Blog Post #6 Consider The Lobster

In the food review written by David Wallace, Consider the Lobster, Wallace sheds a light on the known and ignored truth of the food industry. Animals aren’t treated humanely it’s not humane to boil another animal alive, or stick them in cages awaiting there gruesome deaths at the behest of their consumers all while tied up unable to live but instead survive until they die. Wallace challenges the ideas of genre by taking a food review and turning it into a research paper with such incredible research and detail into the backstory, history, and science into lobsters. The work put in is extremely intricate and detailed having footnotes the sizes of paragraphs all to further inform the reader on the ethical question of whether they should be eating this creature. It breaks the typical ideas of genre by taking one genre and putting it in the shell of another; the review may not be a review on the festival but it is suffice to say a research paper on the history of lobsters and the horrors attached with eating them.

Wallace wrote this article using the genre conventions of a typical research paper having multiple sources. There is a sense of correctness and an incredible amount of research done but I believe it to be wasted. Not knowing how old this article is or when it was written it definitely has a clearly firm viewpoint advocating against cruelty of animals but the audience is that of a younger generation. While I feel horrible and could never imagine sending a lobster to its death this article very much has no audience it’s speaking to aside from us as ENC2135 students reading this article. In today’s generation with the advent of the internet everything moves at a quicker and more instantaneous rate. Nobody wants to read a seven page PDF so I didn’t I listened to it on YouTube. To further challenge the ideas of genre the ways Wallace wants to, isn’t to repurpose or remix the genre conventions of one genre for another but advance it and change it. Words in a food article while literal texts aren’t the needed texts to stop the morally questionable acts of the food industry. This is the reason many organizations against animal cruelty puts out videos of abuse and of baby chicks being thrown into a grinder; it’s for that visceral animal response.