Why the foie gras warriors have got it wrong
With ministers set to drop a promised import ban, Ed Cumming says there are bigger animal rights issues at stake
At Maison Francois, a smart brasserie in London’s St James’s, a plate of foie gras is set down in front of me. It is served as a slice of pale-pink flesh, with a quenelle of pear and tomato compote to lend some fruit and acidity to the fats. I think of myself as fairly catholic in my tastes, but it’s a punchy dish for a Monday lunchtime.
I take a bite. It’s rich and smooth and not really like anything else at all. Amid the tinkle of cutlery on china and murmur of conversation, as diners around me wolf down sausages and steak, my meal doesn’t feel especially seditious. If you’re going to eat foie gras, this is the way to do it.
But it is a big if; probably the biggest in western cuisine. Food trends come and go, but foie gras is the debate that never simmers down.
The controversy has always revolved around the gavage, the process by which the duck or goose is force-fed with grain, via a long tube rammed down its throat, so its liver swells to 600 per cent of its normal size. Even by the standards of how we treat animals being raised for meat, it seems cruel and unusual. If that makes you feel queasy, imagine how I now feel, with a lump of the end product sitting in my gullet.
“It is really the only food which involves torture in its preparation,” says Alexis Gauthier, the owner of Gauthier London, in Soho, summarising the objections. As a classically trained French chef, Gauthier grew up with foie gras as a fundamental part of cooking before he was converted 10 years ago. He is now vegan, and so is his restaurant.
“I used to profit from foie gras,” he adds. “I was cooking about 20kg a week. As an ingredient, it’s very versatile. It’s delicious. But it involves so much torture that, in a modern society, there is no place for it. As a species, we are better than that. The human race doesn’t need to torture an animal for its delicacy. That’s in the past.”
Production of foie gras has been banned in the UK since 2006. Earlier this year, it looked as though we might finally take the lead among European countries and outlaw the trade in it, too. Polls have suggested that the British public is overwhelmingly in favour of such a move. An import ban was part of the Conservative’s proposed Animals Abroad Bill. It looked like part of the broader effort by the Zac Goldsmithcarrie Johnson wing of the Conservatives to prove Brexit might have advantages for animal welfare. Last year, Lord Goldsmith described foie gras as “unbearably barbaric”, in response to Fortnum & Mason announcing they would no longer stock “torture in a tin”.
But those ambitions ran into trouble last month, when it was announced that, along with fur, foie gras would be exempted from the bill; members of the Cabinet had objected, led by Jacob Rees-mogg, for whom it interfered with personal choice, but others had their reasons, too. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis thought it might have risked inconsistent rules with Northern Ireland. Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, has previously said he doesn’t see why he ought to have to travel to enjoy his favourite foodstuffs.
“I’m extremely disappointed,” says Abigail Penny, executive director of Animal Rights UK. “What’s upsetting is that with a ban there comes the opportunity for the Government to set a really strong precedent and stay true to their word. At the moment, the UK is condoning cruelty. It’s completely hypocritical and unjustifiable to be profiting from these practices. Millions of animals are suffering for an abhorrent product, so disgusting that it is a crime to produce it in the UK. So why are we allowing it to be sold in our shops?”
Still, she is hopeful this is only a minor bump in the road. “This is backed by the British public,” she says. “There’s no way [this ban] will not eventually happen.”
In some senses, Rees-mogg and co are part of a tradition. As with almost everything in food, the argument about foie gras has always been in part political. For decades, it served as a kind of litmus test for self-professed gourmets. On the side of foie gras were the sensuous, the hedonistic, the lovers of sex. The French, in other words. The critic AA Gill said he would rather grow another chin than forgo a single spoon of it. Against it railed Peta, vegetarians and other humourless forces.
But its fans have been losing for decades. As Britain becomes more vegetarian, or even vegan, and sustainability has become more central to the conversation around meat, foie gras has shed any rebellious glamour it might once have had. Restaurants have swapped it for chicken liver parfait, or done away with those altogether. Even many of the places that sell it were not keen to defend it in print.
Experiments have been made with alternatives. At Christmas, Waitrose sells a “Faux Gras”, made with cream and goose liver from “humanely reared” birds on British farms. For the true defenders, however, these alternatives are moot. One argument is anatomical. While the thought of a tube down the throat is appalling to humans with gag reflexes, ducks and geese are made differently. In a 5,000-word essay for the website Serious Eats in 2014, the American food writer J Kenji Lopez-alt concluded that, as horrific as the metal tubes down the animals’ throats might look – especially in upsetting videos distributed by animal rights activists – this was a misunderstanding of the birds’ physiology.
After visiting a farm in Hudson Valley, New York, one of the biggest foie gras producers in the US, Kenji concluded foie gras was not inherently unethical, compared with other forms of meat production. Before the gavage, he wrote, many of these birds enjoyed far higher standards of welfare than other animals reared for meat. Even during the gavage, they were fed using rubber tubes instead of metal ones, which they didn’t seem to mind as much.
“If you are against the confinement, slaughter, and eating of all animals, then that’s a different argument to be had at a different time,” he wrote. “But to single out foie gras as the worst of the worst is misguided at best, and downright manipulative at worst.”
Even after the predictable outcry in response, he stuck to his guns in a follow-up piece. “The proper thing to do is ban the practice, not the product,” he wrote, arguing that banning sweatshop factory conditions was different from banning shoes.
Victor Garvey, the owner of SOLA, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Soho, which serves foie gras as part of a tasting menu, agrees. “The banning of foie gras is a war on an upper-middle class that doesn’t exist,” he says. “It’s much more about people not liking fancy continental European stuff than caring about animals. If it were about animals, we’d make battery chicken and beef illegal. But imagine if we made halal meat illegal. It would be a human rights crisis.
“You cannot say you’re OK with eating bog-standard supermarket chicken or chicken from a chicken shop and then advocate animal rights when talking about foie gras. Foie gras is a delicious luxury. I don’t know why we would deprive ourselves of it.”
It remains one of the most emotive issues in food. I suspect that where you stand on an outright ban will depend as much on where you stand on other topics as on your view on foie gras specifically. Either way, sitting vaguely queasy at my desk, I’m not sure I’ll be having it for lunch again soon. Or at least not on a Monday.
‘Foie gras is a delicious luxury – why would we deprive ourselves of it?’