[Vision2020] Foie Gras Legislation

[Nick Gier]

October 7, 2006
The New York Times
Foie Gras on the Legislative Plate
By DAN MITCHELL

SO how did I get here, defending the killing of God’s creatures?” the 
celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain asks plaintively. The creatures, in this 
case, are ducks.

The man he’s asking, a fellow celebrity chef, Michael Ruhlman, is 
sympathetic, but he can’t help but throw in a few zingers, as when he asks 
Mr. Bourdain, “So, are you just off on another of your bobble-head-doll rants?”

The conversation, solicited by Salon and conducted via e-mail, centered on 
how the “food police” are making life tough not just for famous chefs, but 
for the entire food industry (salon.com).

Michael J. Panter, a New Jersey legislator, has proposed a ban on the 
forcible feeding of ducks and geese to make foie gras — which is produced 
from their fattened livers. Animal-rights activists decry the practice, 
called gavage. The proposal comes after a similar ban in Chicago and a 
proposed ban on trans fats in New York City restaurants.

The biggest problem with the proposed New Jersey law, according to Mr. 
Bourdain, is that the state is home to D’Artagnan, the company that started 
the fresh foie gras revolution in the United States two decades ago. Mr. 
Panter’s law, according to Salon, could “effectively cripple the production 
and consumption of foie gras not only in New York City’s great temples of 
gastronomy, but in restaurants and homes around the country.”

Ariane Daguin, the founder and owner of D’Artagnan, “is not just the foie 
gras lady,” Mr. Bourdain writes, “she was a Gertrude Stein to a veritable 
salon of hotshot New York chefs.”

D’Artagnan sells much more than just foie gras, offering all kinds of 
gourmet meats and other products. Ms. Daguin is “a one-woman supply train 
for every French chef in New York and consequently any American chef with 
aspirations to be among the best.”

Cutting off her foie gras could mean halting that supply train, he laments.

But what about this gavage business? Isn’t it wrong to ram a tube down a 
duck’s throat to pump food into it? Sure, Mr. Bourdain writes. And not only 
is it bad, but it makes for bad foie gras, but “that’s not what D’Artagnan 
sells.”

Although the fowl is fed through a tube, Mr. Bourdain writes that in 
“proper foie gras farming, the same feeder tends the duck every day, and 
more often than not, it’s the duck who approaches the feeder.They have room 
to run around, to live a good, natural life — even a pampered one — 
compared with the horrifying and vastly more widespread practice of raising 
battery chickens.”

Battery chickens are raised in a factorylike setting, stuffed into cages, 
and are induced through artificial lighting to produce as many eggs as they 
can before they are slaughtered once their egg production levels off — 
usually around 18 months. There’s no law against that.

"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human 
affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061007/de38864e/attachment.htm