"We should be allowed to keep publically masturbating while staring at kids in the park because it feels really, really good."

Slicing (~1" thick) and searing is the way to go. I prefer the sides/condiments not sweet myself but sweet is traditional (Sauternes is often served with foie gras).

@1 What the hell kind of false equivalency is that?

You're right number 1. Each person should have veto power over everybody else's diet. To many crickets died harvesting your tofu. You are clearly an evil pink unicorn.

Ethical issues aside for a second, foie gras is totally disgusting. Not only is it, um, LIVER (I subscribe to the FDA list of offenders for drug residues in animal products, and let me tell you that the only sample that outnumbers liver on that list is kidney - do yourself a favor and do not eat the filters!), it is liver undergoing fatty change, which is icky and which I have no desire to put into my body.

I have tasted it, and it is not in any way tasty enough to make up for how gross it is. How much of the allure of the foie gras is just the mystique?

Try a nice brie instead.

Maybe you should try forcing it all down your gullet at once so you'll know how it was produced, and then you can kill yourself.

I have heard that you heat it with duck fat. A lot of duck fat. You can use butter, something like three parts butter to one part livers. But don't quote me.

Sear it and spread it on a piece of really good toast.

@6, people have been eating organ meat for several millennia without ill effect as long as they paid attention to what animals ate. Not only liver is very tasty prepared in many different ways but it is very good to address anemia (iron rich).

Torchon that shit!

Haven't yet had the pleasure of foie gras, only because it is hard to find around here. But liver can be delicious - venison or calves liver sautéed with bacon, onions, peppers and mushrooms, YUM, or chicken livers roasted with the bird or (for a fatty Southern taste) deep-fried are also phenomenal. It's also got a hell of a lot in it that's incredibly good for you. Yes, it should be eaten in moderation and yes, you should do your best to get it from healthy animals. But one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten was the liver from a wild doe, or from a calf we raised and slaughtered ourselves.

And considering where the vast majority of our meat comes from I find it hypocritical for so many non-vegans who wax all moral on the evils of foie gras. It's no worse than the things we do to a ton of delicious animals. And the resistance to organ meat and the squishy bits in general from people who have never tried them - or try them with opinions already formed - is sad and wasteful. Liver and heart are delicious. Admittedly I'm a bit of the pot calling the kettle black on that one; a Vietnamese friend has tried to get me into some things, like cartilage and tendon. I can't handle the texture, though.

Q: What's the difference between Michael Vick and a foie gras chef?

A: Michael Vick didn't EAT THE CORPSES of the animals he tortured to death.

@7 lol you think birds are people.

@7 You do know that gastric lavage is the standard (humane) method for feeding ducks and geese as they recover from certain types of injuries under veterinary care right?

Just like any other method of rearing animals for food, you can have humane rearing or inhumane rearing for producing foie gras.

Whoever said 1" cut for the searing is insane. No thicker than 1cm. Sprinkle on your favorite collection of herbs and salts. Sear it fast. Sear it super hot. It should almost melt, since it's mostly fat, some of it should melt.

@7 failure #1: people don't have gullets, just one reason that anthropomorphization of foie gras is factually mistaken.

If you're going to kill yourself anyway, wait until you've had a glass of really nice sauterne with your torture-murder-foie gras. It's a really really nice combination. Um, so I've been told.

@7 Geese and ducks - in fact, birds in general - have no gag reflex. They also have no teeth and don't chew their food. Have you ever seen a bird swallow a fish whole? Also, the geese and ducks raised for foie gras are migratory birds who pig out and get engorged livers in the wild. The process of producing foie gras replicates what occurs naturally. I would rather eat free-range foie gras than battery farmed chicken.

Do you buy cheap eggs or food made with cheap eggs? If so then you should try sitting in your own piss, shit and hair in a tiny cage so you'll know how they were produced, and then you can kill yourself. Or just get off your high horse you sanctimonious prick.

@ Bethany - fry the foie gras and serve it on a grilled brioche with a fillet steak and a madeira jus.

My resistance to eating liver and kidney - not "organ meat" in general, but specifically those two filters - comes from having looked at an awful lot of histologic slides and chemical tests of the tissues and thus knowing what is likely to be in them. No, thanks.

"People have been eating it for thousands of years therefore it must be fine" is a crazy way to think. There are a lot of chemicals that we have added to the environment and which concentrate in the filters to some extent, and which are known or can reasonably be expected to have harmful effects on humans. (Have you ever seen a pasture-kept cow dead because she ate a battery? I have. Grazers eat some weird shit, and I will limit myself to muscles and muscular organs. People periodically want me to tell them that at least the liver from grass-fed organic animals should be wonderful, but as far as I am concerned that is the opposite of true. Phytotoxins...parasites...ew.)

And yeah, fine, there are nutrients in there. But I have the good luck to live in a time and place where I can get those nutrients another way, so I think I will.

Anyone else is welcome to do what they want; I don't really care. I just think it is gross, and that if most liver-eaters really understood what they were eating they would not want to eat it anymore.

@14: I probably would have had some respect for him if he had: at least there would have been some use out of them. But that's probably not as much fun as your hyperbole.

As usual, Fnarf@9 has it right. If you're going to put cherry preserves on it, I'll swap you for some Fred Meyer liverwurst. You'll never know the difference.

#21: What do you mean there was no use for the tortured pit bulls? Some rich sociopaths enjoyed themselves, which is exactly the purpose of foie gras as well.

@23: I'm glad you're happy as a vegan. But here's a tip: referring to people who disagree with you as sociopaths really isn't effective at converting them.

#24: I apologize, continue force feeding animals to death and then eating their engorged livers, I'm sure nobody will ever judge you again.

@20,
""People have been eating it for thousands of years therefore it must be fine" is a crazy way to think."

Except that it isn't what I said. I said you had to know what these animals ate (as always). Some nations (Germans, French, ..) eat large quantities of liver and have been doing so for centuries. The odds are we'd know by now if there were a problem in doing so.

Yawn. Somehow I think I'll survive your judgement. And you weren't going to convert me regardless of your douche level, but thanks for the amusement anyway.

Foie gras is NOM!

@25 Foie gras isn't from animals that have been force-fed to death. Geese and ducks gorge on food in the wild and store fat in their livers to prepare for migration. The gavage feeding replicates this on the farm. They are killed like all farmed animals are killed, not through overfeeding.

Cheap, mass-farmed meat and eggs are far, far crueller to animals than foie gras.

@29,

They haven't been force fed to death, but they have been force fed. If foie gras production were "natural" it wouldn't be necessary to force a tube down a duck's throat to fatten it up.

I'm hardly an opponent to foie gras, but your defense of it is absurd.

Last month at Le Gormand (soon to RIP--sob) I had a dish of foie gras and wild mushrooms that was so mind-blowingly delicious that I elevated from my chair and flew about the room. My taste buds died and went to heaven that night, and I won't be able to use them any more.
Sorry, can't tell you how it was prepared.

@25: if they die from the lavage, you're doing it wrong. Since foie producers are in it for the money, very few of them do it wrong. I will, however, avoid buying it from you.

"The odds are we'd know by now if there were a problem in doing so"

I am not trying to be rude, but I think the odds are not good that the American eating public would know. For various reasons. (Does the eating public of Seattle know how many parasites are present on average in a piece of sashimi in Seattle? answer: two, so it is a good thing raw fish is frozen real cold before being served in restaurants.)

But you do what you want,and more power to you. The risk is probably not that great (certainly less than eating undercooked pork from pigs that lived outside); like I said, it is just gross, and I can't convince myself that foie gras is that much tastier (or any, actually) than plain old goose fat in any other vehicle.

NB: storing fat in the liver is not a normal part of healthy life for any animal; it is a pathology, it impairs liver function, and that is why it is gross.

@31Farming, especially farming on an industrial scale, is unnatural by definition. My defence of foie gras - that the production of it is less cruel than the production of majority of cheap, mass-produced meat and eggs available in the supermarket - is not absurd.

Eat with relish, as James Joyce suggest:
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

@34 Storing fat in the liver is a normal part of healthy life for some migratory birds.

Foie gras is natural at certain times of the year, the geese and ducks naturally fatten themselves up. Ducks and geese for foie gras will walk up to farmers and pester them for feedings from the 'inhumane' tubes.

I think allowing animal rights nuts to dictate policy on foie gras is a very bad precedent. Do we really want peta controlling what animals we eat? What's next, mulsims banning pork, bible literalists banning shellfish? If you don't want to eat something, don't eat it. Don't criminalize it for everyone.

I love foie gras threads.

I think liver in general is disgusting and I'm sure I could't eat more than a couple bites of beef or chicken liver without puking. But foie gras is an altogether different thing.

Searing is the thing to do -- I'd use butter, I think -- and I agree with the commenter above that 1" sounds a bit thick. It's been a long time since I saw someone cook it, but I think you sear it for a bit longer than you would, say, tuna steak. Seek some guidance there, I'd recommend.

I love scrapple and have always thought of it as a kind of poor man's foie gras: you want it crispy on the outside, and hot, soft, and fatty on the inside. The cherry stuff sounds okay but I'd just eat it with some good crusty bread and maybe a sweet wine.

Man, I'm salivating, here.

34, storing fat in the liver is not pathology in geese. They do it naturally before migrations. It helps The survive the long flights. If you kill a goose just before migration, you can get foie gras. Geese don't have a gag reflex, and the tube does not cause them pain or physical harm.

@25 omnomnom!

Obvious troll is obvious.

If people who advocate for animal welfare were as vocal in advocacy for human welfare we would have much less poverty and ill health in this country. A well-educated, well-nourished citizenry is much more likely to eschew foods from factory farms. Why does misanthropy seem to go hand-in-hand with the animal rights movement?

@6 You know that dairy cows have to be continuously made pregnant, and their offspring are often turned into veal, right?

Please enjoy that brie!

The disproportionate number of San Francisco chefs protesting this ban is probably due to the fact that SF has a long history of connections to France and has had a vibrant French cuisine scene since the 19th century. I don't think LA has anything comparable, although it must surely have some French restaurants.

I've got no beef at all with vegans. I don't make fun of them for their food choices. I don't think that they are stupid, or foolish, or (necessarily) judgmental joyless fucks.

Until they decide to use the force of law to (if you will pardon the expression) shove their food choices down my throat. In which case, fuck them. Hard.

It's not only vegans and vegetarians who are supporting the ban, which is what baffles me. I don't understand meat-eaters who make these types of distinctions. Factory farming is brutal. Cows, chickens and pigs live hellish existences before they're slaughtered, so why all the special concern for ducks and geese?

Dust off your high-school French, 'cause Le Monde has a recipe for preparing homemade foie gras, presented in this cartoon parody of 24::

24H (foie gras) Chrono
http://long.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/12/22/1…

animal welfare is socialist

@34, "I am not trying to be rude, but I think the odds are not good that the American eating public would know."

Well, the American public consumes massive amount of beef that was ground months prior to eating it (among other horror) so it is safe to say that what the public knows isn't particularly relevant to this discussion, but since we are discussing what we actually know, it'd be nice if you came up with evidence showing that populations eating liver from healthy animals evolve specific illnesses.

maybe they should go back to importing it from China ...

You know, not everything we disagree with should be made against the law. It's already costing us dearly to enforce countless useless laws. And please note: Republicans never attack police unions the way they attack teacher unions!

Nobody who participates in modern technological civilization has any high ground whatsoever in criticizing others in the moral relativity of animal welfare. Just make your own choices as best you can.

The very fact you're typing an anti-meat screed on a mostly fossil fuel powered energy grid, on a device only possible through the earth corrupting process of mining strategic minerals, in a society infrastructure that displaces and slaughters countless entire species just by occupying the same habitat as animals --- all that --- merely eating animals PALES in comparison to the cruelty and impact of your very existence in the technological world.

Oh. No. People eat meat for pleasure and convenience at the expense of animals? How immoral!

People drive on roads, live in houses, farm land, use electricity for convenience and pleasure, too. That's what civilization fucking IS. Convenience to make time for pleasure. And don't tell me you HAVE to do all those technological things. No you don't. Literally billions of people don't. And billions more through out history didn't have these technological conveniences. You could do without.

But you don't. Because it's convenient and pleasurable.

You don't eat meat. Great. Harping at other people of the immorality - the cruelty - of it? That's sentimental bullshit. The continued existence of human civilization as it is IS cruelty.

I'm huge fan of civilization. Of convenience. Of pleasure. And so are you or you wouldn't be reading this. Therefor we are, all of us, fans of cruelty as well.

Not eating meat? It's better ecologically for sure. Eating meat in our civilization is not sustainable. That's the only real argument against meat eating that matters. If you insist on living in technological world it's one thing you can do to minimize your personal impact. But it's just one small fucking thing. And it's for HUMANS. Not animals. Don't get a big head about it.

I adore France, and I loves me some French cuisine. And I know there are several things in French cuisine traditions that have been practiced for centuries - like that thing with the Ortolan. But I'm unable to enjoy cruelty foods - just can't get over that hump if I know what's going on.

@57

Your argument boils down to this:

"Human civilization harms the environment, therefore one cannot draw a moral distinction between living in civilization and being a consumer of animal products [i.e. perpetuating a system that artificially reproduces, holds captive, abuses and tortures, and finally kills billions of animal per year]."

Your argument is categorically without merit.

The harm inflicted on individual sentient beings by the overall operations of civilization is tragic. But this harm is incidental to said operations, is not inevitable, and is limited in consequence (however extensive).

For instance, when a forest is razed, individual animals will be killed, populations will be displaced and more individuals will die as a result, and the ripple of disturbance will propagate through the ecosystem. But once the damage is done, the ecosystem adapts and a new homeostasis is reached.

Compare this with animal exploitation industries. Here, humans artificially sustain populations of animals, reproduce them, and exploit and kill them ad infinitum. The harm inflicted on individual sentient beings is perpetual.

Clearly we should all make choices that influence civilization to minimize its injuries to the natural world. Chief among these choices is to cease our complicity in animal exploitation.

One's level of participation in civilization at large in no way modifies the immorality of participating in animal exploitation industries.

At least the other flesh eaters in this thread are honest about their selfish disregard for the suffering they inflict on animals. You, on the other hand, have attempted to hide behind a bullshit rationale of moral equivalency.

That's even worse.

@59

One's level of participation in civilization at large in no way modifies the immorality of participating in animal exploitation industries.

What a load of bullshit. You're the one who is deceiving yourself.

You want your computer. Your car. Your modern convenience. And you want to blame other people for all the problems your lifestyle inflicts by hiding behind sentimentality and self-righteousness.

You choose literally the easiest thing, the simplest choice, and then pretend you're done and everybody else is immoral.

Modern agriculture is the number on cause of injury to the natural world. NUMBER ONE. More land is cleared - habitat destroyed - for crops than for meat production.You know it. And I know it. Meat production is just one small part of modern agriculture.

If you're not living in a yurt harvesting and gathering your own food you have literally no moral authority to lecture anybody about morality. You want to lecture about sustainability, fine. That is at least a provable harm. Not just emotional sentiment about animal suffering.

Clearly we should all make choices that influence civilization to minimize its injuries to the natural world. Chief among these choices is to cease our complicity in animal exploitation.

Not even close. Offer proof of this ridiculous assertion. You can't. All you can do offer up more emotional sentiment and point-of-view based arguments. But no proof that eating animals is the "worst" thing for the natural world.

Modern human civilization is the worst thing for the natural world. But, unless we're willing to give it up - and we're not (I'm not) - it's either us or the natural word. I vote us.

In terms of personal choices to effect the future: Far and away not having children would be "chief among these choices." Secondly would be not utilizing any hydrocarbons in anyway. In any way. And that is a very difficult thing to do. Though not impossible.

Make your choices. Do what you can. But quit pretending you are superior and lay it all at the feet of everybody else. Next time you get the urge to lecture everybody on the internet save an animal and turn off your computer, or better yet sell your car.

I don't eat meat, by the way. Or rarely do. I just don't think I'm a fucking hero for it. You clearly do.