I'm currently enjoying this site. It's good for a twenty minute time-killer:

http://www.pgacon.com/KitchenMyths.htm



Cheers,

-P

Hi, Plunderer,

I don't think lobsters scream, but do they feel pain? I don't know, but I'll bet if you poked a sharp stick at the lobster's tail, he would move --

The writer has an interesting point of view, but just because they do not have a spinal cord or something, ergo cannot feel pain, is extremely simplistic, in my point of view.

I think the "scream" was basically a metaphor, most of us would guess that lobsters cannot vocalize.

I eat meat, I would eat lobster for a treat, but of course, I believe in a "humane execution" for my dinner plate (vegetarians will hate me, now). It's good to expose myths, but I think this guy's myth-popping may be too simplistic.

Pat

Pat,

I actually agree with you (mostly) on this one. I know some purists who say this is wrong, but we always killed the lobsters quickly before throwing them in the pot.

-P

Will you be serving garlic butter with that?

Good on yer, as Molly Ivins (and others from her region) would have said.

Trivia: I heard or read (and I won't vouch for the truth or not on this) that lobsters were once so plentiful in places like Maine, that they were not considered a treat, in fact, the poor dined on them more than the rich.

I don't know if I got that from NYTimes Sunday magazine, the food page, or not. That's one place I could have read it. I also read "The United States of Arugula," so I might have gotten it from there.

Pat

I thought this one ineresting. My dad used to soak his beans in a baking soda and water solution overnight or for 2-3 hours if he had not set them out the night before, drain the beans and then cook them as usual. None of us six kids, dad, nor mom ever had any problems with gas after eating our ham and limas or bean soup. Neither did anybody else who dined with us even if they had had problems with beans in the past.

Another piece of trivia I heard (or read) recently, is that most of the gas-causing things are in the skin, which the early soak (and discard of soaking water) helps reduce. I wonder if baking soda enhances the process! Hmm, I'll have to try that.

* I used to not discard the soak water because I thought it was a waste -- which is silly, considering all the other water I use. Well, beans, beans ...

Pat

Might also be because you already had a high fiber diet?

I read an interesting book, The Secret Life of Lobsters. It has an appendix that deals with lobster pain, and concludes that it's reasonable to assume that anything with a nervous system as complex as that of a lobster probably feels pain.

It's kind of silly to think otherwise, really, because the whole function of pain is to alert us to dangerous conditions (heat, cold, crushing pressure, overloaded muscles), which is something anything capable of movement needs. There are a few differences, however. Lobsters, like all arthropods, have open circulatory systems. Their blood does not pass through vessels as ours does, but washes freely through spaces between organs, and between the shell and the soft tissues inside. If a lobster loses a limb, its entire circulatory system is open to outside environment and it has no clotting ability (which anyway would be useless to plug such a large leak). Instead, lobsters have the ability to mechanically close off the stumps of lost limbs. If a limb is caught, say on a rock, they can consciously sever it. Because of this, it seems likely that loss of a limb probably isn't nearly as painful for a lobster as it is for us.

When cooked, lobsters and crabs sometimes lose their limbs. I interpret this as them having been stressed while dying, and trying to save themselves in the only way possible, by shedding limbs. So if I see shed limbs after I cook them, I know that they were in pain. The most humane way I've found of cooking crustaceans is to put them in a pot with an inch or so of cold water on the bottom, then raise the temperature slowly. As the temperature rises, the oxygen concentration in their blood drops and they slip into unconsciousness. Once this happens, I raise the temperature and cook them. There are no shed limbs. But based on my own experience with broken bones I know that there is a considerable time lag between a severe injury and the first experience of pain. From this I suspect that plunging a live lobster in boiling water probably isn't as painful as it sounds, because it takes time for the mind to construct the feeling of pain, and the whole animal well may be dead before this happens.

Pain is a subjective phenomenon that, despite what the neurophysiologists might claim, is not understood in any animal, and can not be understood without solving the mind-body problem, something that is as unlikely now as it ever has been. We can discover neural correlates of subjective states, but not a causal connection between the two. We also tend to assume that subjective emotional states (and consciousness itself) somehow are related to neural complexity, but there is no good basis for this assumption. Single celled organisms that entirely lack nervous systems respond to stimuli as if they could feel pain. Absent some powerful evidence to the contrary (I can't even imagine what such evidence might be) I assume that they feel pain.

The Nazi's were very concerned about the suffering of lobsters, BTW. In Holland they passed laws banning the boiling them alive.

They weren't more plentiful in the past, they just were not considered a delicacy by locals, and could not be shipped long distances.

It turns out that lobsters probably have become more plentiful over the past few hundred years, as the population of large cod, the primary predator of small adult lobsters, has plummeted. Lobster fishing as it has been practiced for the past 80 years or so (females with eggs are released after their tail fin has been notched, after which she may not legally be harvested) has little effect on the lobster population. There are enough baby lobsters to make up for the adults who are harvested. The population is much more sensitive to changes in ocean currents that carry larval lobsters to places where they can mature. The same is true of many crabs (blue, dugneness).

As kids we ate very little in the way of whole grains as our bread was white Wonder and our rice was processed white rice, flour was bleached and enriched. Mom & dad didn't have money so most of our grains were the cheapest thing on the shelf or government surplus. Dad's trick with beans works even on people who have chronic problems with consuming beans so I don't think the high fiber differential really is in play here. Good thought though.

Gas usually is caused by indigestible sugars fermenting in the colon. Usually we can build up a population of gut bacteria that can digest these sugars for us, so if you keep eating the offending food the amount of gas you produce will go down as the population of these bacteria build up.

A course of oral antibiotics can reveal all kinds of previously unknown sugar sensitivities because it will wipe out gut bacteria and leave you with just your own enzymes. This is how many people discover their lactose intolerance. Helpful bacteria also are why most people who are lactose intolerant don't have a problem (I see Chinese kids swigging milk all of the time).

This has been a very educational thread!
Pat

Alas, I wish the bean soaking would actually prevent the gas attack. When I cook bean soup from dried beans, I always soak them before hand (no baking soda). I wish I could say there's no gas, but there always is. Then again, I've never cooked them straight, so I can't compare. Maybe next time I will try beano.

Interesting. I was just making a guess.

-P

Pppprrrbbbtttt!

No help for you!

-P

P.S. I'll be sleeping on the couch tonight, folks...

Hey, it's not like we had beans for dinner. Plus, your split pea soup or Chili recipes aren't that much safer.

Every so often research comes out about whether or not lobsters can actually "feel" pain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#Capac...n_and_suffering

My uncle sent my family some live lobsters from Maine once, and I put one in the pot, but couldn't do the other. There's something very unnerving about dropping a live animal into a pot of boiling water.

But it was tasty....I'm not going to lie, it was tasty.