California Über Alles

At recent meals in California you've not been able to escape the imminent foie gras ban. Two dishes out of five at a recent meal at La Folie (un-reviewed since I've written about them several times, but still my favourite restaurant in San Francisco - how will chef Passot make those delicious little beef and foie gras burgers now?); two out of seven at Manresa. California has been getting foie while the getting is still good.

This article at Eater has the views of several chefs on the upcoming ban. Shame Keller wasn't a bit less corporate in his response but Michael Chiarello is a star and right on the money. He says: "It's a decision based on agronomics not intelligence. If we took the amount of attention and money put to this, and applied it to something more significant, we'd make a gigantic impact to help Americans."

I visited a chateau in the Dordogne region of France where foie gras was being made when I was a kid - on a school trip no less - and while it was weird to see the la gavage feeding process my abiding memory is that the birds didn't actually seem that unhappy as they were force fed via a sort of scoop arrangement. Ok, it was a chateau with a little production rather than a mass-production farm and I don't doubt it was on the more picturesque side of the equation but still, the ducks came willingly enough, got (over)fed and then waddled off. Consequently I've never been so tied to the idea of foie as uncommonly cruel, even during my vegetarian years (let us not forget however that all meat production is cruel to an extent - you seriously don't want to spend any time at an abattoir or, as I did in an early part of my career, even on factory farms). 

Anyway, the ban approaches (July 1st it kicks in) and there seems to be little that Californians have the will to do about it (unlike in Chicago where a similar ban was short lived). In the UK interest in a ban still seems low and the trend a couple of years ago towards ad libitum ethical foie seems to have died out, presumably due to the low quality of the end product. More concerning will be whether the ban spreads in the USA. 

Mellow out or you will pay...