For all the non-financial foodies without access to Bloomberg News, here’s a breaking story to read while I compose my Michelin post-party report.
Foie Gras Debate Splits Chicago as Chef, Mayor Duel Over Ducks
2005-11-03 00:06(New York)
By Christopher Martin
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) --
Chicago, the city with a history of stockyards and steakhouses, has erupted in violence over a matter of greater culinary delicacy: foie gras.
Aldermen may vote this month on a proposal to make Chicago the first U.S. city to ban the sale of the fattened livers of force-fed ducks and geese. The debate has split the city: On one side is Chicago's most famous chef, Charlie Trotter, who won't serve it; on the other is Mayor Richard M. Daley, who says foie gras should remain on restaurant menus.
Amid the back-and-forth, Cyrano's Bistrot and Wine Bar in the city's tourist-heavy River North neighborhood had a window smashed and a door smeared with fake blood last week after Chef Didier Durand protested any ban. For Chicago, the issue marks an evolution in the taste of a town more familiar with bratwurst and beer than the haute cuisine of duck and goose liver.
``The main obstacle is that nobody around here knows what it is or how it's produced,'' says Alderman Joe Moore, 47, a Democrat from Chicago's North Side who proposed the ban after learning about the treatment of ducks from Trotter. ``We're more of a steak-and-ale kind of city. This is different than killing and eating a cow; you're actually torturing little animals before you eat them.''
Foie gras producers can fatten a duck liver to 12 times its normal size by pouring a pound of cornmeal down the bird's gullet three times a day for as many as four weeks before slaughter. Protests against the technique, which animal rights activists liken to torture, emerged after the freshly prepared dish gained popularity in the U.S.in the 1990s.Producers such as Ferndale, New York-based Hudson Valley Foie Gras say waterfowl aren't harmed in the process because the birds naturally overfeed to build energy for weeks before their biannual migrations.
Limited Time
In Chicago, 19 restaurants list foie gras on their menu, according to Tribune Co.'s Metromix guide. Sales to the area have doubled in the past couple of years, says Jacques Bissonette, export manager for Palmex Inc., a foie gras farmer in Quebec and one of three in North America.
``People are ordering foie gras more than ever because they don't know how much time they've got left,'' says Jorge Chaux, a waiter at Cyrano's Bistrot, which police say was vandalized the night after Chef Durand spoke against the ban at a city council meeting Oct. 25. Durand was traveling and unavailable to comment.
The Norfolk, Virginia-based advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, supports bans on foie gras. While Trotter doesn't support government involvement in menu selections, the chef says he's comfortable with his role as an accidental leader in the movement against foie gras, which is typically served as an appetizer for about $15 to $20.
`It's Grisly'
``I'm not exactly Mr. PETA, but I've been to a couple of foie gras farms,'' says Trotter, 45, whose namesake restaurant offered the delicacy until about four years ago. ``I've witnessed the process, and it's grisly to put it mildly.''
Daley, 63, has said restaurants would probably serve foie gras under different names should the ban win approval by the city council. ``Our inspectors can't go out and test it,'' Daley said last week, adding that he enjoys foie gras, according to the Chicago Tribune. Daley's office declined to elaborate.
The proposal passed unanimously in the 14-member health committee on Oct. 25 and needs 26 votes to pass the full council, says Moore, who has been calling fellow aldermen to discuss the merits of the proposal. He may bring the ban to a vote at the next council meeting on Nov. 30.``One chef told me he sells it to less than 10 percent of his customers,'' Moore says. ``It's a luxury for the wealthy.''
Cow Town
Chicago is more familiar with cows and pigs than goose liver. Labeled ``hog butcher for the world'' by Carl Sandburg in a 1916 poem, the city was home to the world's largest cattle and hog stockyards, producing 82 percent of the meat consumed in the U.S. in the early decades of the 20th century. The last of the stockyards closed in 1971 as automation took over.
Today, the third-largest U.S.city has the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's largest futures exchange, where a record 4.5 million contracts conferring the right to buy or sell live cattle traded last year, along with 3.2 million contracts on lean hogs.
The practice of force-feeding geese began with the Egyptians almost 5,000 years ago, and French chefs have refined the technique for more than two centuries. Until the late 1980s, when the first commercial foie gras farms opened in New York and California, U.S.diners were limited to cooked, tinned blocks of imported pate.
Hudson Valley Foie Gras says it produces more than 220 tons a year, or about 75 percent of the U.S.total, from farms that opened in New York's Catskill Mountains 14 years ago by former bond trader Michael Ginor and Israeli-born duck breeder Izzy Yanay.
California last year banned the force-feeding of birds and the sale of foie gras starting in 2012, becoming the first state to pass such a restriction.
--With reporting by Peter Elliot in Chicago. Editors: Walsh,Horvitz, Brice, Wolfson
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