The City of Big Livers

Hard to believe the city that works, Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago, has become a hotbed of anti foie gras agitation. A few  things seem notable in this contretemps:
The movement to ban foie gras seems to have as much to do with the context of the end product as the cruel process, motivated as much by a resentment of the likes of Alain Ducasse and his patrons as it is by a love of geeese.  From a utiltarian standpoint of reducing the amount of suffering in the world, banning chicken would seem to do much more good. The life of a Tyson's chicken does not seem appreciably pleasanter than that of a foie gras goose, and there are a lot more of them, but chicken fingers are not the snack of plutocrats.
Also, intentionally or not, lobbying for a ban suggests that Chicago is the kind of town where foie gras will be thrust upon you at  every turn. Certainly Chicago is a well-regarded dining destination, but proposing a ban on foie gras suggests that there are lobes of goose liver lurking behind every Old Style sign. Like the topless squeegee scandal in Canada in the late 90s, this is the kind of crisis that will have some folks calling their travel agents. If I were on the chamber of commerce of some sort of Southwest Airlines kind of town, like Manchester, New Hampshire, or Jacksonville, Florida, I would loudly call for a foie gras ban, sit back, and wait for hotel reservations to spike.
In general, anti-foie gras sentiment seems to function as part of a moral calculus I am calling the whippet. In real life, ski mountaineering in particular, you attach a whippet to your ski pole as a device that, in theory, will allow you to stop yourself from sliding down a glacier if you fall. In moral issues, the whippet is the opposite of a slippery slope, in that it demarcates the boundary between what is acceptable, and what is not. Defining foie gras as outside the pale of what you are willing to eat reinforces the idea that everything uphill of that point on the slope is ok. In other words, sentiment against foie gras works, perversely, to justify other kinds of animal consumption. I say this as a consumer of all kind of meats, including foie gras, (the latter limited as much by budget and geography as anything else). In sum, from here, it looks like it's about everything but the goose.

Comments

[fat asian baby]

the sort of scary/sad/pathetic/absurd thing is that i tried to give up foie gras. i really did. but for some reason i, a lowly grad student, live a life in which foie gras is thrust in my face often enough in situations in which i'd be hard pressed to gracefully turn it down that i've reluctantly given up the giving it up entirely. oh and it tastes pretty damn good too.

[pbmath]

i like the Whippet idea. i think you'd need to explain why you're placing the whippet where you are though.

my train-of-thought response to this entry is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/pbmath/640069.html

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