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Foie pas
Mark Caro makes it easy to take sides.
It was the Jews.
There are a lot of facts crammed into Mark Caro’s The Foie Gras Wars (Simon & Schuster, $25), but for this Jewish, left-leaning, increasingly animal-empathetic food writer, the fact that the Yids in the Renaissance played a crucial role in spreading foie gras was hardest to swallow. Caro details how kosher laws led my people to rely on poultry fat, which led to them to raise pudgy geese, which led to an expertise in foie gras that they took with them all over the world, including New York, where the country’s premier foie gras farm is based, owned and operated by an Israeli. And here I thought I was an innocent bystander.
Innocence is relative, I guess. As one of TOC’s restaurant critics, I’m about as guilty of promoting foie gras as you can get. Even if the delicacy never makes it into a single article I write, I’m still hyping restaurants and all of the mindless gluttony that goes on in them. Was I kidding myself that abstaining from foie gras—both eating it and writing about it—could put me on the right side of the issue? Yes.
But what side is that exactly? Over the course of reading Wars there were times I wasn’t certain. The delicacy made of fatty goose liver—controversial because the birds must be force-fed to procure the properly swollen liver—made waves in Chicago in 2006 when the City Council banned restaurants from serving it (a ban that was later repealed). Caro ensures that neither side sits on higher moral ground and does an admirable job sharing the stories of foie supporters.
He tells of Guillermo Gonzalez, the El Salvadoran farmer who left his war-torn country in the ’80s and started Sonoma Foie Gras in California, only to have his farm repeatedly broken into by renegade activists. He spends time with Izzy Yanay, that Israeli farmer, who comes off as charming (in a Don Knotts kind of way) and sympathetic to the birds—or at least as sympathetic as somebody who makes a living killing these birds can be. Even the history of foie—my Jewish guilt about Jewish involvement notwithstanding—helps put the food’s consumption into a welcome, logical context.
And Caro is equally evenhanded with the opponents of foie. But, unfortunately for them, no amount of balance can soften the edges of some animal-rights activists’ malicious crimes. Nor can it make Ald. Joe Moore (49th) look any less shameless. Then again, balance is equally helpless when it comes to making foie-distributor Ariane Daguin sound any less idiotic. “If you want to stop all cruelty, that means you want to stop all slaughterhouse activity,” she says. Cruelty is apparently something she isn’t ashamed of promoting.
Caro is as fair as a Chicago Tribune reporter like him should be. In doing so he deftly points out the thing that’s missing from the debate, the thing that would give it the push it needs to rise to the level of intellectual debates such as Pepsi versus Coke: a justifiable reason to continue eating the stuff. Because at the end of the book, the pro foies argument for continuing the practice still boils down to taste. Flavor. The flan-like consistency.
And that makes it easy to pick sides. Just look at those foie-toting Jews now: They’re using Crisco, and they’re doing just fine.
