Exactly seven years ago to this date, I posted a worldtable.com page devoted to foie gras. The page included a review of Michael Ginor's then recently published Foie Gras…A Passion, as well as an impassioned defense of foie gras prompted by the cancellation of a panel discussion and tasting of foie gras scheduled for September 1999 at the Smithsonian Institute.
My defense of raising, marketing, serving and eating foie gras, in response to attacks by people supposedly for the ethical treatment of animals, was based largely on accounts by Ginor in his interesting book and by Ed Behr in issue 48 of his highly respected quarterly journal The Art of Eating Ginor, whose Hudson Valley Foie Gras facility raises ducks and markets domestic foie gras, is not a disinterested party and I took that into account. Ed Behr, on the other hand, is someone whose research and opinion I have found impeccable.
Five years later, in issue 68, Ed Behr published Derrick Schneider's The Dilemma of Foie Gras in which Derrick took a tougher look at the industry. After visiting Sonoma Foie Gras to witness the gavage, commonly referred as "force feeding," and doing significant research into what's been published by critics, supporters and impartial sources, Derrick offered the opinion that "foie gras occupies an ethical grey zone." He admitted he still ate it, but in his blog at the time, he said "I did a lot of research on this piece, and my own attitudes about foie gras changed dramatically in the process. I used to think there was no dilemma but now I acknowledge it's a gray area. I of course think there's a lot of good information in the piece to help people make their own decisions about the ethical issues of foie gras. I'm pretty proud of the article, as I think it will be useful to the people most likely to be debating or thinking about this topic." The Art of Eating doesn't make its articles available online, but Men's Vogue does. The appearance of Steingarten's article online, and the chance to recommend it, prompted this page.
Jeffrey Steingarten's excellent article, stuffed animals, should be read by all interested parties. Hell, it's well written and entertaining enough to appeal to disinterested parties. I happen to like Steingarten's writing style and have great respect for the thoroughness of his research. I may be less taken of Steingarten the entertainer on Iron Chef America, but that's another story.
Jeffrey sits on the fence to some extent in stuffed animals, but his description of a duck's anatomy—all domestic foie gras comes from ducks—tends to reduce my concern that gavage is harmful. His short history of foie gras is concise with the humorous departure to note that nothing is written about whether Jesus ate foie gras, although it's an ancient delicacy dating back to the Egyptians. Admittedly, the livers of geese then, were likely not as extended as we grow them today. Some of his information may have come from Ginor's book, but I didn't know that Watertown, Wisconsin, was the center of a foie gras industry supplying the famed Luchow's on Fourteenth Street in NY, among other places. I dearly remember Luchow's and it's food, but I don't those memories with the kind of food I might get at Alain Ducasse NY, l'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Daniel or Per Se.
Stuffed animals offers some of the less obvious realities behind the California ban scheduled to go into effect in 2012 and covers some of the vandalism connected with anti foie gras activists in California. The wanton vandalism, some of it threatening to human life, has done nothing but harden my defense.
Jeffrey gets my attention by paying respect to the ethical concerns of raising livestock for human consumption. I tend to support the position that one needn't become a vegan to respect animal life. I also think we get better meat when animals are not raised industrially. The article's strongest argument, in my opinion, is made precisely when it deals with the medical questions of stress and disease in these ducks and where it debunks attempts to encourage us to anthropomorphize. Steingarten's scientific research relies on experiments by Daniel Guémené, Ph.D., a research director at INRA, the prestigious French Institute for Agricultural Research and recent studies by the The American Veterinary Medical Association, whose members have recently defeated resolutions calling for a ban on tube–feeding.
Steingarten concludes by writing "The scientific evidence is pretty much unanimous in not condemning foie gras, but the evidence is still limited. So, though it seems unnecessary to stop eating foie gras altogether, the data is not unambiguous enough to encourage unbridled gorging. For now, the most sensible policy is to eat just a little of this sublime and ancient delicacy. Which is what most of us are doing already." My own opinion, beyond that eating just a little foie gras seems analogous to being just a little pregnant, is more favorable towards eating foie gras. Not only do I find insufficient evidence to conclude that gavage is stressful or unethical, but that without the anthropomorphism the anti foie gras movement relies on so heavily to argue its cause, there's almost no evidence. There is however far greater evidence to question the way grain fed animals are raised on feedlots and how all poultry is raised to supply cheap chicken for sale in supermarkets.
We need to get our priorities in order. Larger than the The Dilemma of Foie Gras is The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is the title of a book by Michael Pollen, published by the Penguin Press earlier this year. I'm less than halfway through, but heartedly recommend it to anyone concerned with the ethics of animal husbandry particularly in relation to today's industrial farming. Issues raised by Pollan of perhaps even greater concern are the health of our food supply and the health of our soil and water resources. Directly, and indirectly, we may be treating ourselves less ethically than we treat our animals.
Home Page
Copyright © 2006 WorldTable, Inc.