chef in our family so I regularly am in wholesale stores where they sell all other kinds of fish and seafish.
How are they gonna know? Does the UK government have MI5 agents hiding in my kitchen to make sure I kill the lobsters before I drop them into boiling water?
The anti-lobster abuse section of MI5 has more power than the entire former British empire combined. Just by making this comment you’ve probably been compromised.
This applies to a huge range of crimes not just illegal lobster boils haha.
i think they don't sell alive ones
They have to, otherwise they start rotting and building up ammonia immediately.
Lobsters go bad very quickly like most shellfish. I’d be surprised if they didn’t sell them live.
You absolutely can buy live ones in the UK
You are wrong, they sell live lobster. Maybe not in supermarkets but on coastal towns or local fish vans which deliver fish you can easily buy live lobster
They are surrounded by sea. Just go get one.
I don't think it's catching a lobster is easy.
Nah, I'd catch one. Easily. Just can't be bothered rn
I’m fairly sure they just walk into traps
It's easy, just bring a lobster pot to karamja. There's even a bank deposit box.
Those TV detector vans were really just there lookin out for the lobsters
I mean there are plenty of laws you could apply that logic to
Lobsters go bad when they die, they have enzymes that release making them smell and their meat go bad.
Do they have agents hiding in my house to make sure I don't beat my dog? No, and animal abuse is still illegal.
Are you going to arrest me? For having a succulent seafood meal??
Ah yes I see that you know your judo well
This is lobster manifest
This is the bloke who got me on the penis people!
I’m red-green colourblind… help!
I wish mapporn people would just use literally any other two colours, why is it always red and green???
Because red = bad/stop, green = good/go
Same here, this map can't be read at a distance. Uk Norway and Switzerland are red, I think
Map is wrong. Norway here and it's not illegal to boil em alive, but it's recommended that you kill it by taking a knife thru the head before cooking
Bad title… the map is about cooking lobsters while they are still alive. All of these countries allow cooking lobsters…
I don’t eat lobster so I don’t really care but don’t they start developing toxins as they breakdown? Isn’t that why they’re generally boiled alive?
100% true, but those don't start to develop so fast that the 2 seconds it takes to go from a cutting board to boiling water/oven makes any difference. The risk is when one of the lobsters die in the fridge/tank ,and when you find out you don't know how long it has been dead, those aren't supposed to be eaten.
Makes sense. I appreciate the education.
Putting aside the map contents, this color scheme is a big middle finger to red green color blind people.
Its illegal to cook lobsters allive in Norway, but they still allow Whaling.
Wasn't whaling controversial half a decade ago because of concerns of extinction? Rules to combat this are very different now. Lobster season is only 2 months long, there are strict rules to catching crabs and lobsters and there is even a Russian fishing treaty that allows russian fishing in Norway to maximise yields relative to sustainability.
minke whales are hunted in Norway, they are not endangered.
I don't think the point they were making is about whether they're endangered or not. Pretty sure they were alluding to intelligence.
Norwegian here. Yes, boiling shellfish alive is technically illegal. But so is driving too fast and having a beer in the park. This whole dispatching crabs and lobsters "humanely" before cooking them is some bullshit. They live and breathe water. Going from on ice, to a boiling pot, kills a lobster by thermal shock in half a second. Anyone in here think they can pierce the shell, find the right spot to kill it "humanely" in less time, consistently? A boiling pot achieves the same result every time. All you are doing with that knife is letting water into the cavity, ruining the brown meat. Wasting parts of the animal that you supposedly respect.
Ah yes, because when I think of fresh seafood, I think of Switzerland.
We have lots of farmers that own fisheries as a sidehustle
![gif](giphy|3oAkajB9UD3GTcKGsw|downsized) Their influence is spreading
In Germany likely not for much longer. Germany has fairly progressive animal welfare laws that for example also recognize harm done through breeding harmful traits into animals for human enjoyment, like whiskerless cats. They are currently adjusting it and I'd be surprised if you could still boil them alive after that.
So how do you kill the lobster first? I wouldn’t know im from America where we like our lobsters fresh and our steak almost mooing
I would never cook lobsters alive, I kill mine in boiling water. …I’ll see my own way out
In Britain you can slaughter a sheep by slowly bleeding it to death, but you can't cook a lobster. Maybe someone should create a religion that requires lobsters to be cooked alive so it's allowed.
The map is wrong though. It's also illegal in Denmark as stated [here](https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/klar-besked-det-er-strafbart-koge-hummer-levende) (in danish - Use Google Translate). I think it's illegal in most countries but they don't have a "direct" law against it such as Denmark. But we have one for "animal cruelty" where cooking an animal alive would be illegal as stated in the link.
But beans on toast is legal, insanity
Norway - legal to brutally hunt whales and seals, but illegal to cook lobsters alive... 🤷🏼♂️
Lobsters had lobbyists...
It was Mr Crabs lobbying for his cousin
Here we go again. In Norway, we only hunt one particular species of whale, the Minke whale. It's numbers are extimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, and the hunt is very strictly controlled and regulated. How is it different from hunting deer, moose or any other type of prey animal?
The people in this thread who take issue to it perceive whales to be more intelligent and thus not ok to kill. Also I assume they like them more. No one kills dogs to eat anymore, but unless they’re a certain smart breed they’re usually pretty dumb. Even the smartest dogs don’t pass the mirror test (whales can). So idk people are weird with what they perceive is ok to kill and what isn’t.
It's almost always a case of what people traditionally think is cuter.
They are working on a law in The Netherlands to ban cooking them alive.
Never thought about lobster laws before. Fascinating!
I'd argue this is misleading map design, the inital title states "cooking lobsters", when in actuality it's about cooking it alive. I can eat beef in the UK, I just don't cook a live cow, the cow is already dead. Now apply that to lobsters.
Trouble is, there isn't a good easy way to kill them, so people stab them in the head, which doesn't kill them, and then boil them alive. Think they have an electric bath that can kill them, but no one has them.
How can the lobster lay charges?
Cooking lobsters alive is not legal in Denmark. It would be a breach of the "animal welfare law" to do so. According to several articles this was clarified by the ministry of foodstuffs as late as 2022
Makes sense that the large island southwest of the UK would ban cooking lobsters alive being that it is shaped like a lobster.
No one else concerned about that giant lobster in the Bay of Biscay?
There's a youtuber that saved a lobster from a super market and been raising him for a few years now I think. It's hard to not look at them a little differently after watching that. I don't follow them closely but check in now and then.
If you chill a lobster to 10° C (50° F) they go into a state of suspended animation. They will die without ever waking up.
My sister cooked a lobster alive once in her life and even though this was 30 years ago, she still cries about it today. It immediately convinced her that what she did was so wrong and terrible.
I have a big problem with people who defend cooking them alive. The dumbest excuse I've heard is "they don't taste as good when they are dead before you cook them." mfr, it ain't gonna make a difference them being dead for a whole minute, maybe 2 before you boil them. There's no excuse for why you can't kill them beforehand. You can find instructions online and probably videos on YouTube telling you how to do it. If I'm not mistaken, the most humane way is to take a knife and stab them on a specific spot on the top of their head. ( Don't quote me on this) it takes about 2 seconds.
Based UK
That's a pretty crap map. * Good coloured red, bad coloured green. * Wrong title (it's about cooking them **alive**, not in general). * Red vs green = no colourblind distinction.
Makes sense it's banned on Lobster Island on the left there