The lobsters, cold and squirming, go head-first into the big pot of
boiling water on the stove. Twenty minutes later, hot and red, the shells
are broken open with knives and nutcrackers and our bare hands. We pull
out chunks of white and pink meat from the body cavity and the legs and the
preposterous claws, savoring especially the green liver that we find in the
bellies and, if you are especially lucky, the chunks of bright red roe.
Which lead me to this hypothesis: If you take a food that otherwise
would be considered bizarre, like a bug, and just find one that is big enough,
like a lobster, the bizarre part somehow disappears. You have to break
the lobster down and eat it like meat, and so it seems like meat and not a bug.
Indeed, it is a delicacy.
Rodents are the same way. Nobody -- at least nobody around here --
wants to eat a mouse or a rat. But by the time you get to something as
big as a rabbit, and certainly venison, it becomes not merely edible but a
gourmet food.
Not a great hypothesis, perhaps, but I stand by it
nonetheless.
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