Live Shellfish Leaves Whole Foods
A concern for crustacean welfare has prompted Whole Foods to pull soft-shell crabs from its shelves and reconsider other live shellfish, according to this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If you keep a soft-shell crab out of water for a week, it’s “unpleasant” for the crab. Really? One wonders how they know.
The chain will continue to sell frozen soft-shell crabs, but every good cook knows that the best time to kill a crustacean is right before you eat it.
But what if Whole Foods is on to something? I wonder how many seafood lovers will have sympathy for animals that are closer to insects than fish. At what level do we stop worrying about the suffering of other life? Will the self-righteous grocery chain ban line-caught fish because the animal struggles to a painful death? Will Whole Foods pull bread because the baker incinerates the yeast while they’re still alive? Or wine because the yeast are forced to poison themselves?
If you’re going to concern yourself with the ethical treatment of animals, you have to decide where to draw the line at what animals you’ll investigate. And all of this ignores the fact that even the most humane slaughter probably involves some amount of pain.
I’m probably being far too cynical about this one, but it’s probably a real pain in the neck to actually carry live shellfish. To have an “ethical” reason to only sell frozen sounds like a decision made by the accountants to me.