Foie Gras, Served in 1k Restaurants in NYC, Is Banned
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We're talking about organically farmed birds that are kept such that they are fattened up and delicious (aka. in good health) in a way that is the complete opposite of the dystopian life of a chicken bred in cage that needs antibiotics just to survive their miserable life long enough to be slaughtered.
Banning Kentucky fried chicken or other fast food chains would be considered ludicrous. So, is this.
I eat meat and chicken but I'm well aware where it came from. I've had foie gras a couple of times. Not crazy about it but I appreciate it.
Same would go for ie Moet champagne, one can afford it but you definitely notice the price.
A fatty liver is by definition the opposite of good health.
There is such a thing a thing as more natural "animal friendly" foie gras which apparently takes advantage of geese's natural instinct to gorge themselves before migration, which results in a slightly enlarged liver, but still much smaller than the traditional foie gras. I've never been able to find any in a restaurant, though, so I just avoid foie gras and the restaurants that serve it.
However, foie gras can never be done humanely, it's a horrible practice where the animal has to suffer in order for a diner to have 5 minutes of gastronomic enjoyment.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_s_surprising_foie_gras_...
But anyway, I hope this torturous practice comes to an end worldwide.
This ban seems rather hypocritical to me given the atrocities happening in mass meat production.
While there are absolutely terrible things happening in Foie Gras production (I would never, ever buy any products from Hungary, as a for example) the really good stuff is raised quite humanely.[1]
To me this just looks like an attempt for quick political gain without any advantage to any factory raised animal (which, for the record, I regard as one of our biggest moral failings as humans).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/11/ethical-f...
Right by which metric?
Not anymore; stopped about three years back. It was difficult personally after I became a parent. The rest of my family are meat and fish eaters and I keep out of their preferences.
This can only be done in phases. Raise awareness, ban instances of extreme cruelty, support substitutes etc. I'm very optimistic - Impossible burgers and sandwiches are quite close to the real thing and if prices come down (and we have more choices and availability) it could be a guilt-free, and even healthier alternative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy#Statutor...
Animal tested products are horrible on animals. For example, they test that a soap or a shampoo doesn't irritate eyes too much by putting a concentrated form of the product on some animal's eye over and over again, sometimes rendering them blind. And that's just the beginning. It's just horrible.
Milk doesn't kill cows, but cows can only produce milk after giving birth. You are smart enough to figure out the rest of the story: cows are forced to give birth to calves, the calves are "taken away", and the milk is harvested. The animals get traumatized in the process, crying for days.
Chicken eggs should not require us to kill, but in practice if a male chick is born they're often "sacrificed" (often by being ground alive). The survivors spend their lives in a cage.
But changing the mass meat market is sadly a lot harder than changing the market for such a specialty item. Avoiding restaurants that serve meat is a lot harder than avoiding restaurants that serve foie gras. I hope it's a step in the right direction and we'll create better standards for how we treat animals.
But it reads much better in the original French.
One could certainly make a case for banning animal slaughter, but I suppose it would be practical only after we have good meat substitutes.
But in the meantime we could perhaps ban wanton cruelty such as Foie Gras. I'll add veal too to the list now.
We're not in a survival situation, we have options that don't involve killing animals whereas animals do not, and we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other.
Also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggie-cat-food/
> Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.
Unlike cats, we can survive without meat.
I suppose I should have written a proper more detailed comment, I absolutely do believe that humans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and definitely shouldn’t be doing cruel things to living creatures because we do know better and can do better. But nature is still a pretty messed up place sometimes.
You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)
Certainly, IMHO. While many animals show varying levels of compassion, we are capable of doing that on a coordinated, global scale; which is unique.
We are also omnivores that don't need to eat meat to survive. Maybe for instance dolphins can also reason about what they do, I don't know. But their biology gives them less choice.
Also humans now eat so much meat that the mammals we breed for food are 15 times as much biomass as all wild mammals combined. It's almost irrelevant what other mammals do, there are so few of them.
Even so, it's a personal choice. It happens that I made a choice to be vegetarian, but that was only five weeks ago... Other people make their choice. But it's different from the case of other animals killing for food.
Milk and egg production still involve animals being killed for meat though e.g. female diary cows are killed for meat when they stop producing enough milk after a few years and males from diary cows are killed within a month of being born as veal.
- Male chickens are usually ground up alive within a day of being born because they're not economical to keep for meat. Locally kept chickens still feed into this supply and demand as the egg laying hens have to come from somewhere.
- Egg laying chickens can live for about 8 years but are usually killed after 2 years when they stop producing as many eggs. This happens at free range farms too.
- Also, free range doesn't mean what most people think it does e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range#Free-range_poultry "In the United States, the USDA free range regulations currently apply only to poultry and indicate that the animal has been allowed access to the outside.[3] The USDA regulations do not specify the quality or size of the outside range nor the duration of time an animal must have access to the outside.[4] ... Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means"
> since they lay eggs most days whether you eat them or not and if you don’t use them, they would rot or attract rodents.
We bred chickens to lay eggs that often though (wild chickens lay about 10 eggs a year whereas factory chickens lay about 300 which is so much it damages their health) and for them to leave their eggs unprotected (they've been bred to not "brood"). They're forced into this cycle.
That’s why I said local. I grew up in the country and lots of people had a few chickens. They run around freely and are not “farmed”. They’re almost pets. They lay eggs all the time, so there’s nothing wrong with eating those eggs.
As for where the hens come from, this is how my parents got hens when they kept chickens a long time ago: go to your neighbour with a rooster and say “hey, neighbour, could I get some chicks next time you have some? Thanks”
> Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States
I don’t live in the US though.
> We bred chickens to lay eggs that often
Ok, but now that they do, what are we to do? Slaughter all the non-farmed free range chickens to find some wild ones? The damage is done, what’s wrong with giving them good lives and enjoying their abandoned eggs?
- Do they let the chickens live until they die of natural causes? Or do they kill them before this?
If you have too many adult roosters running around, they act like assholes and start fighting, pecking eggs, and other nastiness, so you don't want to keep them.
Meat chickens are usually mixed sex, as they are bred to grow so quickly that you slaughter them after only two or three months.
Historically, people would castrate male chicks and raise them as capons for eating, but that's become rather niche.
I'm vegan, and on my honeymoon we went to a place where hens ran around free in the villages and would crawl underneath bushes to sleep for the night. Even I wouldn't see any ethical problems with humans grabbing unfertilized eggs they found under bushes each morning, but as I said, how many people would that feed?
It's the same as me having much less of a problem with hunting than I do factory farming, because a bullet and instant death, or at least within a couple of minutes, is a much better life for the animal than factory farming. But if we limited meat eating to only that being hunted, people would get to eat a small fraction of the meat they eat today.
Or rather, price would probably be so high that only the most well-off could afford the eggs and meat in that world. If you're in that group you might still get eggs and meat, otherwise not. Still, people who use these two examples as ethical ways of getting eggs and meat must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
Also, as of 2013, 98% of hens in the US was in cages, and 2% free-range:
https://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/5235021/Statistics-Laying-hens...
In the EU, it was 60% cage, 25% barn, 12% free-range, and 3% organic. At least for Sweden, free-range can still be indoors, but organic requires access to the outside. So even moving only to current free-range eggs would mean a drastic reduction of consumption.
> how many people would that feed?
Where I grew up, lots of people had a few hens running around and they typically gave their excess eggs away as there were too many. It wouldn’t take that much to sustain a small community on eggs.
But yes, you’re right, it wouldn’t replace the egg industry, my point is simply that if you do have access to such eggs, then I see no issues with eating them, even if you’re otherwise vegan.
> must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
I don’t disagree at all and certainly never said we can replace all farmed eggs with cruelty-free free-roaming-chicken eggs, just that if you do have access to those eggs, then as far as I’m concerned, enjoy some eggs.
Only the most delusional of them believes this is even remotely possible. In the real world, demand for meat is raising.
Foie tastes like magical butter and it would be wonderful if there was a more ethical way to have it.
He talks about a farmer who is not force feeding the animals, but instead prepares the grassland such that those animals voluntarily eat themselves into a fat liver. Taste seems to be superb, for those who eat animals for fun.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierwohllabel
For eggs this is even mandatory:
Disclaimer: I don't eat foie gras and don't advocate it either.
Just banning the practice of force feeding would make more sense.
You can find a few things online about those alternative way https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=487088946
So, non-force-feed remains legal.
You don't have to buy the force fed kind though.
Buying responsibly is a first step, and forbidding torturous practises would be another one. Not killing animals at all is yet another discussion.
Guilty until proven innocent seems to be the general trend in NYC these days.
If shark fin is illegal, then being able to order it in Mandarin isn't a "loophole" -- it doesn't magically become legal on a technicality.
It's just a means of avoiding enforcement of the law, by making the illicit activity less obvious.
People will find loopholes anyway.
It's not even hard in this case.
Let's say that I go to a restaurant that claims they only use true cinnamon and Kashmir saffron to flavor a cinnamon roll, which they sell at a premium because of the high-quality ingredients.
When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Similarly, if a restaurant claims to be selling humanely-sourced shark fin (not even sure how that works, but let's roll with it), and can't substantiate that claim, then there does need to be some kind of punishment for deceiving their customers.
> When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
> If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Can the punishment also be scaled to the harm, or potential harm, caused by the fraud? In a case like this, that would be nothing.
The harm is indeed relevant! "Crimes" without a victim, or where the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, should not be crimes.
But in this case, the harm is decidedly not nothing:
(1) How many consumers chose "Cakes of Deceit" over their competition, "A Taste of Honesty", on account of those premium ingredients? This pushes other businesses to engage in dishonest behavior in order to level the playing field.
(2) How many customers paid more for the "premium" offering because of its ingredients? What would they have paid had they known the truth? The difference between these two is the amount of money stolen from the customers.
(3) What is the economic impact to the sellers of the premium ingredients? Presumably, customers eating at "Cakes of Deceit" will come out with the opinion that "Kashmir Saffron" and "True Cinnamon" aren't any different than the cheap stuff.
This is far from a case of "no harm, no foul"
Also, you scale punishment to fit the difficulty of detection -- and I would argue, the guilty's ability to pay -- as it keeps the risk-reward equation balanced.
Imagine a shoplifter, Alice. She is caught stealing a $10 pack of cigarettes from the corner liquor store.
Alice offers to pay for the cigarettes once she is caught.
Sounds fair, right?
Suppose that we know that there is a one in ten chance of catching a shoplifter. That means for every ten times Alice tries to shoplift those $10 packs of cigarettes, she'll escape punishment nine times, and get caught once.
The corner store would be out $90 in goods in this case. Alice would be out the $10 for a single legitimate purchase. So we adjust the punishment upwards to make the process of shoplifting unpalatable to Alice in any case.
Now, what if Alice is wealthy, and just stealing for the thrill of it?
Well, a $200 fine probably won't mean much to her. So we scale the punishment until it does.
The Swiss do this, and I highly support it. If we are going to make something illegal -- which we do far too much, I must admit -- being wealthy shouldn't be equivalent to a Get Out Of Jail Free card.