FOIE GRAS RETURNS TO CALIFORNIA MENUS

FROM THE OREGONIAN
Foie gras returns to the menu in California

The days of liver-crazed Californians darkening Portland’s door have come to an end.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled Wednesday that the state’s two-year-old ban on foie gras — the fatty liver of force-fed ducks and geese — was unconstitutional.

Amid concerns that traditional foie gras production methods were inhumane, California lawmakers passed the ban in 2004, though it wasn’t enforced until 2012. In the wake of the law’s enactment, at least one Portland food blog offered visiting Californians a guide to Portland restaurants offering foie gras.

Last year, courts rejected a separate argument that the ban interfered with interstate commerce. On Wednesday, Wilson ruled that the law was unconstitutional because it conflicted with an existing federal law that regulates poultry products.

In his 15-page ruling, Wilson acknowledged the fraught nature of the debate.

The ban “touches upon a topic impacting gourmands’ stomachs and animal-rights activists’ hearts,” he wrote.

The ban was challenged by Hudson Valley Foie Gras of New York, Hot’s Restaurant Group in California and the trade organization Association des Eleveurs de Canards et d’Oies du Quebec.

On Twitter, California chefs took to celebrating the law, some comparing it to the lifting of Prohibition in 1933.

Ken Frank of Napa’s La Toque told the SF Chronicle he planned to put foie gras back on the menu that night.

“All of my sous chefs are jumping up and down,” Frank said. “This means chefs in California can cook with their favorite ingredient, just like chefs everywhere else in the world.”

Celebrity chef Ludo Lefebvre told the Los Angeles Times that foie gras would appear on the menus at his two Los Angeles restaurants as soon as Friday.

“I know the people of California have missed their foie,” Lefebvre said. “Speaking as a French chef, it is an important ingredient and part of the legacy of French cooking, so I am thrilled to be able to add it to the menus of Petit Trois and Trois Mec.”

A coalition of animal rights groups including the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Humane Society, has promised to appeal.

“The state clearly has the right to ban the sale of the products of animal cruelty, and we expect the 9th Circuit will uphold this law, as it did in the previous round of litigation,” the group wrote in a statement. “We are asking the California attorney general to file an immediate appeal.”

In a statement, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) objected to the celebratory mood among chefs.

“Foie gras is French for ‘fatty liver,’ and ‘fathead’ is the American word for the shameless chefs who actually need a law to make them stop serving the swollen, near-bursting organ of a cruelly force-fed bird,” the organization wrote in a press statement.

“A line will be drawn in the sand outside any restaurant that goes back to serving this ‘torture in a tin.’ Whoever crosses that line identifies themselves with gluttony that cannot control itself even to the point of torturing animals.”

— Michael Russell
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Will it return to kosher menus, too?

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