Schloss for the Gander
In a video bemoaning food nannies, Baylen Linnekin, who is a good guy and whose writing I enjoy, begs a question. He declares NYC’s bans on trans fats and foie gras to be the same kind of lamentable “Nanny State” restriction. This is surely true if geese are like lipids and smearing pans or mixing foodstuffs with fats is like forcing food down the throats of living birds. But if they’re not, we have issues.
I’m not sure how bad gavage actually is – more on that in a moment – but I’m sure it’s not like adding Crisco to a Mixmaster. Accounts differ on how traumatic the force-feeding itself is – the ones The Google takes me to this evening are mostly by gourmands and somewhat self-interested. Michael Ruhlman quotes Culinary Institute of America chef Eve Felder describing the force-feeding of ducks as practically cuddle time. Curiously, Felder begins her letter by declaring,
My philosophy in most everything is that one has to experience what another person (or animal) is experiencing prior to making an informed judgement.
While she then describes practicing gavage, she doesn’t describe undergoing it. Perhaps she doesn’t yet consider her judgment informed.
In a post from 2006, Doctor Vino allows that, on the artisinal foie-gras farm he visited,
Whether or not having a feed tube shoved down the throat causes pain to the birds, the fact that they are kept in the dark for this last month of their lives, fed four times a day and rapidly put on weight cannot be pleasant.
In sum, on the farm in question, the geese start out with a life which would please any “free-range” meat-production booster, but end their days under conditions resembling a miniaturized factory farm.
The defense of Doctor Vino and several of his commenters amounts to Tu Quoque-er:
Back in America, what’s motivating the foie gras protesters and the legislators? Is foie gras production really any different than the inhumane conditions that exist for veal? Or other livestock from poultry to hogs to cattle? (As vividly shown in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation among other places) Will osso buco be coming into the sights of legislators?
Probably not. The trouble with arguments that suggest foie gras is the thin edge of the wedge is that it is just so thin–the amount of foie gras consumed in America is miniscule. And that’s a part of what appeals to activists and legislators alike: it’s easier to take on the three American producers of foie gras than it is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
He’s got a small point. But if factory farming and gratuitous cruelty to animals is wrong, and if gavage amounts to gratuitous cruelty, then a ban on foie-gras production constitutes an incremental improvement in animal welfare. A “marginal revolution,” if you will. (And of course, animal-rights groups, love ‘em or hate ‘em, do try to ban factory farming.)
When it comes to animal rights and their vindication, I’m an incrementalist (in addition to being weak about being “the change I want to see“). I believe like Hayek that we should be informed by traditional cultural practices without being bewitched by them.
But there’s simply no question that the ethical case for banning foie gras is not the same as the ethical case for banning trans fats. With foie gras, the impulse is to limit perceived cruelty by one to another. With trans fats, it’s to substitute a lawmaker’s judgment over what one does to one’s own person. I don’t have to believe a goose has the same rights I do, or Lakhdar Boumediene has, but it may well have the right not to be force-fed for a month in a pen in the dark. I’m open to discussing some other process than City-Council hearings by which the culture might decide to vindicate that right (or not). I’m open to arguments that, on one side, since waterfowl have no gag reflex, goose/duck gavage is not so awful, and on the other side that Spanish farmers have already figured out how to produce cruelty-free foie gras. But foie-gras bans resemble trans-fat bans about as much as watching dirty videos resembles having an affair.
Comment by Travis —
June 21, 2008 @ 12:24 am
I tried foie gras, and thought it tasted like avocado, except with a disgusting aftertaste. Maybe it was poor quality, or prepared wrong, but I really don’t think I’ll ever try it again.
Comment by mnuez —
June 21, 2008 @ 1:02 am
The experience I had in France is that they fed the ducks a warm mash of corn, water and duck fat that was administered through a funnel.
The funnel had a wire in it that helped to expedite the mash from the sides and through the tube. The wire moved when you pressed a peddle with your foot. Sort of like a sewing machine.
I sat in a comfortable small straw lined corral with 6 ducks in 6 corrals on a small stool. The warm mash was poured into the funnel. I held the duck under one of my legs and extended its’ neck upwards
She DID experience it! And it was COMFORTABLE!
As for your writeup on The Art of The Possible about porn and adultery… eh. I mean there are comparisons between lots of things (the sky is blue and when you hold your breath you are too) so one really needs to get at exactly what people mean by adultery being “wrong” before one decides whether jerking to porn is some sort of lower-level similar “wrong”.
In all though, there’s really no comparison between the trans-fats:foie gras comparison and the porno:adultery comparison.
Or there might be.
But I don’t so.
Selah.
mnuez
Comment by Skip Oliva —
June 21, 2008 @ 11:21 am
“I don’t have to believe a goose has the same rights I do, or Lakhdar Boumediene has, but it may well have the right not to be force-fed for a month in a pen in the dark.”
Seems the question is more, “Does Jim Henley have the right to stop someone from force feeding a goose because he finds it distasteful?” I’m inclined to say no, Jim doesn’t have that “right,” especially since it’s common practice to, well, slaughter and eat geese.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 21, 2008 @ 11:29 am
Skip, you’re engaging in the same question-begging Baylen did, only less appealingly. Are you basically an Objectivist? That would explain the blind spots in your response.
Comment by cavjam —
June 21, 2008 @ 11:40 am
As an incrementalist myself, I say we begin the journey by not atomizing children so still more billions can be force-fed to the CEO of Exxon, a man whose carcass’ pinworms alone would surely feed half of Micronesia for a generation. Then we can move toward the ultimate goal of trapping cockroaches to release them in their natural habitat – the Gilt Halls of Congress. Priorities, my friends.
Comment by b-psycho —
June 21, 2008 @ 11:44 am
I like meat. It’s tasty. Thus, I personally don’t care what goes on with my meat, as long as it doesn’t result in its contamination. I say that as an eater, not as any sort of moral statement. No, I am not an Objectivist, in fact I’m one of the rare libertarians that think Objectivists are kinda kooky.
Considering what “foie gras” really is, I don’t eat it. Why bother when there’s all that other tasty duck meat surrounding it? Strikes me as just a snobby version of eating livers & gizzards at a fried chicken place, the actual meat is so much better, I don’t get the preference.
Comment by Timothy —
June 22, 2008 @ 12:16 am
Jim, you have not stopped to consider that geese are, as a species, irremediably evil and that they, therefore, have this coming.
Comment by Jackmormon —
June 22, 2008 @ 8:37 pm
Foie gras is delicious.
Comment by absence of something —
June 23, 2008 @ 4:06 am
yeah, but not that much more delicious than plain old goose liver pate that it warrants consumption. It’s a small thing to forego, and yes it only results in a small improvement in animal welfare, but a small improvement is still an improvement.
Theres more than one way to raise and slaughter a goose, or pig, sheep, chicken or cow – i find a happy beast is a tastier beast, and it bothers my conscience less if i know what i’m eating has spent a fulsome life gambolling freely in the sunlit pasture before being quickly dispatched with as little stress as possible, preferrably to the strains of the Berlin philharmonic
Comment by alkali —
June 23, 2008 @ 10:43 am
I don’t think I’d like to be fed with a tube down my throat; at the same time, I don’t think I’d like to swallow a live fish in one go, and yet geese are pretty happy with that.
All things considered, I think it would be hard to make the case that gavage feeding is measurably worse than the many other things we do to the animals we raise for consumption. To my mind, this makes the foie gras ban more an example of substituted judgment motivated by silly ressentiment (I decry your pate while happily munching my chicken nuggets!) than a real effort to do anything about cruelty to livestock.