What I've Read: The Foie Gras Wars

Keeping up with my tradition of reading nonfiction books about strange, singular food topics, my mother gave me The Foie Gras Wars as a gift, and so of course I had to read it. It's probably the most open and least aggressive food book I have read in terms of trying to drive a message home. And I saw this as a good thing. Too often these food books are either trying to glorify or destroy something, not just inform me and let me make my own decision. Guess this is the benefit of the book being written by a journalist who had no opinion going in and just as little coming out.

In trying to sum it up quickly, here's the gist: Foie gras is duck liver, and it's a rather expensive dish that restaurants serve. Besides the price, what makes it stand out is that the ducks that produce these livers are force-fed for just under a month so that their livers enlarge about 10 times their normal size. This gets them fatty and rather delicious tasting (yes, I've eaten foie gras several times in my life, but none since I started reading the book).

The book is great because it centers around a famous Chicago chef who decides in the early 2000s that foie gras is inhumanely produced and he doesn't want to serve it anymore. Innocent enough, I suppose, (except for the fact that he loves serving steaks, chicken and whatever else you may deem as 'inhumanely treated animals'), except other chefs got pissed and then cities and states start trying to ban foie gras, the animal rights people get involved and then everything goes to shit rather quickly over something rather innocuous like duck liver.

It gets super crazy from there. Videos are produced (beware, it's rather gross stuff if you don't have an easy stomach). Protests get a little out of hand and F-List celebrities who don't know jack about shit get a little too worked up. Restaurants go out of business, politicians get all hopped up and crazy, an industry gets more or less eviscerated, and there is not a chance in hell that anyone comes out on the right side of things.

It's a really cool book to read, and in the end I didn't have a real dire-hard opinion about whether this production process if cruel or not. I think it is, but I'm not 100% sure. And I really don't think it matters and should be this big a deal when we have WAY bigger food things to worry about, like how cattle and chickens and other animals are 100% treated like shit because someone needs their Big Mac to be less than $5. There are a lot of sketchy things that go on in the food industry and we still no more about how these ducks are treated after one book than entire shelves of books on other food industries that more directly affect our daily lives.

When it comes down to it, I'll probably avoid foie gras from now on. I'm not boycotting restaurants that serve it, but I'm not going to order it anyway. I don't think it's a 5,000-year-old delicacy that should be preserved and maintained. If it goes away, fine. I won't miss it. If it stays, fine, but I'm probably not going to get as upset over it as I am about things like The Cove. Just don't be surprised if I try and educate you a little and make you think about it. Because I'm happy enough to say that I feel more educated and knowledgeable about it, and being a smarter eater and consumer is a damn fine place to be. But I'll definitely pass on the foie gras, thanks.