Eating the amazing octopus

Brendan Kiley's article in this week's The Stranger (one of two Seattle alt weeklies) is an excellent gloss on the giant Pacific octopus as beautiful and amazingly complex sea creature. It's also a personal reflection on what it's like to eat a still-live tentacle, and a commentary on the best way to prepare octopus.

That the three types of writing can coexist peacefully in one feature story says a lot about cognitive dissonance, our capacity to hold contradictory thoughts and beliefs in our minds and recognize them as contradictory. You can feel how the arguments against eating octopus probably weighed on Kiley's mind as he researched and wrote the piece. But he doesn't get off onto any tangents about animal rights in the story, and I'm glad.

He explores the possibility that a concentration of neurons in octopus limbs suggests that consciousness for this creature is not relegated to its brain, but rather spread throughout its body. After this, he writes, "I'm beginning to wonder what the tentacle I was chewing, back in that dark-paneled room in a restaurant in Osaka, was thinking."

On the question of when and how to study the creatures, we have another tension. Kiley is straightforward (but not judgmental) about the methods scientists use to study octopus intelligence, such as one experiment in which the two halves of an octopus' brain are severed to discover whether or not octopuses, like humans, can "lateralize information" (they can).

And again, as if Kiley's one by one evoking every animal-rights position in the book, we've got another problem, and that's that octopuses apparently don't like to be in that watery equivalent of zoos: aquariums. He spends a good deal of time describing escapes:

When they can't get out, some octopuses tear up their tanks. Another octopus at the Seattle Aquarium, nicknamed Lucretia McEvil, destroyed her life-support system in one night: She dug through several centimeters of sand, chewed through wires lashing down an undergravel filter plate (a ridged plate that covers the bottom of an aquarium, allowing beneficial bacteria to process ammonia buildup), yanked up the plate, and ripped it into pieces for the staff to fish out of her tank. Octopuses also squirt water at their keepers (either in play or hostility—it's hard to tell), and Dr. Anderson has heard of sensitive lab equipment ruined by precisely aimed jets of salt water.

via www.thestranger.com

But there's no singleminded sympathy for the plight of the caged octopus here. At this point, Kiley's already enumerated the octopus' own predatory tendencies (including attacks on humans). And a good deal of the article focuses on a Seattle Aquarium researcher who's devoted his entire career to cephalopods, the study of which he feels is not given sufficient attention. Thus, the aquarium as institution is redeemed by this endearing lover of octopuses, who wears an octopus T-shirt and carries an octopus bag and washes with octopus soap.

But the fact that the article ends with Kiley's visit to two local restaurants with octopus on the menu shows that in this case, an animal-rights/vegetarian position is rejected, despite a tremendous argument for the octopus as intelligent, probably capable of emotion, and worthy of our study.

Like Kiley, I've eaten octopus at Tavolata and thought it marvelously prepared. I've also eaten squid at Le Pichet, where they serve it in an endive salad with pickled fennel root, the squid so light and delicate it seems to have been fried in air.

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