A few days ago Toad and I were faced with a moral dilemma that I still don't know if we resolved satisfactorily. While Toad was outside clearing snow from the drive and the car, a guy we had never met before, with two small children in his car, drove up and asked him if we wanted to buy some fresh mussels. Caught offguard, Toad failed to say "No, thanks", as I wish he would have done. Instead he told the guy, Daniel, that he would ask me and started toward the house. Daniel followed him inside, bag of mussels in hand. Now, I had never eaten a mussel up to that point and had no desire to do so, but I thought that Toad must want to try them since he brought the guy in the house. I fumbled around, unsure what to do in the situation. I felt somewhat committed to buying the mussels since the guy was right there with them, and yet I really didn't want them. Not only is the thought of eating mussels distasteful in more ways than one, killing them to do so seems morally wrong as I am certainly not dependent upon them for my survival and it was therefore unnecessary to kill them. My motto in life has always been live and let live, whenever possible. In addition, I knew that if we spent $10 dollars on that bag of mussels we would have an even harder time stretching our meager food budget through the remainder of the month. Toad, however, enjoys eating some foods that I do not, things such as liver and sardines and cretons, and I didn't want to prevent him from eating mussels just because I didn't want them. (Later Toad said that he had not eaten mussels before either, which surprised me considering the diversity of foods he claims to have eaten during his lifetime. The only food I have ever known him to dislike and refuse has been cantaloupe. Weird, huh?)
I'm fairly sure that it was obvious that I didn't want to buy them, as I kept asking Toad if he wanted to eat them (to which he replied "I don't know", most infuriatingly) and even told Daniel that I had never cooked them before and didn't know what to do with them. Undeterred by my reluctance, Daniel said that they are good boiled in beer for about five minutes, although they could also be cooked in water. Toad finally asked if we had enough money to pay for them and that was that. My pride welled within me and I felt compelled to say "Yes" so as not to appear as pitifully close to broke as we actually are. I handed over to Daniel a ten dollar bill, the only bill I had, in fact, and he handed over a good-sized bag of mussels, smiling and stating again that they were fresh. He left quickly, anxious to get back to his children, who had been honking the car horn throughout this exchange.
Toad and I looked at one another, and at the bag of live mussels, in dismay. Alright, we had purchased them--the deed was done--and now we had to do something with them. They appeared to have been cleaned and debearded, which caused us to think that returning them to the ocean was not an option. Their fate had been sealed: they were to die soon, to be food for the decomposers either directly or after being eaten by a go-between first. It would be morally wrong to *waste* them (as if all living flesh isn't eventually wasted by death) by not using them to provide nourishment to someone higher up in the food chain. Giving them away to a neighbor was an option but a poor one, we felt. We would look foolish for having bought them in the first place, with no desire to eat them and no experience with preparing them, and we would have squandered ten of our last few dollars. So that was out. They had to be cooked before anyone in our household could eat them, and once cooked there was no good reason why they shouldn't be consumed by Toad and me, rather than by Dudley, Sadie, the cats or anyone else here. We should get our money's worth and, in the process, meet the challenge of killing and cooking these doomed creatures. Nevermind that my stomach turned at the thought of eating them, in the same way it turns at the thought of eating other technically edible invertebrates such as worms and insect larvae. Just as surely as their fate was to die, my fate was to kill and consume them. I had, after all, made the decision to buy them, even if against my better judgement. As the saying goes, I had made my bed and now I must lie in it.
I started the grim process of dealing with the mussels by looking up recipes that sounded halfway palatable and that involved ingredients we had on hand. We had no beer to boil them in, as per Daniel's suggestion. Most of the recipes called for a sauce, usually a tomato-based one. We did have a couple of cans of tomatoes in the pantry. Hmmm. The next step was to clean them and make sure that they were debearded, which they apparently had been. The recipes all called for cooking the mussels before putting them in the sauce, and mentioned that if they didn't open after being boiled (or steamed) to throw them out as they were dead before being boiled alive. Oh, how I cringe at the thought of inflicting pain on another creature in any manner, and boiling one alive seems particularly barbaric to me. That's the main reason why I don't prepare lobster. I try to live by the Golden Rule, you know.
The prospect of the mussels having something wrong with them, as in not being fresh despite Daniel having stated that they were, made me even queasier than I already was, so when I opened the bag in the kitchen sink and saw that some were already open I panicked a bit. Toad was no help, having no experience with cooking mussels. I had him take the mussels to the neighbors across the road for their opinion, risking the humiliation in order to achieve, hopefully, some peace of mind. The neighbors pronounced them fit to cook and eat, and told Toad that they knew Daniel. Toad and I had figured that he was a local guy but it was reassuring to have that confirmed and to know that he could presumably be trusted. The neighbors also told Toad to make sure that the water was boiling rapidly before adding the mussels and that they liked to eat the cooked mussels fried in butter. So that is what we did with the first half of the bag of mussels. The next day I boiled the remaining mussels and added them to homemade tomato sauce, which I served over pasta.
It was upsetting to find that several of the mussels had extended threads in an effort to escape the bag and find a better environment in which to live. Via the threads they clung together in their desperation, in their desire to remain alive. Prior to dropping the poor creatures into the boiling water I apologized to them and thanked them for dying to provide nourishment for us. I still felt (and feel) guilty as hell, though, and did not, could not, enjoy eating them. I did eat my share, however, as a matter of principle. Lying in my bed, so to speak. And so I met the challenge presented by the purchase of the mussels. I fulfilled their destiny and my own as it involved them. It pained me to see the open shells with the dead bodies within, particularly those who had extended their little feet. Those I could not bear to eat. Those I made sure to place on Toad's plate. I know that it sounds odd but even now, days later, I feel as if there are little hard lumps in my stomach and gut, each lump a little mussel body. They don't belong there, physically or mentally. They belong in their natural habitat, siphoning the water and living their little lives. I wasn't the one who removed them from that life but I am the one who killed and ate them. I'll do my best to avoid this happening again. Toad and I both are practicing saying, "No, thank you".
I documented the demise of the mussels for posterity.
By the way, Dudley benefited from the boiling of the mussels by having the juices, the milky water left after the animals were removed, used to flavor his dry feed. The chickens will benefit from the calcium shells once they are crushed and mixed with their feed. All parts of these mussels have been or will be consumed and their nutrients used. That thought gives me some comfort.
I suppose that many people wouldn't think twice about cooking and eating mussels, yet here I am still pondering what I felt that I was obligated to do and what transpired. It's a curse, this empathy and reverence for life to the point of agonizing over the deaths of a bag of mussels, yet I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope that I'm never so inured to death that I breeze through a decision to kill or otherwise harm another creature. There is already far too much of that in this world.
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