News Wed Jun 13 2007

Foie Wonk

By Andie Cavedo

It seems there are few things that life in Chicago can't turn into a big-ass ridiculous political showdown, and the eating of big-ass goose livers is apparently no exception. With the Chicago City Council foie gras ban on the books for over a year, the fuss surrounding the issue and all its attendant concerns (save the geese! save the gourmands! save Doug Sohn! save the constitution!) continues at a low roar. This month alone, the Foie Gras Debacle (FGD) has received attention from PETA, a federal judge, and the US House of Representatives. This month will see the City Council consider a repeal of the ban, just in case anyone was ready to call it a day.

For those who just miss something salty to go with their cornichons, it does seem to be verging into surreality. And yet, beyond the silliness of the FGD, perhaps there are some real issues at stake...

It all started innocently enough, perhaps, back in the verdant spring of 2006, when a ban on the sale of the fatty duck livers known in French cuisine as foie gras (literally..."fatty liver") in the city of Chicago. And voila, a movement was born.

The problem breaks down into three main areas of complaint, the first being animal cruelty and its supposed prevention through the saving graces of the foie gras ban. It goes like this. To create a suitably fattened liver in the birds that eventually end up as foie gras, the animals are over-fed with the assistance of a tube depositing the food directly in their crop for optimal digestion and weight. This force-feeding, or gavage in French ("gorging") is required by French law for the official production of foie gras -- not unlike government sanctioned grapes are what create of Beaujolais and government-sanctioned Camembert, thanks to the French AOC certification system. (Incidentally, don't those three sound delicious together? Well you know, if you can get past the force-feeding geese part, which some sources say doesn’t even cause geese and ducks much discomfort because of their lack of gag reflex. Ha.)

Constraining animals to achieve a desired comestible effect is hardly a new practice. Consider the tiny cages and milk diet of the cows that become veal, another perennially controversial food. And so, animal welfare activists have hopped onto the foie gras bandwagon praising Chicago’s wisdom and compassion in supporting this ban of a cruel and unusual perishable, with some groups even going so far as to elevate the City Council as the new vanguard knights of the Round Table of Animal Rights.

But at that point, the argument takes a turn. The Chicago ordinance doesn’t ban the production or consumption of foie gras – merely its sale in Chicago. Even some Chicago restaurants speak down their cuffs about taking the delicacy off the menu – while some menu items suddenly are offered at a higher price with a duckier flavor and smoother consistency, to say nothing of Chicago's Farewell Foie Gras extravaganza last summer. A more comprehensive ban that would have perhaps protected Illinois geese and ducks from the force-feeding practice which produces foie gras has languished in the state General Assembly since its introduction in 2005 and has failed to attract the kind of widespread media attention of the Chicago ban. Furthermore, foie gras is a delicacy almost by definition, which in turn means that a relatively small percentage of people enjoy it, let alone on a regular basis. Efforts to curb animal cruelty would perhaps be more effectively directed to large-scale beef or pork operations, which engage in practices that habitually alter the animal’s natural diet to increase production (corn-fed beef) or worse, alter the animal’s body (docked tails in pig pens, snipped chicken beaks, etc.). The brouhaha animal rights groups have raised over foie gras would have been perhaps much more far-reaching had they perhaps just reached a bit, well, farther. This point, however, takes a leg out from under the animal cruelty folks to support a tangential platform that wrinkles its nose at the Chicago ban as a stopgap at best and a drain on the remarkable energy of a grass-roots group of passionate activists at worst. It is an argument that, in any form raises a whole new tangle of issues, and doesn’t make anyone any happier.

And if those two groups weren’t enough, a third seems to be coalescing around the very idea of allowing a municipality to restrict sales of food items, let alone morally ambiguous ones. Making the rounds of the subcommittee circuit of the U.S. House of Representatives, a small addition to the 2007 Farm Bill is poised to turn the volume up all the way to eleven on the debate around the Chicago ban by enacting a mandate against prohibiting food sales except at the federal level. A law at this level would strike down the Chicago ban entirely a While some hearts may stir at the idea of a Federalist spirit living on in the law of the land (especially where it relates to what is literally growing in the land, as the section seems mostly intended to address genetically modified foods and their regulation), the State-Rights’ spirit seems to be equally alive and kicking, and yet another group plants their flag in the malleable and welcoming grounds of foie gras.

So here we have animal welfare activists, more farsighted animal rightists, and a vocal group of locally concerned farmers and elected officials; as well as the populations who feel the city has no right to legislate what a citizen can or cannot of their own volition consume and see it setting a dangerous precedent (commercially and constitutionally) elsehwere. To say nothing of a general public at once amazed and bored by this debate. Whew. Even with another resolution on the Council floor, it’s clear that no real resolution for thh FGD is yet in sight. If nothing else, we now have faux gras to tide us over. And if that fails, there’s always the deep-fried cicadas.