San Francisco Blog

Inspired by recent protests at Seattle's Lark against the restaurant serving Sonoma foie gras, Incanto owner Mark Pastore has published a long, thoughtful essay, Shock & Foie: The War Against Dietary Self-Determism. After placing the issue in the context of the current concern for "sustainability," the essential roles of death and destruction in food production, the relevant differences between duck and human physiology, and the tiny (0.04 oz.) portion of Americans' 220-pounds-per-year average meat consumption accounted for by foie gras, Pastore gets to his essential point, that foie gras is a cynical wedge issue:

"Working to ban something that 99% of people never eat is not an act requiring great moral or physical courage ... the anti-foie gras movement is - at best - founded upon a shrewd political calculation in which the professed indignation of a few is used to harness the indifference of the many to the inherent political cowardice of elected officials, in order to achieve a desired political outcome. In essence, it's a confidence game in which participating meat-eaters, by agreeing to condemn something that they don't care about, receive the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail card, i.e., the right to feel slightly less guilty as they bite into that factory-farmed McNugget."