Friday, April 28, 2006

Foie Gras blogging

We're off to Chicago for the weekend. So much for my plans to eat lots of foie gras. The Chicago City Council just banned it. Mayor Daley seems to have to proper perspective on this:

We have children getting killed by gang leaders and dope dealers. We have real issues here in this city. And we’re dealing with foie gras? Let’s get some priorities. Our priorities should be children, the quality of education. It should be seniors. We should worry about the gas price. We should worry about the global economy.


Nicely done. The Gurgling Cod, from whence I learned about all of this silliness, has had some wise things to say about what's really going on here:

Hard to believe the city that works, Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago, has become a hotbed of anti foie gras agitation. A few things seem notable in this contretemps: The movement to ban foie gras seems to have as much to do with the context of the end product as the cruel process, motivated as much by a resentment of the likes of Alain Ducasse and his patrons as it is by a love of geeese. From a utiltarian standpoint of reducing the amount of suffering in the world, banning chicken would seem to do much more good. The life of a Tyson's chicken does not seem appreciably pleasanter than that of a foie gras goose, and there are a lot more of them, but chicken fingers are not the snack of plutocrats....

In general, anti-foie gras sentiment seems to function as part of a moral calculus I am calling the whippet. In real life, ski mountaineering in particular, you attach a whippet to your ski pole as a device that, in theory, will allow you to stop yourself from sliding down a glacier if you fall. In moral issues, the whippet is the opposite of a slippery slope, in that it demarcates the boundary between what is acceptable, and what is not. Defining foie gras as outside the pale of what you are willing to eat reinforces the idea that everything uphill of that point on the slope is ok. In other words, sentiment against foie gras works, perversely, to justify other kinds of animal consumption. I say this as a consumer of all kind of meats, including foie gras, (the latter limited as much by budget and geography as anything else). In sum, from here, it looks like it's about everything but the goose.

Posted by jwb at 6:31 AM   

0 Comments:

Post a Comment
« home