MJ and I recently went to a Chinese seafood restaurant in Los Angeles Chinatown area, hoping to get some of their dim sum but finding that dim sum is not served at night. (Who knew?) I then had to confront one of the more daunting moral questions that's bothered me since I was a kid dining at Chinese seafood restaurants: Why are the live fish/ seafood displayed in the tanks? And is it worth it for the super-fresh seafood to have the deep feeling of guilt of eating those live sea creatures?
For a society that's so obsessed with Disney creatures, we sure do eat a lot of meat/ seafood. I've seen no fewer than 3 Disney movies about sea creatures in my life (Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, something else I'm forgetting) which feature cute, adorable main characters in the form of crabs and fish, but then we go ahead and consume those things quickly as soon as the popcorn fades and hunger hits after getting back from the movie theater. Circle back to Friday night, MJ and I ordered the crab, and then the waitress came out to show us the live crab they were about to kill and stop the life of, asking if "This one was OK," as if we were some sort of death panel sentencing a living creature to death. And it's even worse than a death judge, it's like we are judging this crab as "suitable for our luxurious tastes" to take the life of, and if this crab's life wasn't worth it we could always take a different life. Ethically, that seems a little mortifying and at a certain level it definitely turns me off to eating live animals. Then the cook went back into the kitchen, put the crab into a boiling pot of water I'm assuming (or fried it in a sizzling hot pot), ending the crab's life horribly, all while MJ and I were talking about what we might do on Saturday to indulge ourselves. The horror doesn't end there, though, as we're eating the crab (admittedly very delicious due to the freshness of the meat), the other crabs left in the tank were crawling around, as if watching us eat their comrade/ family member. One crab was almost crawling out of the tank, as if to say, "you will pay for this, if not in this life then the next life!"
This is bad, but usually the queasiness of the event is covered up by the time meat hits the table, like there's a reason the kitchen is separated from the dining area at most restaurants, you don't have to witness the ending of life in order to wet your palate. But with the addition of the crab tank, it puts it back into play. So to answer the question, since I'm 3 days removed from eating that little crab fella and still feel bad and a little traumatized about it, I'd say it's NOT worth it to have the tank out in the open to indicate freshness. Would you have live chickens at a fried chicken restaurant or live cows at a hamburger place to remind us what we're killing to have a meal? I think not.
Aside from the ethics of eating crab, eating crab is a bit of a hassle. (Probably due to evolution, if you believe in that sort of thing). You need to crack the shell, you need to poke the meat out. Sure, when you get to the magical insides the meat is pretty nice, but anyone who's done it knows it sure does take quite a bit of effort. My 91-year-old grandfather refuses to eat shrimp, crab, or lobster because of the pure convenience of eating these things, whereas his tastes are dulled enough now that he doesn't care about the juiciness or tenderness or savoriness of what he's eating, just that it's food and he can get to it quicker. I gotta say, he has a bit of a point. You gotta clean your fingers after snapping the crab, which means eating other stuff is hard, you don't want to be eating crab when you're hungry cuz you don't get too much nourishment in one bite, you can stab yourself on one of the claws (even in death, some zombie crabs can do some damage to you. Maybe the revenge of being eaten......man evolution has really given these guys a leg up on other animals!) so hard that I've bled form eating crab before.....you might get a piece of shell mixed in with the juicy meats, you feel guilty about wasting that tiny piece of meat that you couldn't get to within the joints of the crab......so many things that make eating crab just that much more tedious than a ham sandwich.
I clearly haven't gotten over the traumatic experience of Friday night and need more time to collect my thoughts.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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