In my article in Boston magazine on the "lobster war" -- about the ways that animal-rights activists and Whole Foods executives are putting live lobster on trial -- I describe how lobster processing, distribution, and retail sale will be revolutionized by technology.

To recap: in the name of treating lobsters humanely, Whole Foods has discontinued the sale of live lobsters. Instead, the gourmet food chain will sell processed lobster meat. That, of course, begs the question: what technology will be used to kill and process these lobsters behind the scenes? Will it be humane?

Here are the new death machines.

First, the CrustaStun.

It was designed and built in the UK in response to tightening animal-welfare laws intended to protect crustaceans from torture.

It zaps the lobsters with a jolt of electricity, rendering their nervous systems dysfunctional prior to cooking.

There is a "continuous flow" model, with a conveyor belt, to be used for industrial applications. There is also a small, individualized lobster killer for zapping one animal at a time. Got space on your kitchen counter, between the blender and coffee maker?

The CrustaStun has already received some press in a few newspapers and on a few websites. As gruesome as it sounds, the CrustaStun has received a humane stamp of approval.

But the lobsters processed for Whole Foods will not have the luxury of electrocution.

In fact, no one seems to have noticed the much bigger machine that has already started revolutionizing lobster processing -- the Avure HPP. Yet it is this extraordinary piece of technology that will be used to provide lobster meat for Whole Foods.

These enormous devices, built by Avure Technologies, are called hydrostatic pressure processing (HPP) systems. They come in several models. The entrepreneur mentioned in my article, John Hathaway of Shucks Maine Lobster, is the proud owner of the Avure 215L -- which weighs 80,000 pounds and is 16 feet tall.

The HPP technology was initially developed by the U.S. Army to make better-tasting MREs ("meals ready to eat") for the troops. The science of it is relatively simple. If a piece of food is immersed in water, and the water is then squeezed to high enough pressure, pathogens and bacteria will be neutralized, but the food will be otherwise unaffected.

You press the start button on an Avure machine. Powerful pumps whir, and inside a narrow tube in the center of the machine, the water pressure is compressed to several times the pressure found in the deepest trenches in the ocean. The microscopic bugs in your meal all die, giving the food extended shelf life, and reducing the need for artificial preservatives.

These machines have been in use for a while already. If you've ever eaten Avoclasic guacamole or Hormel Natural Choice deli meats, you've eaten HPP food. HPP machines turn out to be handy for shucking shellfish, too -- the pressure causes the meat to separate from the shell.

What's new is using these machines to process live lobsters. The animals are locked inside the tube, alive, and the pumps whir and the water pressure is compressed around the lobsters to three times the deepest trenches in the ocean. The lobsters die, of course -- just think what the pressure on your ears is like when you dive a few feet underwater.

At the same time, all the muscle flesh inside the lobsters conveniently separates from the shell. For the first time in human history, people have finally devised way to extract the meat of a lobster without cooking it.

And that's what this Whole Foods thing is about. As I write in the Boston magazine article:

In 2005, the Maine Lobster Promotional Council commissioned a survey on people's attitudes toward lobster. Only 15 percent of Americans, mostly in the Northeast, qualified as 'traditionalists' who wanted their lobsters alive. An equally small number, just 13 percent, objected to the retail sale of live lobsters for reasons of cruelty. For Whole Foods, the smart business decision is to target the silent majority -- the 50 percent or so of Americans who would love to buy fresh lobster if only it were easier to prepare.

For Whole Foods, switching to processed, packaged lobster meat will earn them far more money than live lobsters ever did. At the same time, they are presenting it as an ethical choice, which will earn them maximim moral points.

In the meantime, it is this 40-ton U.S.-military-derived crushing machine the company will be relying on, in the name of treating lobsters humanely. To replace its live lobsters, Whole Foods has signed a deal with Clearwater Seafoods of Canada to sell shucked raw frozen lobster, processed using an Avure 687L (pictured above).

According to Avure, the water inside the machine can take from 30 to 45 seconds to reach maximum pressure, and it's unclear how long the animals endure inside -- while they undergo pressurization -- before they die. A spokesperson for Whole Foods told me this:

Whole Foods Market is currently working with a team that specializes in the physiological and welfare aspects of humane slaughter to have this machine evaluated and certified. Pilot studies with this machine suggest that the lobster is killed within seconds (rather than up to several minutes when using the traditional boiling-water cooking method). It is important to us that we ensure this is the case in order to remain consistent with our requirements for humane slaughter that we have established for all of the other species we sell.

It will be interesting to see if "seconds" turns out to be 30 seconds or three seconds. If it's more like 30 seconds, then I suspect that the only way to guarantee that lobsters are killed in a humane fashion for HPP processing would be to use both machines -- run the animals through the CrustaStun first, then load them into the Avure HPP.

When the lobsters come out of the Avure machine after a minute or two, the result is arresting. Every piece of meat can easily be extracted from the shell, raw and fully intact, including the leg muscles. After shucking, here is what the lobster looks like:


The company in Maine I referred to above, Shucks Maine Lobster, even advertises the rather extraordinary possibility of eating "lobster spaghetti" -- which is to say, a heap of lobster leg flesh. Photo below.

My method of killing lobsters with a kitchen knife suddenly seems rather quaint, doesn't it?

Welcome to the future.

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Comments (2)

- I'm a keen lobster hunter in Florida, and I'm afraid I just grip the lobster firmly in one hand, while twisting the tail off with another. I usually do this at the dock, the minute I get off the boat. (I feel marginally guilty about then reaming the tail with a piece of antenna to remove the vein, but I've gotten over the involuntary twitching). One time after a dive, an interested novice diver was watching the operation, and asked "Does it hurt?" I replied, "Not me!" In any case, I lose patience very quickly with all this "humane killing" mularky. All you need to do is watch animals eat each other in the wild to see how it's supposed to be done!

- We experimented with the HPP equipment to process crab meat but found that while the recovery of meat from the shell was excellent the process completely changed the texture and taste of the crab. The texture was rubbery and the flavor was altered to an inferior level compared to what we are used to. We also tried the machine on a Maine lobster with the same result, rubbery and less flavorful. The upside was that recovery was about one third better than hand picking.

John Wendt
Seatech corporation

"When Whole Foods halted live-lobster sales last week, it was a sign of just how hot the debate over treatment of this New England icon has become. In July's Boston magazine, Trevor Corson reports from behind the lines of the growing 'lobster war.'"

Get my take on the Whole Foods ban on live lobster. Click here to read the article.

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So now that Whole Foods Market has banned live lobster, what are our options? The animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) recommends that we eat "Mock Lobster." This is a lobster made of soybeans.


What the heck, I thought. I'll try one. I went online to visit May Wah Vegetarian Healthy Food, Inc., the retailer in Chinatown in New York City listed on PeTA's "Lobster Liberation" website.

There is a long tradition of Chinese "mock meats" for Buddhists. Years ago in Hong Kong, I'd eaten at a Buddhist restaurant that served imitation meat that was quite delicious. So I was looking forward to testing PeTA's claim that the mock lobster sold by May Wah tasted "just like the real thing."

When the lobster arrived, still frozen and packed in styrofoam, the label said in Chinese: "Ham Giant Dragon Shrimp." That sounded like the sort of monster that might battle Godzilla.

Having studied Chinese some years ago, I knew that "dragon shrimp" was the word for lobster in Chinese, but why was it called a "ham" lobster? I was stumped.

I shot off a query about this "ham" word to a friend of mine, a gastronome who also has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies. (I will let you know what I find out.) In the meantime, to celebrate my confusion, I decided to name the lobster Ham.

As it happened, I had been invited to a weekend barbecue -- bring your own meat for the grill -- so I took Ham along. Everyone was very intrigued when I pulled Ham out and showed him around. A few people played with Ham.

Then we laid Ham on the grill.

Despite the searing heat, Ham didn't scream. He didn't writhe in pain, or snap his tail or scratch his legs on the grill in agony. He just sat there. We watched for a while, and then it got kind of boring and we went back to our conversations.

After a while I took Ham off the grill. He still looked fine.

Now the hard part. I had to cut him to pieces with a big kitchen knife. I have to tell you, I felt awful slicing Ham. In our short time together, we had bonded.

So how did Ham taste?

Ham, I love you, but you tasted terrible. I mean, not spit-your-food-out terrible, but just . . . very lackluster. After all that, I just would have liked even the tiniest bit of lobster-like flavor.

Having conclusively repudiated PeTA's claim that mock lobster tasted "just like the real thing," I felt forlorn. It seemed unfair that vegetarians and animal-rights activists wouldn't be able to enjoy lobster just like the rest of us.

So imagine my delight when I discovered that a book group populated by vegetarians had read THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS and celebrated with a lobster constructed of vegetables! "Although we were intimidated for a while," says the meeting's report about the veggie lobster, "we eventually tore him limb from limb."

If that still sounds too gory for you, I highly recommend May Wah's shredded mock chicken. It makes a delicious stir-fry. And it looks nothing like a chicken.

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"Unceremoniously, Whole Foods Markets, the largest natural-foods chain in the world, pulled its lobsters from their tanks last week and boiled them all. For the influential grocer, it was the final lobsterbake," writes Patrik Jonsson, masterfully, in an article in today's Christian Science Monitor.

Who ate them all? He doesn't say.

Jonsson goes on to quote me:

"This is the end of an era, because the lobster is pretty much the last significant animal that [individuals] still have to kill [themselves] before [they] eat it," says Trevor Corson, author of THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS. . . . "I have a serious problem with anyone who's ever had a hamburger complaining about lobsters," Mr. Corson says. "The scientists who study lobsters all take them home and eat them."

What's more, Corson says, Whole Foods is failing to capitalize on one of its missions: connecting consumers to producers. Several Maine lobstermen are now printing their websites on lobsters' claw bands, so that buyers can go online and read a bio of the fisherman who caught their dinner. Such an opportunity for fisherman-consumer bonding is now lost by a chain that purports to value that connection, says Corson. "Whatever moral benefit we get from not having to deal with lobsters in our kitchens, we lose a larger awareness of where our food comes from," he says.

You can learn more about the web-based lobster tracking program I was referring to at Lobster Tales.org. Individual items of seafood, especially fish, are notoriously difficult to track from sea to plate; for example, scientific tests conducted last year by the New York Times revealed that much of the salmon sold as "wild" in New York City was actually farmed. This lobster tracking program is a rare and welcome exception.

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