Summarize the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace .

You will be asked to provide support and explanation by integrating examples from both readings (“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan), as well as your observations, experiences, or other sources. Begin with a thoughtful statement about the topic/essay question you are answering or ask a thoughtful question.Briefly summarize Wallace’s position on the topic/essay question (1-2 sentences), and Michael Pollan’s position on the topic/essay question (1-2 sentences). In “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace discusses/shows/states ____. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan believes/states/argues ____.Then indicate your thesis: your position. (I believe _____)-Paragraph 2: First reason to support your position.Use an example from “Consider the Lobster” or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Provide enough summary of the text so that your example makes sense. Include one direct quote. Explain what the quote means (in other words/by this the author means).Respond to the author in some way that shows what you think.-Paragraph 3: Second reason to support your position.Use an example from the text you have not yet discussed. Provide enough summary of the text so that your example makes sense. Include one direct quote. Explain what the quote means (in other words/by this the author means). Respond to the author in some way that shows what you think.-Paragraph 4: Third reason to support your position. (Your third reason should be based on your personal experience or observations, or something that you read or saw in the media.)Use an example in which you tell a detailed story about your experience, or that of someone you know, or something you have seen or read about.End this paragraph by connecting your detailed story to something that either Wallace or Pollan has written. (As Pollan/Wallace believes/states/claims _____. Based on my experience/observations, I have found ______).-Paragraph 5: The Omnivore’s Dilemma(excerpt from “The Anxiety of Eating” & “The Ethics of Eating Animals”)In biology, “atavism” is an ancestral trait that reappears after having been lostMichael PollanAn omnivore is a person or animal thatthat can eat both animals and plants as food“cornucopia” = abundance = abundance​One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.) Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivore’s dilemma have lost their sharpness here — or simplyfailed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.Terms and choices of the supermarket“boon”– something helpful and beneficial​And so we find ourselves where we do, confronting in the supermarket or at the dinner table the dilemmas of omnivorousness, some of them ancient and others never before imagined. The organic apple or the conventional? And if the organic, the local one or the imported? The wild fish or the farmed? The trans fats or the butter or the “not butter”? Shall I be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or a vegan? Like the hunter-gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility, we pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of our senses, scrutinize the label, scratching our heads over the meaning of phrases like “heart healthy,” “no trans fats,” “cage-free,” or “range-fed.” What is “natural grill flavor” or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all this stuff, anyway, and where in the world did it come from?​[…]​Being an omnivore occupying a cognitive niche in nature is both a boon and a challenge, a source of tremendous power as well as anxiety. Omnivory is what allowed humans to adapt to a great many environments all over the planet, and to survive in them even after our favored foods were driven to extinction, whether by accident or because of our own too-great success in overcoming other species’ defenses. After the mastodon there would be the bison and then the cow; after the sturgeon, the salmon, and then, perhaps, some novel mycoprotein like “quorn.”“neophil” – one who enjoys new things“neophobia” – fear of anything new​Being a generalist offers us deep satisfactions, too, enjoyments that flow equally from the omnivore’s innate neophilia — the pleasure of variety — and neophobia — the comfort of the familiar. What began as a set of simple sensory responses to food (sweet, bitter, disgusting) we’ve elaborated into more complicated canons of taste that afford us aesthetic pleasures undreamed of by the koala or cow. Since “everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite,” [Jean Anthelme] Brillat-Savarin writes, “the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man,” making “man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.” Taste in this more cultivated sense brings people together, not only in small groups at the table but as communities. For a community’s food preferences — the strikingly short list of foods and preparations it regards as good to eat and think — represent one of the strongest social glues we have. Historically, national cuisines have been remarkably stable, and resistant to change, which is why the immigrant’s refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.Some rules have cultural reasons.​Yet the surfeit of choice that confronts the omnivore brings stresses and anxieties also undreamed of by the cow or the koala, for whom the distinction between The Good Things to Eat and the Bad is second nature. And while our senses can help us draw the first rough distinctions between good and bad foods, we humans have to rely on culture to remember and keep it all straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, manners, and culinary traditions, covering everything from the proper size of portions to the order in which foods should be consumed to the kinds of animals it is and is not okay to eat. Anthropologists argue over whether all these rules make biological sense — some, like the kosher rules, are probably designed more to enforce group identity than to protect health. But certainly a great many of our food rules do make biological sense, and they keep each of us from having to confront the omnivore’s dilemma every time we visit the supermarket or sit down to eat.Health reasons​The set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties. The meso- American practice of cooking corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein, rendering the bean indigestible; unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable, leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored.“prodigious” — remarkably great in extent, size, or degree​[….]Eating a steak & reading book by philosopher of animal rights“astounding” = impressive​Guided by no natural instinct, the prodigious and open-ended human appetite is liable to get us into all sorts of trouble well beyond the stomachache. For if nature is silent what’s to stop the human omnivore from eating anything — including, most alarmingly, other human omnivores? A potential for savagery lurks in a creature capable of eating anything. If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have been living in groups.​[….]​The first time I opened Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. . . It had been a long time since this particular omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat . . . The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat. That’s not because slaughter is necessarily inhumane, but because most of us would simply rather not be reminded of exactly what meat is or what it takes to bring it to our plates. My steak dinner, eaten in the company of the world’s leading philosopher of animal rights, represented my somewhat tortured attempt to mark the occasion, and to try — a bit belatedly, I know — to see if I could defend what I had done already and what I was about to do.For the most part, cultures we grew up told us that animal eating is healthy and good for our consciousnessFamous vegetarians​Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it. Vegetarianism is more popular than it has ever been, and animal rights, the fringiest of fringe movements until just a few years ago, is rapidly finding its way into the cultural mainstream. I’m not completely sure why this should be happening now, given that humans have been eating animals for tens of thousands of years without much ethical heartburn. Certainly there have been dissenters over the years — Ovid, St. Francis, Tolstoy, and Gandhi come to mind. But the general consensus has always been that humans were indeed omnivores and, whatever spiritual or moral dilemmas the killing and eating of animals posed, our various cultural traditions (everything from the rituals governing slaughter to saying grace before the meal) resolved them for us well enough. For the most part, our culture has been telling us for millennia that animals were both good to eat and good to think.Today doctors are saying that eating meat is unhealthy, and philosophers are saying that eating meat is unethical.​In recent years medical researchers have raised questions about the good to eat part, while philosophers like Singer and organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have given us new reasons to doubt meat is good to think — that is, good for our souls or our moral self-regard. Hunting is in particularly bad odor these days, even among people who still eat meat; apparently it’s the fact of killing that these people most object to (as if steak should be gotten any other way), or perhaps it’s the taking pleasure in killing an animal that is the trouble. It may be that as a civilization we’re groping toward a higher plane of consciousness. It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating animals — like out former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings — can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame.As the traditions that allowed us to eat meat are losing their hold on our thinking, we follow the fashion and choose vegetarianism.​That at least is the animal philosophers’ wager. But it could also be that the cultural norms and rituals that used to allow people to eat meat without agonizing about it have broken down for other reasons. Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they’re more easily buffeted by the force of a strong idea or the breeze of fashion. Buffeted = beaten down“schizoid” – contradictoryScientists are proving that animals are more capable of thinking and displaying emotions than we ever thought.​Whatever the cause, the effect is an unusual amount of cultural confusion on the subject of animals. For at the same time as many of us seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to other species, in our factory farms we’re inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one science is dismantling out claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language, and even possibly self-consciousness are not, as we used to think, the exclusive properties of Homo sapiens. And yet, most of the animals we eat lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig — an animal easily as intelligent as a dog — that becomes the Christmas ham.​We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. (When was the last time you saw a butcher at work?) The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality; it is a space in which the Peter Singers and the Frank Perdues of the world fare equally well.Meaning of this last paragraph: years ago when we were a farming society, people were directly involved with breeding, raising, and slaughtering the animals they ate. This is no longer the case for most people.​A few years ago the English writer John Berger wrote an essay called “Why Look at Animals?” In which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals — and specifically the loss of eye contact — has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!). Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing; certainly looking away was not completely off the table. Which might explain how it was I found myself attempting to read Peter Singer in a steakhouse.Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (an excerpt). The Penguin Press. New York. 2006.​295-98 & 304-07.​1 of 4