Food Co-op Claws Past Whole Foods

By Henry Darger
ASSOCATED PRESS
Sunday, April 01, 2007

HANOVER, New Hampshire — Raising the stakes for the humane treatment of lobsters sold in grocery stores, New Hampshire’s Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society has stopped selling the tasty crustaceans live and instead now provides them to customers after administering “lobster lethal injections” of either lemon juice or melted butter.

“Unlike Maine, our state has only 17 miles of seacoast – so we have to get creative when it comes to selling the fresh seafood delicacy we know our socially conscious customers crave,” said Terry Applebee, general manager of the food co-op, the nation’s second largest. Appleby was referring to the recently announced plans by the Whole Foods chain to sell electrocuted lobsters at its new Portland, Maine store in an effort to treat the animals humanely.

“Lobster electrocution was a good idea, but the only thing it accomplishes is soothing the conscience of grocery shoppers,” said Applebee. “Our innovative approach to crustacean compassion also allows guilt-free lobster consumption at the same time it adds taste and value to this excellent local product. Who doesn’t eat their lobster with lemon juice or melted butter?”

Working with researchers at the Salmon P. Chase food innovation laboratory at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, the Co-op experimented with various methods of dispatching the lobsters without causing them pain or discomfort. “We tried various immersion techniques as well as a noose-like contraption,” said Professor Claude Homard of the Thayer School. “Our ‘eureka’ moment came when one of the guys from the seafood counter at the Co-op’s Lebanon store said he liked to smother his lobster in melted butter.”

At first, the research team treated the suggestion as a joke. But, to satisfy their curiousity, the inquired of anesthesiologists at the nearby Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Despite the strident opposition of the American Society of Anesthesiologists to lethal injections for humans on death row, the doctors observed the process in its experimental phase and advised that infusions of butter and/or lemon juice result in a quick and painless death to lobsters.

A local animal rights organization, Civil Rights for Animals and Plants, remains skeptical. “Lobsters deserve death with dignity, and we shouldn’t do to defenseless animals what we wouldn’t even do to a serial killer of people,” said Shelley Croydon, the group’s spokesperson. But, she added, “this is definitely an improvement over death by boiling or that awful lobster electric chair Whole Foods uses.”

The Co-op, which markets the innovative product as “Live Free or Die” lobsters in tribute to the New Hampshire state motto, reports that its latest effort at socially conscious marketing has proven wildly popular with customers. Some 500 lobsters a week are making the ultimate sacrifice, painlessly, at the co-op’s two supermarkets. The $62 million-a-year consumer-owned retailer even has an “Eighth Amendment Seafood Cookbook” in the works for publication this summer.

“Now our biggest problem is adequate supply, since we want our lobsters to come from the New Hampshire seacoast,” said Tony White, the co-op’s merchandising manager. “So we’re looking at investing in underwater lobster-farming facilities as a way of diversifying our business and meeting the growing retail demand.”

With such a tiny seacoast, New Hampshire has scant submerged real estate available for such purposes in territorial waters. According to White, the Co-op has been in merger discussions with the Clamshell Consortium, a fishermen’s cooperative that is one of New England’s major suppliers of farm-grown clams and mussels. Clamshell holds a longterm lease on 400 acres of prime aquaculture seabed off the coast of Seabrook, N.H. The state’s Department of Resources and Economic Development believes the site could accommodate up to 3,500 lobster traps without adversely affecting the mollusk farming there.

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