Foie Wars

"It's the same with spring lambs," claims Jorgensen of Two Chefs. "We take them away from their mothers and kill them at 25 days old. Does that go under animal cruelty as much as foie gras? I don't know. It's a very tricky thing." Talula's Curto expresses the oft-repeated fear that "If you start with foie gras, what's next? Everything that's an animal." Indeed other chefs reference abusive treatment of pigs, cows, calves (for veal), pheasants, quail, farm-raised fish, and, most of all, chickens. Says Oudin of Pascal's on Ponce: "To define animal cruelty can be subjective and hypocritical. The production of foie gras is tightly controlled by the authorities, much more so than the chicken industry. How many people have seen the 'manufacture' of a chicken? How many will still eat chicken after that?" Van Aken wonders, "How capable are we of saying what is humane killing? We certainly have not been effective of this within our own species."

The dozen toques who spoke with New Times were all careful to characterize themselves as conscientious carnivores. The force-feeding issue, therefore, has a tendency to make them a bit defensive. "I like our planet," says Ortanique's Hutson. "I care about the world that my son will inherit," says Bloise of Wish. "I'm not a horrible person," says Curto, "but I'm a chef, and it's foie gras, a wonderful thing." Many, like Giancarla Bodoni (Escopazzo, South Beach), emphasize their use of free-range, grass-fed, or organic meats, "not animals that are cooped up in overcrowded pens, who succumb to disease and therefore have to be treated with antibiotics and steroids." And most of our culinarians have dealt with food controversies before.

"I was an early pioneer in the boycott of bluefin tuna and swordfish," recalls Jonathan Eismann of Lincoln Road's seafood-based Pacific Time. "I didn't serve tuna for three years, which was very difficult for us." Bloise bypasses "Chilean sea bass, swordfish from the not-yet-fully recuperated South Atlantic population, and farm-raised salmon." Hutson doesn't use Chilean sea bass, either, "or put billfish on the menu." Sounds painless enough to do without a few fish, but according to Chispa's Haas, that's not always the case: "You stop serving something because of a vocal minority, but ultimately it's the buying majority that's going to dictate whether you stay in business. When I took Chilean sea bass off the menu at Baleen, customers were up in arms about not having it. I thought I was going to get burned in effigy in the parking lot."

Yet resisting sea bass or farm-raised salmon, or even tender veal scaloppine is one thing. Forgoing foie gras, one of the consummate pleasures of the table, is, as Michy's Bernstein says, "like quitting tobacco" — or, as Bodoni prefers to put it, "like a child going to an ice-cream store and discovering that their favorite flavor is no longer served." She should know, because Giancarla was the first South Florida chef (and still one of just a few) to eliminate foie gras from her menu. "I stopped serving it at Escopazzo about one and a half years ago," she explains. "The decision wasn't an easy one, as our business is driven by what the market expects of us, and foie gras was one of my specialty dishes. Unfortunately the demand for foie gras has led the producers to handle their animals in such a way that meets those demands, but at an inhumane cost to the animals."

Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer and co-author Jim Mason, in their book The Way We Eat, ask whether callous farming practices are too high a price to pay for the provision of cheap food to the masses. In the foie gras debate, the question of cruelty concerns a luxury item lapped up almost exclusively by the affluent. Bernstein, however, thinks such distinctions should not be made. "Isn't eating any animal a luxury?" Besides, she adds, "Foie gras is part of something much larger than just an appetizer worth twenty bucks. It has given work to people, fed families, helped cities, and been part of cultures for a long, long time."

About 5000 years, more or less. Ancient Egyptians are credited with discovering the delectability of domesticated duck and goose livers. Noting that the birds would gorge themselves prior to long migratory flights and use their livers to store the protein, the Egyptians mimicked this instinct by force-feeding them, albeit in lesser quantities than today. In the Roman Empire, geese were stuffed with fresh figs (which somehow seems gustatorially kinder than corn mush), and after slaughter, the fatted livers were plunged into a bath of milk and honey to further swell and flavor them. The fact that certain palmipeds have a genetic inclination to binge leads some people to proclaim force-feeding to be the extension of a natural physiological process, not a pathological one. Others argue that no bird would gluttonize itself to anywhere near the state brought on by gavage, and that the species of duck used in foie gras production neither migrates nor overeats.