![]() |
PHOTOGRAPH FROM PIEPENBURG / LAIF / REDUX |
Ben Lerner’s new novel, “10:04,” opens with a meditation on a decadent and expensive lunch in Chelsea, prominently featuring baby octopus. The narrator is supposed to be celebrating the six-figure sale of his book, but instead he focuses on the absurdity of the meal: “the impossibly tender things” had been “literally massaged to death.” He wonders about eating “an animal that decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play.” Afterward, he and his agent walk out onto the High Line to watch the traffic on Tenth Avenue, and he experiences an empathic response to the once sentient octopuses now curdling within him:
I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely.
Octopus intelligence is well documented: they have been known to open jars, guard their unhatched eggs for months or even years, and demonstrate personalities. Most famously, they can blast a cloud of ink to throw off predators, but even more impressive is the masterfully complex camouflage employed by several members of Cephalopoda (a class that also includes squid and cuttlefish). Their curious behaviors are also culturally familiar. Ringo Starr traces the origins of his song “Octopus’s Garden” to an anecdote that a sea captain once told him in Sardinia, about the habit octopuses have of adorning their homes with rocks and detritus. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, soccer fans across the world became enamored of Paul the Octopus (also known as Pulpo Paul), who correctly “predicted” the outcomes of all seven of Germany’s matches by choosing a box that, in addition to containing food, had the flag of the winning country on it. The chef José Andrés pledged to take octopus off his menus if Paul’s prediction about the semifinal between Spain and Germany came true. It did, and some Germans responded by calling for his arms. (Paul died that October, of apparently natural causes.)
Pulpo Paul the Octopus (January 26th, 2008 – October 26, 2010) R.I.P. |
Paul the Octopus's Memorial Statue |
It takes a whole lot of work to make an octopus palatable, but humans around the globe, particularly in the Mediterranean and in East Asia, have been doing it for centuries. Most preparations involve tenderizing the meat—which is quite lean—through some combination of massage, blanching, braising, and blunt force. According to Harold McGee, salting is essential. The French chef Éric Ripert tenderized an octopus on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by giving it a few good whacks on a cutting board, echoing the stereotypical Greek fisherman bashing it to death on the rocky shores of the Aegean. The perfectionistic sushi chef Jiro Ono requires that his octopus be massaged for forty to fifty minutes. These days, however, most octopus bought wholesale and served in restaurants comes frozen, and already tenderized, after being “tumbled” with sea salt and ice, its eight legs neatly tucked under it like the petals of a flower.
One way of bypassing the prep work, of course, is to eat the thing while it’s still alive. This is a practice with its own morally dubious thrill. (I have eaten live shrimp and ants, and I wonder if the frisson I felt wasn’t some kind of dormant predator instinct.) Mostly, though, it feels like a stunt. In Korea, the dish has a name—san nak ji—and in Flushing, Queens, there is a Korean restaurant that serves it, along with a potful of other live sea creatures, which are quickly simmered to their demise. Traditional san nak ji has the octopus cut into wriggling pieces. In a terrifying scene from the South Korean cult film “Old Boy,” however, it is served and eaten whole. Multiple live specimens were used in the filming of the scene, and the actor, Choi Min-sik, a Buddhist, said a prayer for each one. (The YouTube user who posted the clip writes, “I think I would try it but I dont think its kosher.” He’s right—lacking both fins and scales, it is not.)
![]() |
Octopus w/ lemon and garlic |
According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, catches of O. vulgaris, the common octopus, are down about sixty per cent from their record high in the mid nineteen-seventies. But octopus, squid, and cuttlefish remain a delicacy of modern cuisine—think grilled-octopus salads and squid-ink pastas. I wondered whether word of cephalopod intelligence had reached the food world, so I asked a few chefs if they had any misgivings about serving the animals at their restaurants. For Ashleigh Parsons and Ari Taymor, of Alma, in Los Angeles, the question is not what we eat but where the food is coming from and how it is treated. “The only octopus Ari can get is frozen and shipped from Japan,” Parsons told me in an e-mail. For them, sustainability is paramount, and can trump the cachet of an ingredient.
Ignacio Mattos, the chef at Estela (and formerly at Isa, where he served a whole squid), said that he recently put cuttlefish on the menu, and recalled telling his staff about how smart the creatures are. “I remember seeing this Discovery Channel documentary about them and it really blew my mind,” he wrote to me. Mattos confessed that he loved their elegant texture and taste, but added, “I might in a way have started consciously avoiding using them somehow.” Dave Pasternack, chef and co-founder of the upscale midtown seafood restaurant Esca, spoke with me last week during dinner service from a wall-mounted phone right behind his station in the kitchen. As he called out orders for sole and scampi, he assured me that he had never heard tales of octopus intelligence. “The smarter they are, the more you’d want to eat them, right?” he suggested. (I’ve always been suspicious of people who eat brains.) He insisted that there was an art to cooking octopus correctly. His includes a Neapolitan trick: a wine cork in the cooking liquid. Éric Ripert and Harold McGee dismiss this step as mere legend—to which Pasternack gleefully responds, “Éric Ripert is full of shit!”
Raise your hand if you're smart... |
Like many animals, the octopus is occasionally cannibalistic—does that make it any more or less O.K. to eat? And if we could grow octopus meat in a lab, would it still be palatable? Last year, the Times Magazine ran a story about Dylan Mayer, a teen-ager who legally wrestled, caught, and ate a giant Pacific octopus off the coast of Seattle, causing an uproar. “Mayer’s real offense,” the piece concludes, “may have been forcing a community to realize that just because they’ve embraced local fare doesn’t mean they’re necessarily ready to see, in gory detail, it slaughtered or hunted or punched out and dragged from the bay.” In my opinion, Mayer is on solid footing—he swam for his dinner. It’s the rest of us, outsourcing death to the supply chain, who have something to think about. It is impossible for us to fully know the inner lives of octopuses, but the more we continue to study them and other forms of life, the closer we can come to a working definition of “intelligence.” The real quandary here is, when we find them, what if aliens turn out to be delicious? — Sylvia Killingsworth | The New Yorker
No comments:
Post a Comment
"Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart."