Consider the Lobster

The genres of writing that I noticed while reading the article was that Foster Wallace mainly uses a personal essay format. He tells of his travel to the lobster festival and the event of going to the festival is tied to a larger idea of considering the questionable way of cooking a lobster.

What is so important about the footnotes in this article is that they are things that a person that isn't from midcoast or someone unfamiliar with lobsters(other than knowing it's something people eat) would not understand. An example of this is when calls lobsters "giant sea insects" and explains in footnote #3 that people from the midcoast actually call lobsters "bugs." I personally had never heard a lobster get called a bug so I found the footnote useful.

The article shifts points from the talking about how big the lobster festival is in Maine's midcoast as a tourist event and to the people living there to talking about how there are people out there that do not like how lobsters are cooked alive. The title of the article is "Consider the Lobster" and it makes sense as, like he points out, lobsters are probably feeling pain when they are boiled alive. He even gives an example of how some cooks do not stay in the same room as a cooking lobster, instead bringing a timer with them to another room so they do not have to witness the bugs struggle.