Foie Gras and the real world.

As I've said before, I'm an atheist, and pretty firm about it.  But something that bothers, even embarrasses me, is the spectacle of protests and legal challenges against the smallest display of religiosity - the use of the word "god" in public proceedings, etc.  Part of what sticks in my craw is the meaninglessness of it - honestly, I don't see how anyone is put out or feels like they're getting their rights trampled - and how that triviality discredits opposition to serious instances of religious intrusion into public life.  The other problem is that it's not honest.  The sort of person who's going to pick a fight over a line in a national anthem making reference to a belief that 90% of the world holds to some degree or another is the sort of person who's mostly pissed about being part of that last tenth.  And what they probably want is not just for that display to be taken down, or the words to not be sung, but for everybody else to start being atheist too.  (Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what the rest of y'all think.  I also don't care that everybody else seems to think AC/DC aren't the worst band in the world, so long as they don't force me to listen to their weak shit.)

And here's where we say hello to one of the most delicious foodstuffs I have ever consumed: foie gras*.  If you don't know, it is goose (or sometimes duck) liver with an insane amount fat in it; the flavour is similar to sweetbread drowning in butter - it is an astonishing thing to eat.  It is also, unsurprisingly, fantastically unhealthy and not at all cheap.  In the four years since I first tried foie (as part of the incredible tasting menu at Beckta), I have had it about three or four more times, and even that feels a little excessive.

All that flavour does not come without another cost, of course.  The process of creating the fat-riddled liver involves force-feeding the fowl for the last two weeks or so before slaughter. There is a natural gorging stage in the life of migratory geese, where the birds will voluntarily over-eat to similar (although less extreme) effect. (An 'ethical' version of foie gras is produced by slaughtering birds at this stage, although it is by necessity a seasonal thing.) Most production of foie is done by gavage, or deliberate force-feeding of corn and, naturally, this is considered by some to be unacceptably cruel.

A number of bans of foie gras production have been enacted - in parts of the EU, Turkey, Israel, and California (although it doesn't take effect for another three years) - although these have little effect, since the vast majority of it is produced in France, Hungary, other parts of the US and Quebec.  The city of Chicago briefly outlawed its sale in 2006, but the ban was short-lived and widely ignored. We in Ottawa have had a charming group of protesters who have harassed two excellent restaurants so far (Domus, and then Stephen Beckta's Play) through picketing and abusive emails and telephone calls. Beckta capitulated recently, although I was pleased to see that the protesters can claim no moral victory - his opinion hasn't changed, he just wanted to stop getting screamed at. (Sincerely, to anyone responsible for troubling Mr. Beckta, who is a very nice man, or his staff: go fuck yourself.)

I would like to emphasise that I don't entirely disagree with the protesters' position, much in the way that I don't disagree with many things vegans say about the consumption of meat. I won't attempt to say that eating artificially enlarged goose liver (or beef, or cheese) is just fine and dandy. There are genuine ethical questions - or rather, there aren't - raised by the consumption of meat and dairy, and it's not hard to see why the protesters feel it's an issue worth getting worked up about. But it is difficult to understand why they feel that their tactics are an acceptable response, or why they feel a right to regulate what a small portion of the public chooses to eat when it goes out. Indeed, one wonders why they've chosen to pick on small, independent local businesses whose methods they would otherwise applaud, and who in turn support local, sustainable farms.

It's true, as the protesters breathlessly insist, that some foie gras is produced from geese kept in cages and treated poorly - crappy foie that no restaurant worth eating at would serve. In much the same way, one can get lousy meat of any kind from shitty, cut-rate producers who treat animals (and most likely their workers) poorly, or you can give a shit, pay a little more and get meat raised by people who care about what they're doing. Chefs - good chefs, at least - are well aware of the conditions under which their food is produced, and generally will buy locally from farms that they can visit (or even work at) whenever possible. The notion that the protests are about "informing" restauranteurs about what they're serving is laughable.

I’m reminded of what Ian at Mariposa farms was saying about it – foie gras is actually a canard (pardon the pun); the activists actually would like to ban the eating of meat entirely, but since that wouldn’t attract much support or produce results, they pick on something smaller.  Which, tactically, makes some sense; but again it’s dishonest, and it’s picking on something that makes such a tiny difference that it distracts from a useful resistance to factory farms or the raising of battery hens (why not encourage people to support to restaurants that use sustainable and smaller-scale suppliers instead? Oh, right, those are the same places.)

It’s easy to pick on something that hardly anyone eats, and that has great photo ops and it’s easy to exaggerate about, because you’ll get some result you can point to and say, ‘we saved some ducks’ lives’ (that’s an actual quote from a protester’s comment to the Citizen.)  But of course, they didn’t save any ducks’ (let alone geese's) lives.  There were two possible results: those livers will be sold somewhere else, or the farm that provides Beckta with his foie will stop producing it (and/or possibly go out of business, since I would assume it’s a fairly profitable commodity.)  But the ducks will still die, as all living things die, and if they’re out in the wild, they will most likely die more slowly and painfully than at the hands of a farmer.  While it might be a comfort to squishy urban liberals that the duck died a ‘natural’ death in the jaws of a predator or under the wheels of a car, I can't imagine the duck sharing that rosy view.


*I'd like to emphasise that crispy, pan-seared foie is pretty much the only preparation I enjoy. I've had foie poutine, and was slightly repulsed by the texture.