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October 7, 2006<br>
The New York Times<br>
Foie Gras on the Legislative Plate<br>
By DAN MITCHELL<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?”<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
Cutting off her foie gras could mean halting that supply train, he
laments.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br>
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<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"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." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
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