- [Narrator] If you walked
into a kitchen and saw a pig cooked alive on the stove,
you'd probably be horrified and lose your appetite. Yet this is how millions
of lobsters meet their fate in American kitchens each year. Some people even relish choosing which lobster's time is up at restaurants or markets across the country. But is a lobster really any different from the other animals that we eat? Why do we boil lobsters
alive and why do places even sell live lobsters? Well, come to find out
this seemingly barbaric way of cooking lobsters could
actually save your life. Turns out, humans were
boiling lobsters alive thousands of years ago. The first recorded case came from recipes attributed to the famous Roman cook, Caelius Apicius, in the first century. American chefs later
adopted the process by 1880 when they discovered that the
dish looks and tastes better when the animal is boiled alive. It wasn't until later
that we realized this also reduces the risk of severe food poisoning. And it's all because of these little guys. They're a type of Vibrio
bacteria and they thrive on the decaying flesh of
lobsters and other shellfish. If a lobster dies you
only have a few hours before these bacteria
show up to the party. And once they're in,
it's nearly impossible to get rid of them. Even cooking lobster meat
won't kill all the bacteria. So it's safer just to
keep the animal alive right up until you serve it. If Vibrio bacteria end up in
your system, it's not pretty. You can experience abdominal
cramping, nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, and sometimes even death. Luckily, there's a pretty good way to tell if you've got meat that is gone bad. Just smell it. - I can smell the ammonia. - Yeah, you can smell that? And that's what that man's just eaten. That's ammonia, that's what releases. The body starts to decompose,
it's been pulled apart, and then decompose. - That's what makes it bad-- - [Narrator] So boiling
lobsters alive saves us from a world of pain, but
what about the lobsters? For starters, lobsters don't
scream when you boil them. In fact, they lack lungs
and don't even have the proper biological
equipment to form a scream. What you do hear is air and steam escaping from their shells. In any case, we don't do
this to chickens or pigs because it's pretty obvious
that they can feel pain. For lobsters it's less clear if their primitive
nervous systems and brains even know what pain is. When a lobster thrashes around in the pot does it mean it's in agony? Or is it simply a reflex response to the boiling water,
not a conscious action? Turns out no one really knows. So more research is needed. Regardless, some say this uncertainty is exactly why we should think twice. Lobsters we just don't know whether they have conscious experiences or not but there's a thing in ethics that we call the precautionary principle. When not knowing, we should
err on the side of caution. If there is a potential for something to have the ability to suffer, then we should treat that
possibility very seriously. So boiling lobsters
alive is not a good idea. - New Zealand and
Switzerland certainly agree. They've gone as far as to make it illegal to boil lobsters alive. Should America follow suit? Let us know in the comments below. (upbeat music)
I hadn't considered that bacterial growth could be part of the consideration when thinking about boiling lobsters alive. It also touches on ethics, and at the intersection between science and society. It's a really good example of how science can enlighten an ethical question while not really being able to solve it for us.
There must be a tie-in to JP's lobster cult in here somewhere.