Craving foie gras? Look beyond Stephen Starr

Striped Bass Restaurant and others by restaurateur Stephen Starr will no longer serve foie gras. Starr removed the item from menus after criticism.

If you haven't tried the foie gras torchon at the Striped Bass or foie gras and fig empanadas at Alma de Cuba, your window of opportunity has just closed.

Stephen Starr, owner of 11 of the city's premiere restaurants, has removed the French delicacy, a fattened duck or goose liver, from his Philadelphia menus due to what he has called "incredible amount of protest."

Animal welfare activists contend that the process to make foie gras - a force-feeding of moulard ducks through a funnel placed down their throats - is inhumane.

The duck livers expand to six times their ordinary size, giving the meat a silky texture that can cost more than $10 an ounce at such upscale restaurants as Le Bec Fin, which serves both compote and ravioli stuffed with foie gras.

"It's barbaric," City Councilman Jack Kelly said. "I have no problem with foie gras itself, but I do have a problem with the way it's being made through the torture of these poor creatures, and I think it has to be stopped."

Kelly introduced legislation to the city mid-last year to ban the meat from all of the city's restaurants, calling the force-feeding "torture." He is joined by Assemblyman Michael Panter from New Jersey, who drafted legislation to the same effect for that state in October 2006.

"Putting an end to the outright torture of innocent creatures has to take precedence," Panter said. "In some cases, the metal pipe [down the duck's throat] chokes [it] to death on its own blood. Others choke on their own vomit and die."

A bill to ban foie gras production is also before the legislature in Massachusetts. It follows Chicago's May 2006 ban on the meat and California's 2004 bill, which set a 2012 deadline to cease all production and sale.

Starr is not the first Philadelphia restaurateur to ban foie gras. Astral Plane, White Dog Cafe, Blarney South and six others have also stopped serving foie gras over the past two years.

Kelly approves of Starr's decision.

"I was delighted to hear that there are some restaurateurs that have really looked at the situation and tried to correct something that should be changed, to treat the ducks fairly," Kelly said.

Representatives at Farm Sanctuary, the leading animal safety in farming group, are also optimistic about Starr's self-imposed ban. Farm Sanctuary's Ban Foie Gras representatives said that they hope others nationwide will follow Starr's lead, including chefs and restaurant owners Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse.

Comments (1)

While Starr is perfectly free to pull whatever craziness he wants in his restaurants, the fact remains that the Chicago and California bans are nothing more and nothing less than utter stupidity on the part of moronic politicians pandering to the most vocally insane members of their constituency. I don't care if the duck that I'm eating had a good life or not. It's a duck. Its brain is the size of my thumb, and I don't feel any guiltier about eating it than I do about squashing cockroaches or setting mousetraps. Anyone who falls into the fallacy of believing that it is somehow morally better to take pains to assure your food was happy and self-satisfied in its previous life is missing the point completely. It doesn't matter how you kill a duck. You're still killing it and you're still eating it. Whether it dies by suffocation or by having its neck broken, it's still just as dead, and no one cares. Ducks are not sentient beings. They are lower creatures that we have found to be tasty. Saying that it is morally abhorrent to kill a duck in a certain way is nonsensical. Ducks are ducks. If killing them one way is wrong, then killing them any way is wrong. And if killing ducks is wrong, then eating meat is wrong. Congratulations! You're now an animal-rights lunatic. You are free, and I daresay obligated, to cast of the spoils of modern civilization. We have acrued these spoils in no small part to what I'm sure you'd call the 'enslavement' of lower creatures for food, labor, and raw materials, and if we had taken the time to assure that our dinner was comfortable, that our pack-animals self-satisfied, and that our tent-poles, oars, and shovels came from creatures who lived a pampered life, I guarantee you, in fact, I would stake my reputation on the assertion that if all of that had been the case, the human race would either be up in the treetops throwing feces at each other, or better yet, extinct for lack of shelter, nurishment, and intellectual stimulation, which, starting from the first great human thinkers who came up with a better way to kill that mammoth have over the ages refined and reimagined tools, writing systems, cultures, iPods, cell phones, and indoor plumbing. If you say that killing ducks in a certain way is wrong because it causes them suffering, and if you insist that the suffering of a duck is morally relevant to a human moral actor, you must accept that the human moral actor must value the life of the duck, and as such cannot condone its killing for any purpose. If you accept this, then you also accept that the domestication of animals to perform what are arguably uncomfortable tasks is equally abhorrent, and you must accept that the machinery of human civilization has always been oiled with the blood of innocent animals, and you must accept that that is wrong. If you accept those things, you are nothing more and nothing less than a self-loathing idiot. Save us some headaches and jump of a bridge. Your corpse might start an artificial reef, and help the fishes.

Comments are closed for this item.