justjoan wrote:is everyone too cowed by the apparently unanimous opposition to the foie gras ban on this website to stand up for the ducks (and geese)? frankly, i've read a lot on the subject and believe that there is no consensus among experts as to whether the birds suffer through their forced feedings. but the birds certainly don't enjoy them and as long as there is any doubt (and i see no reason to think they arent suffering as much as they can suffer) i'll stay away from the stuff.
i love foie gras as much as anyone-my one visit to the banchet run le francais included foie gras with every course except dessert, but frankly, i think there are enough other things to eat so that i no longer feel comfortable eating it. while i would agree that the ban is pretty ineffectual (with the suburbs so close) i see no reason to make fun of it. i'm not always consistent, but i do try to buy only free range chickens, eggs, and meat. i see no moral reason to be a vegetarian, but i also see no good reason not to treat the animals and fish that i eat as humanely as possible. it gets easier every year to avoid cruelty to the food we eat and i think its a good policy to follow. justoan

Actually, justjoan, I think the geese have taken the opportunity to chime in on this particular issue.

Or at least one goose has:

GusDaGoose wrote:Hi everyone! I just flew in from remote Ontario, and boy, are my wings tired!!

Quackedy, quack-quack, honk honk...!! Ahh, that one never gets old. Henny Youngman was an avid bird-watcher, you know. I miss the guy, too - we used to shoot the breeze at Aqueduct, and sometimes my buddies and I would "accidentally" be on the track at the wrong time and in the path of the favorite, clearing the way for Henny's longshot to come in. Always gave us extra bread for our help, and the whole-grain stuff, too, none of that Wonder bread crap. Ahh, the good old days.

Anyway, I caught this little debate going on here about my species and the one little piece of us that you guys love (although, if you wanna chew on an organ meat, I got somethin' for ya! Honk Honk!!!). I gotta say...

You humans are pretty goddamn silly. Listen, we gotta nice little operation goin here, you guys and us geese. We get to migrate down south every year in relative peace (me and the missus gotta nice little time share piece of lagoon-front property off of Brunswick, Georgia), impress you lame-brains with our fancy V formations (You joiks always make me laugh with your explanations for the pattern. Evolution, instinct... yeah, right. We decided on the V in 1932 at the convention in Miami Beach, in honor of Vic da Goose, the longest-lived and luckiest feathered SOB this side of Toronto. He was Capone's pet goose for a while, too... Ol' Alfonse would feed him some nice cannoli scraps out by the beach, and often say to his cronies, "I like dat boid...") and get to take a nice crap on a freshly waxed car (yeah, we geese know which ones they are... we're geese, but we got eagle eyes... HONK HONK!!!) or on some kid's head once in a while. In exchange, a few of us boids draw a lottery to see which ones of us get sent to the farm every year to get fat for a while and then give up the ol' pipe cleaner for you fat bastards to suck down in some kooky reduction sauce. Not a bad deal, especially when you see what goes on with our fine feathered (but really stupid) chicken friends, swimmin' in their own muck at the Purdue plant in Maryland (we boids call it "Duckau") or with the yearly Turkey round-up you guys do to honor all the Indians you killed. Yeah, good logic, homo sapiens... anyway, dis whole goose liver thing (or however you say it in Frog) is bad for business. Take away our nice, fat, juicy livers, and soon, people are gonna start thinkin "hey, what good are geese anyway?" Before you know it, no more goin south, no more free rides and easy livin at the racetrack infields, no more artsy-fartsy documentaries about us (yeah, yeah, I know... you called it "Winged Migration", I call it, "there's two hours and ten bucks I'll never see again...and we ain't exactly talkin about a lifespan of a tortoise over here...). Believe me, we geese got it good (especially that part you guys made up about our name meaning the same thing as a pinch on a girl's tuchis... HONK!!). Givin up some livers every year to keep the peace ain't such a bad price to pay, believe me (ever see how they Kosher kill a cow? I mean, I'm Jewish, and that even shkeeves me out...). So, if you stupid freakin humans can get together, have a vote, a town meeting, a war, whatever the hell it is youse guys do to make a decision for the species... let's let dis liver situation just quietly die down, ok? Believe me, I speak for da geese at large on dis matter. We geese will live to fly in V's and crap on cars another day. Ok, gonna get back up in the jet stream and high-tail it... there's a boat show in Hilton Head that I've been savin up all week for, if you know what I mean!! HONK HONK!!! Oh, and if you see that putz, Hungryrabbi, around, tell him he owes me 20 bucks and a semolina bread from D'Amato's for the Notre Dame-USC game. Notice how that ball seemed to get awfully slippery all of a sudden when Matt Leinart fumbled with 10 seconds left? Ever hear the expression, "like crap through a goose??" What, do I have to spell it out for you morons? See ya next Spring at Arlington and Go Sox!! (Though I must admit, I'm partial to the Yanks, what with Goose Gossage and all...) HONK!! HONK!!

-- Gus Da Goose

Stuffed Animals by Jeffrey Steingarten for Men's Vogue

Do you think it's all right to eat foie gras? That would be an easy question if foie gras were not one of the most delectable foods on Earth. If they passed a law banning broccoli, nobody would utter a peep, except for farmers whose livelihood depends on broccoli. Plus a few peeps from people whose inexplicable yearning for broccoli cannot be satisfied by brussels sprouts.

Cigarettes are not illegal. You are able to avoid establishments with smoke.

Neither are stairs. Are you saying that restaurants should have the right to sidestep ADA laws on the grounds that people in wheelchairs can avoid them?

In reality, the smoking ban should have been handled as an ADA issue - until they can find a way to make "non-smoking sections" actually be so. It is life-threatening for my son. A ban in restaurants doesn't prevent anyone from smoking in private any more than it prevents one from having stairs in one's home.

Foie gras not so much. Ditto to the alderman who's trying to ban trans-fat.

Thanks for the article link gleam.

I'm not generally a Steingarten fan, but I thought it was one of the better pieces on foie gras I've read. His intellectual honesty on the matter was quite refreshing.

Anyway, great piece and thanks for sharing it.

A ban in restaurants doesn't prevent anyone from smoking in private

But restaurants are privately-owned establishments!

JamPhil wrote:

A ban in restaurants doesn't prevent anyone from smoking in private

But restaurants are privately-owned establishments!

Apples vs. Oranges. The restaurant made the choice to open to the public. Once they put the "Open" sign on the door, all the "I'm an owner and I can do anything I want" arguments I've heard in this thread go out the window. Don't forget, we're a democracy, not an anarchy!

And getting back to the topic of this thread, isn't it interesting that chefs/owners against the foie gras sales ban are NOT saying "it's my restaurant and you can't tell me what I can do"...

Actually, is that so? I'm interested to hear from the attorneys among us (I'm not one) what the truth is here. We'd all [i]like[/i] it to be the case that restaurant owners are bound by community standards of fairness, but it seems to me I've read that the law doesn't actually require this. For example, if a crazy restaurant owner said, "I require every customer in my establishment to wear a red hat," he actually [i]could[/i], legally, deny service to anyone who failed to meet this requirement. The one thing he can't do is deny service on the basis of race, since there are specific laws banning that practice. And he can't violate any other specific law, for instance by failing to set up a nonsmoking section when the law requires it, or by serving goose liver when the law prohibits it. But everything not specifically prohibited or mandated is fair game, whether "the public" likes it or not.

Again, not claiming to be an expert here. Just sharing my "lay person" understanding of things. I welcome information from the people here who actually are experts in the law in this area.

And getting back to the topic of this thread, isn't it interesting that chefs/owners against the foie gras sales ban are NOT saying "it's my restaurant and you can't tell me what I can do"...

Actually, I've read a lot of statements to that effect. They may be launching a lawsuit from more technical grounds so as best to succeed in court, but the impetus behind it has a lot to do with the limits on a government's ability to tell restaurants what they can and cannot serve in their own establishments.

From a recent CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/14/foie.g ... index.html

"Sounding more like politicians talking about the Middle East than a piece of meat, enthusiasts voice their concern that foie gras won't be the last tasty treat to make its way from menu to city ordinance.

Will veal be next? Lobster? And what about that fur coat in the closet?

"Now it becomes a political issue and it becomes a constitutional thing," said Rick Tramonto, the chef and owner of Tru. "My biggest concern is where it will stop."

More than a dozen countries, mostly in Europe, have banned production of the delicacy.

Given animal rights activists' success getting foie gras banned in Chicago, Didier Durand, the chef and owner of Cyrano's, is confident they will take aim at other foods as well. "Pretty soon we're going to be eating grass," he said."

Also, I find your mention of anarchy rather confusing. It would hardly be an anarchist society that set up institutions recognizing private property and businesses and owners rights to serve legally obtained food items. The whole notion of privacy and private property and rights is anathema to general notions of anarchy.

I enjoyed the Steingarten article too-- thanks!

"where does it stop" (aka the chilling effect) and "you can't tell me what I can do" are VERY different arguments! The biggest difference is that one is usually effective in the most important court, the court of public opinion -- and the other typically is not.

And advocating making your own laws applicable to your own property, while ignoring those made in a democratic fashion, sounds like anarchy to me...

I guess we just disagree then (and may even have to agree to do so).

Because to me, grandstanding aldermen imposing restrictions on a restaurant's ability to serve legally obtained food, when in reality most people in Chicago don't know or care about foie gras, sounds a lot like tyranny.

I have been wondering the very same thing about this thread (which, I must point out, is not the first of its [url=http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=5615&highlight=foie+gras][b][color=green]kind[/color][/b][/url]).

And also, I don't see why "where does it stop" and "you can't tell me what I can do" can't be interlinked.

"You can't tell me NOT to serve a legally obtained food item in my privately-owned restaurant."

"Yes, we can, because we are the aldermen of Chicago."

"But if you can prevent me from doing that, why can't you prevent me from doing all these other things?"

They seem rather intimately related to me actually.

I wonder the same thing about the Katy's Dumpling thread, which now mostly seems to be a report on the shirt the owner is wearing. Once I noticed the direction the thread took, I stopped clicking on it, because it is no longer of any interest to me. You certainly have the ability to do the same here...

Before this thread devolves into a "my-thread-is-better-than-your-thread" pissing contest or worse (a political argument), I'd like to point out one thing: We've had to "blow the referee's" whistle once already because the level of discourse was veering into personal attacks. Please keep it civil.

grandstanding aldermen imposing restrictions on a restaurant's ability to serve legally obtained food, when in reality most people in Chicago don't know or care about foie gras, sounds a lot like tyranny.

Not really, not so long as you can vote them out of office for said "grandstanding," as well as for the resultant waste of time and money on the part of the council, the staff, and various city departments; the loss of municipal revenue and reputation; the neglect of the real needs of the constituency; etc . . . Vote the bum out. Now there's an idea, particularly since the guy's not likely to still be in Hizzoner's Book of Life and, as far as I know, there aren't a lot of web-footed, duck-billed voters (most of whom are out-of-staters, anyway) in his precinct.

LTH,

As neither Michael's Bleeeet, or his follow up moderator request to keep the thread off of politics, has been heeded it appears a thread time out is in order.

Thread Locked.

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