Why cruel foie gras must be kicked off our menus
As Pamela Anderson urges Gordon Ramsay to banish foie gras from his restaurants, Closer asks why we’re still killing birds in the name of this so-called delicacy…
Baywatch icon B and animal rights activist Pamela Anderson has called upon Gordon Ramsay to banish foie gras from his menu. In an open letter to the chef, written just weeks before the start of World Vegan Month – in November – Pamela urged him to stop selling the dish at his flagship eatery in London, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and opt for a vegan alternative instead.
“Foie gras is nothing more than a diseased liver produced in a real-life Hell’s Kitchen,” she wrote. “Given your exceptional talent, I have no doubt that you can create dishes to impress that don’t involve this cruelty.”
To make foie gras, which is a fattened goose or duck liver, workers force-feed the birds by ramming pipes down their throats to pump their stomachs full of grain. The practice causes the birds’ livers to swell up to ten times their normal size.
ABUSED
The birds are kept in cages or crowded sheds. They often experience fungal infections, diarrhoea, and many die from choking on their own vomit. And since foie gras is made from the livers of only male ducks, all female ducklings, around 40m of them per year in France alone, are thrown into grinders – still alive.
Pamela, along with celebrities like Kate Winslet and Ricky Gervais, are backing PETA’S campaign to end the production of foie gras worldwide. PETA’S director of vegan corporate projects, Dawn Care, explains, “Pamela is a long-time champion of animals, including the birds who are abused to produce foie gras. Over the past few years, she has written to London department store Fortnum & Mason, urging it to ditch the vile pâté, and called on the French National Assembly to ban the forcefeeding of geese and ducks.
TORTURE
“Foie gras production is so cruel that it’s illegal in the UK and more than a dozen other countries. Consumers have the power to take a stand against it by refusing to buy this ‘torture in a tin’ and, instead, choose one of the healthy, cruelty-free vegan pâtés available.”
Now, Pamela and PETA are asking Gordon – who declined to comment – to serve faux gras instead, which uses lentils and walnuts, and is described by Pamela as “a decadent vegan version of the dish that comes with all the flavour, but none of the suffering.”