THE OYSTER ABORTION, REDEUX: ANOTHER TAKE ON THE MATTER

This concludes my musings about disgusting, phlegm-like animals people put into their mouths.

"He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stoops in front of an open air display of fish on a steeply raked slab of marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here; such abundance from the emptying seas. On the floor by the doorway piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of warlike body parts, there is discernable movement. On their pincers they’re wearing funerarial black bands. It’s fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice, otherwise there’d be howling from those crates. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away towards the bloodless white flesh and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and the deep sea fish arranged in handy, overlapping steaks of innocent pink like cardboard pages of a baby’s first book.

"Naturally Perowne the fly fisher has seen the recent literature. Scores of polymodal nosesceptor sites just like ours in the head and neck of rainbow trout. It was once convenient to think Biblically, to believe that we’re surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them and though he’d never drop a lobster into boiling water he’s prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human domination, is to be selective in your mercies."

---Ian McEwan
“Saturday”