Pretend it's 2004. You've got a good set of knives, a decent set of pots, a subscription to Scientific American, a subscription to Newsweek and a subscription to Gourmet... because you like their recipes, and you like that they put their food first and foremost. It's an aspirational read, to be sure - you'll never own the Rolex they're selling inside the cover. You'll never enjoy whatever it is they're telling you is enjoyable on the coast of Mali. That cute new bed'n'breakfast that opened up in Fiji for $900 a night? You'll never stay there. It's fun to read about, but those pictures are as close as you'll ever get.

Oh, but the food.

Gourmet doesn't fuck around with food. They'll tell you how you have to eat mangosteens, and will even tell you how to smuggle them in your luggage. They'll tell you about all the great street food to be had in Havana, and will even tell you how to evade the US travel embargo. When it's Thanksgiving, they'll cook 140 turkeys 140 different ways in order to give you their best practices. Their recipes are so tried and true that people bind the issues and keep them for decades. I had a girlfriend with 1971-1979 bound in red leather; the Rolls Royce ads and all the coked up models with their Baccarat really made it.

So you open your August 2004 Gourmet, expecting barbecue snobbery, potato salad snobbery, how the true glitterati are taking in the sun in Bairritz, not East Hampton and oh by the way, Movados are for poseurs. And you turn the page, and there's David "Infinite Jest" Foster Wallace deciding you need to feel bad about eating lobster.

1) If you read Gourmet, your mind is made up about lobster.

2) If you've ever cooked a lobster, your mind is made up about lobster.

3) If you've ever eaten lobster, your mind is made up about lobster.

4) If your mind isn't made up about lobster, there are better avenues to discovery than Gourmet.

5) If your mind isn't made up about lobster, trudging through eight thousand words of David Foster Wallace isn't going to help.

It was controversial not because of anything it said. It was controversial the way Hunter S. Thompson stories are always controversial - "We asked you to write photo captions for an article on desert racing and you gave us Fear and Loathing." It was controversial because DFW clearly didn't give the first fuck about his audience, how to reach them, who they were or what he was being paid to write. It was controversial because DFW took Gourmet's money and then said "fuck everyone who reads Gourmet, lobsters are people, too."

Your average Gourmet reader overthought her food. She knew which store had better pie apples. She had a fishmonger she trusted. If she was a vegetarian, it's because she'd thought about it and come to her own conclusions. If she wasn't a vegetarian, it's because she'd thought about it and come to her own conclusions.

The DFW piece essentially says "you haven't ever thought about this, so I'm going to do it for you, you poor simp. Here's 20 footnotes."

In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so.

Bitch, VEAL CRATES were legal in all 50 states in 2004. We were dropping phosphorus on Iraq. You wanna talk about impotent suffering, going gonzo over sea cockroaches is a stupid place to start.

Important note: like most people, I've never kept lobsters as pets. Unlike most people, I did have a 20-gallon tank with four eight-inch crawdads in it for several years. They were brought back from a science trip by my dad, who expected to eat them, but my sister and I decided the aquarium wasn't doing anything so we kept them there, next to the dining room table, from 2nd to 6th grade when we returned them to nature. Four hour drive. Turned it into a week-long camping trip. Empathy for crustaceans? I haz it.

Crawdads are not lobsters. They're about as close as you can get, though. There are houseplants that are more interesting than crawdads. Spiders are more interactive. If "sapient" (the word DFW misuses - it actually means "human-like") is a binary condition, then bacteria are "sapient." If "sapient" is a gradient, then lobsters are hella closer to bacteria than they are to chickens.

It's also 2004 - these have been on the air for 9 months.

Chicken Run was 4 years previous.

Finding Nemo was the year before. Babe Pig in the City five years before that. It's 2004 and cows, pigs, chickens, and fish all have cute little mascots that your son or daughter are likely to bring up around supper time and here comes David Foster Wallace, here to convince you that you should feel bad about eating something that would absolutely eat you if it could figure out how.

It's controversial because people don't read Gourmet to be lectured about their choices.

No lie. I cancelled my subscription over this article. My choice to eat lobster is not going to be dictated by some simp English teacher from Pomona College.