I haven't had much of an appetite for anything during my enforced immobility, but that hasn't stopped me from watching lots of food shows and pretending I'm hungry. Rob found this interesting article on Salon today which takes the form of cookbook author Michael Ruhlman interviewing Anthony Bourdain about pending legislation in NJ to ban foie gras. I've always held foie gras in contempt, not only because it's something only rich people can afford and thus indicative of how class-based some food in our culture is (as if poorer folk didn't have palates and wouldn't appreciate tasty stuff?) but because I've always been under the impression it's created by force-feeding ducks, and this interview/article goes a long way toward disabusing me of that notion. I think Bourdain makes some really good points:
Cruelly raised foie gras -- the poor animals you see in the videos in tiny pens with tubes being, as they always say, "shoved down their throats" -- is bad foie gras. None of us would buy that stuff. That's not what we want... 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.So you know, there's still the class thing to consider, but as far as the cruelty issue I'm now of a mind that anyone who protests this and still eats, say, Purdue chicken is being somewhat hypocritical. Update: Lauren begs to differ.
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