The separation of animal and flesh is first and foremost linguistic, a binary emphasised by late-capitalist consumer culture that casts meat as a sourceless entity. At a seafood festival on England’s windy south coast, Louis Rogers finds a more complex picture, where society’s contradictory practices and codified rituals around consumption are made flesh.
Text and photography by Louis Rogers
It’s half past twelve on Saturday and a rumour is spreading that they’ve already run out of lobster. The atmosphere at the Dorset Seafood Festival has been vaguely tense all morning, the result of a large group of stalls selling very similar, often identical, products in close proximity. Visitors navigate the festival warily in groups or couples, sizing up menus, portion sizes, queues and costs, even though the prices at least are regulated: £2.50 for an oyster, £10 for a glass of English sparkling wine. It is the kind of day that sits at the strange heart of an English summer: hot, thick and close; the skies blue but marbled with towers of grey cloud; the wind harrying paper plates and shop awnings without cooling the backs of anyone’s necks. The air smells of frying and salt across Weymouth beachfront, and more intensely on the tarmacked pleasure pier behind Weymouth Pavilion, where the festival is being held over a weekend.
We are all here for one reason. There are a few cooking demonstrations, a talk on seaweed and a presentation from the sparkling wine producer sponsoring the event, well attended by a late-afternoon audience who keep thrusting empty flutes in the air to call for refills. A marquee hosts a group of men in Breton shirts singing sea shanties, and later, a violinist. A Magimix stand is raffling a new kind of blender. Nevertheless, everyone has travelled down here and paid their entry fee for one reason: to eat animals that have been pulled out of the sea.
They are served up as moules marinières, salt-and-pepper squid, mackerel tacos, tikka fish wraps, crab pasties, plaice ceviche, po’boys, paella, various iterations of a “posh” fish-finger sandwich, platter after platter of oysters swimming in shallots and Tabasco, lobsters split down the middle, red, glossy with butter, limbs and appendages hanging over the sides of their cardboard bowls like those of a corpse in a bathtub. It’s in this atmosphere of focused indulgence that a vaunted shortage of crustaceans can cause a minor panic. Thankfully it turns out to be short-lived. More lobsters are brought in, claws waving uncertainly, spindly legs rapping each other’s mottled backs. The steady level of superfluous availability and avid consumption is re-established.
Entrance to the Seafood Festival costs £10. Once inside, visitors are mainly presented with more opportunities for spending, on food, drink and souvenirs. Word of a freebie – whether a taster of fried fish or a paper cup of blended vegetables demonstrating the capabilities of a new kitchen appliance – travels fast and clots the small site with closely wound queues.
Face-in-the-hole or photo stand-in boards are staples of the British seaside. Cassius Coolidge, an American artist and entrepreneur, patented the idea of “comic foregrounds” in 1873.
A group of protestors from PETA are stationed by the entrance as the visitors file in in the late morning. Their banner reads: “Sea life not seafood.” One of them is curled up patiently on the pavement dressed as a prawn. While I’m sure they stir some consciences, their message isn’t entirely dissonant with the festival’s. Alongside all the seafood, there is plenty of sea life inside the barriers – the recently refreshed lobster supply a case in point. Indeed, some of it will be eaten while still alive, not really having left the “life” category in becoming “food”. The festival may not be expounding the exclusionary “not” in PETA’s slogan, but it certainly isn’t trying to obscure the connection they are asserting. There’s no doubt that the food being served was, or is, a living thing.
For every dish of well-disguised animal flesh on sale – curries, sandwiches, croquettes – there’s a whole, gleaming creature, still stirring or dead but intact and recognisable. Then there are the soft toys and ceramics in the shape of these animals; the T-shirts and aprons emblazoned with them; the cartoons of anthropomorphised squids and crabs grinning down from signage, gesturing gamely to menus of their own meat. In this respect, the festival is a heightened version of the rest of Weymouth, a seaside resort where shells decorate house fronts, crabs wink from buckets included in readyto-go crabbing kits, and framed illustrations and photographs of fish on the walls of cafes remind you what’s inside your batter. The connection between food and life isn’t just a selling point here: the life is apparently in the business of doing the selling. PETA’s prawn costume wouldn’t be out of place within the festival barriers. It’s not hard to imagine it being used to market the plastic pots of prawn cocktail that people walk around the site eating like sorbets between larger plates and bottles.
The protestors are invoking the connection between two things – animal and flesh – that, convention would hold, we prefer to keep separate. Much of the language we use for meat enshrines these separations: pork not pig, beef not cow, even that neatly consolidated neologism “seafood”, asserting its own palatable ontology. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss mapped a whole system of binary opposition onto the foundational categories of raw and cooked. His analysis suggests that all cultures are structured around such sensorially detected categories, which, distinguish the natural from the cultural. In his book The Raw and the Cooked, he describes a series of rituals, both enacted in real life and enshrined in myth, which safely mediate the divide: marriage ceremonies that “cook” a couple into a new whole; coming-of-age rites that transform a “raw” boy into a new man.
The music stage host a range of nautically inflected local acts over the weekend.
The accusation often levelled at meat eaters is that they are not just enforcing this division but altogether obscuring the first half of it. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams puts this in terms of the “absent referent”. She proposes that meat’s “absent referent” is the living animal that produced it but is effectively disappeared in order to make meat-eating tolerable. All this is argued in analogy with the negation of sentient life involved in violence towards women. In meat production and in sexual violence, Adams writes, “our attention is continuously framed so that the absent referents – women, animals – do not appear”. Accordingly: “meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there – patriarchal control of animals and of language.”
Adams wrote in the thick of early-1990s US consumer culture. In many settings, her ideas remain plainly pertinent – in all those shops, restaurants, and virtual spaces like recipe websites that neutralise meat into a sourceless commodity. But an environment like the Seafood Festival complicates the notion of absence.
The two-tined chip fork is the traditional but not quite adequate implement for tackling a box of fish and chips by the sea.
In a 1995 report on meat-eating from Texas, South African novelist J.M. Coetzee observes how supermarkets have evolved from the anonymising aesthetics of their early days, where food was sold as “pure commodity: germless, odourless, coming from nowhere”, toward a “spectacle of origins”: fruit and vegetables tumble out of crates, labelled by hand, made to look “rough, homely, mock-rustic”. In the vein of the absent referent, Coetzee can’t imagine the same approach being applied to meat in Euro-American supermarkets, which seem so attached to the euphemistic language of chops and cuts and products. But a spectacle of origins seems the perfect way of describing the settings created around the flesh on sale at the Dorset Seafood Festival.
Some instances of this spectacle feel mediated and complex: those smiling cartoon sea creatures, which remind me of Sianne Ngai’s reading of cuteness as an aesthetic that is edible or invites eating: “the aggressive desire to master and overpower the cute object that the cute object itself appears to elicit.” The perfected example of this particular “spectacle of origins” might be the Marks & Spencer sweets Percy Pigs, those happy little pig faces once made of pork gelatine, which, in a Prospect essay, Mark Townsend memorably describes as “the sweet that wants to be eaten”.
Apart from the cute, fishy illustrations, the spectacle of origins here is more directly referential: blackboards listing the provenance of fishes and bivalves, the use of nets and lobster pots as props, rousing sounds of sea shanties over the PA, and, of course, the undismembered and often still-living forms of the animals themselves. All immediate signs suggest the referent is present.
Once used to thicken stews, the oyster now cannot be touched for its status as gastronomic luxury, indulgence, and enigma. The theatre of their shucking is still the best show at the festival.
Maybe seafood has always been more complicated. Presumably deriving from a necessity for freshness, the raw and the cooked are often closer, even frictional categories when it comes to fish, cephalopods, crustaceans, and their company. There are not many creatures commonly eaten alive the way oysters are. Their conversion from “raw” to nominally “cooked” is a matter of no more than the brief, vital ritual of shucking, loosening, and dressing – a ritual that provides the weekend on Weymouth pier with its clattering heartbeat. There are the mussels and cockles sold and cooked alive, among whom a lifelessly gaping shell is a warning sign not to eat. There are the sea urchins you can buy snipped open with scissors at the docks and scoop clean of their orange reproductive organs with a plastic spoon.
Then there are those lobsters. Plunging the live, ungainly animals into boiling water is a task that reappears in films and literature as an ideally loaded dramatic scenario bringing together the atavistic and domestic. In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, cooking a lobster in a boxy New York apartment nicely stages Alvy Singer’s nervous inadequacies in front of Annie, in a scene faintly touched by the surreal (perhaps inherited from the lobster Dalí placed on a rotary-dial telephone). There’s the subtler use of lobster cooking in Joanna Hogg’s film Archipelago. Rose, a cook hired by an affluent British family holidaying in the Scilly Isles, does the job while Edward, the recently graduated son of the family, hangs around chatting earnestly with her, as he’s developed a habit of doing. There is flirtatious energy, from Edward rather than Rose, that is charged by the stark, transgressive act of killing-cooking it surrounds. Moreover, there’s a coincident heightening of the social boundaries that are being clumsily reinforced by Edward while he thinks he’s dismantling them.
At the heart of all of these scenes is the simple, elemental strangeness of what lobster preparation entails. Samuel Beckett’s short story “Dante and the Lobster”, from his first book More Pricks Than Kicks published in 1934, stages this in a vital, compact form. It begins with its protagonist, an obnoxious student called Belacqua, stuck on a passage in Dante’s Paradiso. Disgruntled, he gives up, puts down his book, and gets on with his day’s tasks: preparing an elaborate and revolting lunch; picking up a lobster from the fishmonger; attending his Italian lesson; and visiting his aunt to eat the lobster. The second half of the story, following the visit to the fishmonger, is deliciously tense with dramatic irony: Belacqua is towing his dinner around town unaware that it is still alive. It waits in the hall outside his Italian lesson in the brown paper bag in which he picked it up, attracting the attention of a cat. (The Italian teacher’s name, Ottolenghi, gives the story some further, serendipitous culinary resonance.) Belacqua is none the wiser until the lobster is finally unwrapped on the counter of his aunt’s kitchen, “shudder[ing]”. “My God,” he whines, “it’s alive, what’ll we do?”
It’s been made clear that Belacqua is especially sensitive to the categorisation of the raw and the cooked. When he makes his lunch, he cuts two slices of bread, stopping to appreciate for a moment how they are “spongy and warm, alive” before setting about grilling them slowly and surely until they are “black through and through … done to a dead end”. Even bread must for Belacqua be safely transferred from alive to dead. Between these slices of incinerated bread goes mustard, pepper and the most rancid gorgonzola he can find in Dublin. (For Lévi-Strauss, the rotten resembles the cooked in that it has gone through its own, natural journey away from the raw; it provides the third point on his “culinary triangle” for analysing cooking methods.) Belacqua’s meal is the antithesis of aliveness: a compounding of ash, decay and corrosion. He relishes “the anguish of pungency, the pang of spices, as each mouthful died, scorching his palate, bringing tears”.
It’s no surprise then that he’s dismayed at the shuddering, irresolute lobster. His aunt is sanguine and “simply [has] to laugh” at Belacqua’s melodramatic reaction. But Beckett leaves us uncertain as to who is the more reasonable here: Belacqua, with his squeamish sentimentality at the lobster’s fate (he is moved to quote some Keats: “Take into the air my quiet breath”), or his dispassionate aunt, who is preparing summarily to “boil the beast”? Put differently: does the lobster deserve pity? Pertinently enough, Belacqua’s Italian lesson was on one of the passages of Dante concerned with the contradictory condition of feeling pity for those consigned to hell. “Well,” Belacqua thinks in the story’s last moments, hoping to brush these dilemmas away, “it’s a quick death, God help us all.” But the story’s narrator gets the last, hair-raising word: “It is not.”
Weymouth esplanade offers a range of attractions, including fortune tellers, donkey rides, a modest helter-skelter, and a dome of sculptures made from Weymouth sand, which, a sign boasts, is so fine as to be nearly classified as silt.
The population of Weymouth has been growing steadily since the 1970s. As the preponderance of mobility scooters attests, an above-average proportion is aged 60 to 84.
In an article on the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival, David Foster Wallace makes an exhaustive attempt to clarify the murky mystery of that not-quick death. He is moved by the prospect of the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and the hundreds of people eating its spoils, to wonder if lobster cooking is exceptional in some way, either more acceptable or more perverse than the standard procedures entailed in meat-eating. Wallace rakes through the known neurological science and the cultural history, but ultimately struggles to makes sense out of something irreducibly strange. Surveying the lobsters meeting their fates he observes, “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?” After cataloguing the various methods of “preparing” them and their merits and associations, he ends on a note of uncertainty and negation much like Beckett’s: “Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot.” What can we say for sure about what happens to the lobster beyond “it is not”?
Perhaps it is only the speed with which an oyster leaves its shell and disappears inside of us which keeps us from recognising the similar intensity of its conversion of raw to cooked. The duration of lobster cooking forces a rare, sustained encounter with the reforming of social categories, the inversion of binaries, the smelting of cultural life. In M.F.K. Fisher’s 1941 book, Consider the Oyster, an image emerges of the process of eating raw oysters as a kind of exhilarating memento mori: “Its chilly, delicate grey body slips … alive down a red throat, and it is done.” The strangeness and perhaps fear is all part and parcel of what, for Fisher, is a supreme gastronomic experience: “having wasted too many years in shuddering at oysters, I like them. I thoroughly like them, so that I am willing to forgo comfort and at times even safety to savour their strange cold succulence.” The oyster’s fast, delicious passage from life to death is a reminder of our deaths, our own rawness. Notice the “shudder” once produced by oysters in Fisher echoing the “shudder” of Belacqua’s lobster on the kitchen counter: two inarticulate, instinctive responses from unsocialised animals. This is all a lot to take. As Foster Wallace notes: “some cooks take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait till the whole process is over”.
So if I say there’s something ritualistic about the atmosphere at the Dorset Seafood Festival, I’m not talking about bloodlust, or even about the rolling repetitions that shape the days people spend there, but about the proximity of life and death, beast and meat, wildness and extreme cultural contrivance. Within the confines of a well-organised, sponsored, exclusive event, we are at once at our most animalistic – creatures eating creatures, reminded obliquely of death – and our most abstracted into culture – surrounded by specialised knives, fine wines, rarefied cuisines and a thousand unspoken etiquettes and norms. Seeing the two halves at once, we are also liable to become aware of the vital, volatile ways in which we codify or “cook” the world. The crunch of exoskeletons and slurp of juices are reminders of our own elemental, natural lives, only the other side of these gestures and conventions. In the dizzying moment where the two sides seem so close, the thrill of that knowledge can be indistinguishable from terror, and revulsion hard to tell from delirious appetite. ◉