Dear Lobster, I Hardly Knew Ye

Francis Lam eases his guilt about chowing down on a certain tasty crustacean by creating an unlikely enemy on his dinner plate, writing an open-ended letter to “Lobster” in Gourmet. He's not sorry for chowing down, "for your meat was like butter and nuts," but his conscience is uneasy: “I had to pretend you had done something awful,” Lam writes, “maybe to my mother.”

But enmity waned "as I plucked off your legs one by one and sucked on them for juice, as I dug with the curved tip of your claw to find the hidden tiny pockets of meat in your carapace (you didn’t mean to hide them from me, did you?), I found that what I was doing was patient, satisfied, loving. You might not have realized it, but that’s what it was. Loving." (More seafood stories.)