“Real people eat seafood cold.”

Thus spake André-Philippe Losier. A.P., as he’s known, a philosophically minded salmon and striper guide based out of Cascapedia-Saint-Jules, Quebec, was in the middle of transferring several crisply orange lobster from a bayou burner to an ice-water-filled Yeti. The lobsters had winced as A.P. lowered them, one by one, into the cook pot. They may have even screamed, though something about that word seems hyperbolic, inappropriate. Can a lobster scream? Can a salmon? Or a striper? In any case, they certainly winced, though I doubt A.P. noticed. He was already salivating, picturing them on a plate as he pulled back the shell and slipped the meat free, vocally masticating every rich, tender morsel right down to the contents of the head—all of which he would do later that evening.

I’d asked him why we were eating the lobster cold instead of hot, straight from the pot. I may as well have asked why grass was green. Though we eat plenty of crustacean cold back home in Washington state, if we’ve gone to the trouble of boiling some Dungeness, we skip the ice bath and eat it hot, typically with ramekins of butter, bibs around our necks if we’re feeling inspired.

A.P. disabused me of this notion. I’d learned over the course of the past week that he—along with just about everyone else I’d met on the Gaspé—took his eating seriously. His social media is equal parts fishing, skiing and food, the digital footprint of an adventure-sports gourmand. Seafood should be eaten cold—raw if possible—because to eat it warm cut against the nature of the thing. It was never warm when it was alive, he seemed to imply, which was the state in which it should be approached on one’s plate. There was something of the purist in that viewpoint, and who was I to argue?

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