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We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.

Animal Defenders of Westchester
P.O. Box 205
Yonkers, NY 10704

Campaigns
Stop Foie Gras Production

A Flap Over Foie Gras

Published in NY Newsday, Issue of May 2:

Chefs and diners love the fatty duck liver, but  animal-rights activists are crying fowl at the birds' treatment.

By Jerry Adler and Tara Weingarten
Newsweek

May 2 issue - It was a delicacy among the Romans, and later the Jews, a   substitute for the pig that helped their Christian neighbors survive the Middle   Ages. To French food writer Charles Gerard, foie gras, the swollen liver of a   deliberately overfed goose or duck, was "the supreme fruit of gastronomy."

Seared  and doused with a port-wine reduction, or baked with truffles into a terrine, it  is the key to the restaurant industry's holy grail: the $20 appetizer.

But to  animal-rights activists, it's fur on a plate, an outrageous flaunting of  humanity's dominion over other species, and at the same time a wedge issue that  can usefully be wielded against the entire meat industry. Which is why, within  an hour of Cardinal Ratzinger's elevation last week, an exultant e-mail went out  from Bruce Friedrich, director of vegan campaigns for People for the Ethical  Treatment of Animals, calling media attention to the new pope's views on animal  husbandry.

In a 2002 interview, Ratzinger opined that "degrading living  creatures to a commodity," specifically by force- feeding geese and confining  chickens in crowded factory-farm cages, seems "to contradict the relationship of  mutuality that comes across in the Bible." So perhaps monsieur would prefer to  substitute the poached leeks?

That's the hope of celebrity chef Charlie Trotter, who inadvertently helped   fuel the debate when he acknowledged to the Chicago Tribune that he had stopped  serving foie gras at his eponymous restaurant in 2002—one year after he   published recipes for foie gras beignets, foie gras custard and foie gras ice cream in his "Meat & Game" cookbook. "I can't really justify this," said   Trotter, who came to his decision after seeing ducks force-fed grain through  tubes inserted down their throats. But he continues to serve every other kind of   cuddly creature in creation, a position that Chicago's other notable  American-French chef, Rick Tramonto of Tru, called "a little hypocritical...  Either you eat animals or you don't eat animals." In a comment Trotter now says  he regrets, he suggested that Tramonto's liver could go on the menu  instead.

But that threat is nothing compared with what happened to Laurent Manrique   of Aqua, in San Francisco; a specialty-food shop he co-owned was vandalized just  before it was to open, and he was sent a video, purportedly from anti-foie gras  activists, of him eating dinner at home with his family.

Legislative efforts to  ban the product are showing success. California, one of two states where ducks  are raised for foie gras, has banned its production and sale, effective in 2012.  The legislature in New York is considering a bill that would phase out  production, although it would not outlaw, for instance, chef Kerry Heffernan's  $17 dish of seared foie gras with vanilla roast-ed pears and sauternes coulis  (left) at Eleven Madison Park. "That will comelater!" promises Friedrich of  PETA.

It's all a huge misunderstanding, in the view of Michael Ginor, an owner of   Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the upstate New York farm that produces most of the   estimated 420 tons (or 1.8 billion calories) of foie gras consumed in the United  States annually. Force-feeding ducks with a tube "does sound atrocious," he  admits, but he maintains that waterfowl, lacking the mammalian gag reflex, do  not suffer from the process. "Foie gras is easy to attack: it's for the rich,  it's unnecessary, it's vain. It can be seen as all those things. But it's been  around for 5,000 years." And Charlie Trotter himself would be the last to deny  how good it is. Its texture as meltingly soft as a chocolate truffle, its flavor  a mouth-filling meatiness and sweetness that helps justify humanity's  million-year struggle to the top of the food chain.

Unless, of course, madame would prefer the vegetable reduction on her  asparagus instead?

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

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ARTICLE SOURCE:
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