‘Why do I feel sad for them’: Woman goes to war against a team of crabs when dinner time becomes a quest for survival

Look, I get it, there’s absolutely no denying that the food and grocery industry is a toxic web of immorality and abuse, whether you’re coming at it from the perspective of food waste or the treatment of the animals we consume.

Food waste could be solved via lowkey distribution systems, but the answer for the question of how we treat the animals is much simpler: give them a chance to defend themselves. Indeed, no more match-fixing by way of roided cattle and mass slaughter; if you want your steak, you have to defeat the cow with your bare hands. A similar route was taken by a friend of TikTok‘s @manihoneyyy on seafood night, and if this is any indication, it’s safe to say we’d respect/cherish our meat dishes a bit more if we were individually responsible for them.

Over the course of the 36-second video, Mani’s friend finds herself navigating a mutiny that’s rich in Vitamin B12 as a trio of live crabs — destined for her dinner plate — get aggressively snippy with her in hopes of staving off the inevitable. She sees their combative will to live and raises them a more cautious approach than she would have gone with otherwise, but after much sass from either party, the crabs eventually find themselves in a pot of water, neither ready nor willing to meet their fate.

The bulk of the sentiment in the comments section was that of empathy for the crabs; many opted to chew out Mani’s friend for cooking the crabs alive as they screamed in protest, with variations of “poor babies” and “this is actually sad” sprinkled in and around the replies.

Now, is it undeniably refreshing to see an internet comment section full of empathy? Yes, but it’s worth considering the possibility that empathy isn’t the driving force of these comments, and could instead be prompted by wanting to judge somebody to deflect their own insecurities. Psychology Today describes this behavior as “projective identification,” wherein someone tries to get rid of unwanted feelings by claiming they belong to someone else – a reallocation of shame, if you will.

Whether meat consumption is ethical or not is a question that’ll tossed back and forth so long as society stays upright, and that’s mostly because there are so many factors to consider in such a question. Is it telling that our bodies are capable of digesting raw fruits and vegetables but get sick when we consume raw meat, or that our teeth have clearly not evolved in a way that pushes us towards meat consumption? Perhaps, yes. Is it telling that death is a natural and necessary part of the biosphere, and that the nutrients of a body that is no longer being inhabited can find new life in new organisms? Perhaps also yes.

Indeed, as with so many debates today, the key may lie in examining not the action, but the system wherein the action is taking place and enabled. Something something consumption, something something capitalism.