consider this article

DFW thinks about lobsters and the people who consign them to boiling water.

Two good lines:

Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.

As I see it, it probably is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way... As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.