The Emotional Reason Alton Brown Refuses To Eat Octopus

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With vegetarianism on the rise in recent years, most people have at least given some thought to their meat consumption. Alton Brown will eat almost any animal with one major exception — he won't eat octopus. During a recent episode of "Last Meals," while enjoying a plate of delicious-looking lamb, the host prodded Alton Brown about a rumor that he wouldn't eat octopus. 

"I will not eat octopus," Alton Brown confirmed. As a follow-up question, the host pointed out that the celebrity chef was willing to eat lamb but wasn't willing to eat octopus, calling the discrepancy a paradox. "No," Brown interrupted, "because I never had a conversation with a lamb." A comment the host found humorous. (Conversation or not, a well-smoked rack of lamb is hard to resist.)

To cut a long story short, an octopus at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California touched the pen in Alton Brown's shirt pocket, which he said "had been established from a previous visit. It f***ing remembered me." This was apparently a real shock to Brown, who went on to say, "I was so messed up from that ... I went to the bathroom and cried like an actual baby for 20 minutes." Mind you, it's not all seafood that gets Alton Brown worked up. After all, he basically eats only canned sardines while on tour.

In a different interview, this time with PBS, Alton Brown went into a little more detail about why the pen was so important, saying, "I used to visit this octopus a lot, a giant Pacific octopus. And the first time that I met him and was playing with him in his enclosure, he stole my pen out of my pocket." If the story intrigues you, Brown goes even more in-depth in his book "Food for Thought." In it, he jokes that the octopus was stealing his pen in order to write his own memoir.

A pen-stealing octopus sounds more like the comic villain of a children's TV show, but the fact that the octopus recognized Alton Brown after months spent apart was enough to cause him to swear off octopus for good. " ... Friends don't eat friends," Alton Brown said in that same PBS interview.

The decision not to eat octopus because of how intelligent they are isn't something unique to Alton Brown, either. Many Americans (and presumably many others around the world) feel the same. The idea of restricting one's diet based on the perceived intelligence or sentience of the creature conjures an intriguing and complex problem for us, as there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to extend that gesture of friendship all the way down the line. Still, there's a qualitative difference between the blank stare of a chicken and the inquisitive, tool-wielding octopus. Whether that means the world is ready for plant-based octopus is a different matter.