Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
Maybe that’s part of the urban myth. But when you cook a lobster professionally you kill it seconds before you cook it. In my experience.
It’s why you want a good, clean kill when hunting. If it’s panicked and dies slowly all that acid builds up. But the biology of arthropods is really different.
All I know is that happy animals taste better, and I’ve been switched off before - touched my head to an electric fence, woke up some time later in the mud - and if that’s what cutting their brains apart does then it’s a good way to go
In theory the water is so hot they die instantly.
…in practice sometimes it isn’t, or the pot is too small and the lobsters drop the temperature. That actually happened to me with a pot of Dungeness crabs (years before I was a cook). It was pretty horrible.
My thinking is that this is just an issue for amateurs at home. Seems like public education would work better than a law…but I’m not in the UK. Maybe restaurants in the UK boil them alive more often or something.
Makes sense that it’s amateurs in the home. The pot is probably not nearly as big, and they’re more likely to be in a rush and not wait for a really hot boil.