My ancestors clawed their way to the top of the food chain, and I intend to stay there.

[madbaker]

Anthony Bourdain's definition of foie gras:

The fattened liver of a goose or duck. Unfortunately, an endangered menu item with the advent of angry, twisted, humorless, anti-cruelty activists who've never had any kind of good sex or laughed heartily at a joke in their whole miserable lives and who are currently threatening and terrorizing chefs and their families to get the stuff banned. Likely to disappear from tables outside France in our lifetimes.

And now, Chicago is preparing to vote on banning its sale this month.
You think Bourdain is exaggerating? Didier Durand, the chef at Cyrano's Bistrot, spoke against the proposed ban. That night, his restaurant had a window smashed and its door smeared with fake blood.

Frickin' PETAphiles. Maybe we should use them as a foie gras source instead...

Comments

[mad-duchess.livejournal.com]

I agree--I too will not eat veal, foie gras, or (for other reasons) shark fin anything. In fact, just seeing them on a menu is enough to make me skip that restaurant in the future. I realize all factory farming and commercial fishing is intrinsically inhumane, but there's just something particularly distasteful these processes. It makes me wonder what kind of sadistic bastard came up with the idea in the first place.

[loup_noir]

Ditto. I haven't eaten veal in decades. Fois gras, I've never eaten and won't because of the way the animals are raised. (Besides, I like geese as critters. They have loads of personality -- unlike chickens or sheep or cows or fish. And, yes, I have been around all of the above.)

At various points in my life, I've been an almost-vegetarian (meaning I still ate chicken) and I could become a vegetarian; however, himself loves meat, although he was willing to eat a heavily vegetarian diet for years with me.

[blkeagl.livejournal.com]

It's a practice that began in ancient Egypt.

[scendan.livejournal.com]

Now shark fin I think is basically evil, since sharks are not a commercially grown product, and so shark fin soup is decimating whole populations of wild sharks, conceivably past recovery. So not only is it a nasty practice (hauling the sharks in, lopping fins off only, and tossing them back to die), but it's not one in which the animals are being cultivated in a way that will keep the population overall healthy. At least with foie gras and veal, you're doing semi-horrid things to a captive population of domesticated animals. Doesn't make it nicer for the individual animal, but at least it's not playing merry hell with a wild population's overall species health.

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

And I'm pretty much in agreement in regards to shark fin. And tiger gall bladders, and other suchlike.