At the outset of his essay "On Pain," the philosopher Ernst Junger offers a passage from a 19th-century German cookbook: "Of all animals that serve as nourishment to man," it reads, "lobster must suffer the most torturous death, for it is set in cold water on a hot flame." Whether or not lobsters suffer - a crustaceous quandary that once left David Foster Wallace ambivalent, even after devouring the scientific literature - it is difficult to see their wriggling as a sign of jubilation. But all too rarely does the fact of their death grab our attention. Rather, it is the spectacle of pain amid the roiling water that sears itself into our minds.