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Printer-Friendly ModeFood regulation ineffective
Cultural effort needed to curb excess consumption
October 2, 2006 —
Should government be able to decide what restaurants may serve to customers? Chicago and New York are providing new tests to this question.
Chicago has attempted to repeal their recently enacted ban on foie gras. What is foie gras? A simple answer: the fattened liver of a duck or goose. While on the surface this seems fairly benign, the controversy revolves around how one attains the liver.
To fatten up the liver, the bird is force-fed, with a tube forced down its throat and large amounts of corn coated with fat forced into the bird, which is supposed to give the liver its unique flavor. Defenders of foie gras argue that since the birds lack gag reflexes, the force-feedings do not cause any pain or discomfort. New York, on the other hand, may ban city restaurants from cooking with trans fats, the artificial fat designed to improve product longevity - at the expense of human longevity.
The New York City Board of Health unanimously passed a resolution last week banning trans fats that will go for a final vote in December. Trans fats are in much of the nation's favorite foods, from McDonald's fries, to anything that has Crisco in it. The fat is known to cause higher levels of heart disease, and may be a precursor to diabetes.
Restaurant owners defend the usage of trans fats, arguing that prohibition will lead to higher costs for consumers, and will alter the taste of their dishes.
On the surface, these stories seem similar. The publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 1906 essentially allowed government to regulate what humans produce and consume for the first time.
But banning foie gras and banning trans fats differ in one significant way: foie gras is a natural animal product that has been eaten for millennia (albeit debated), while trans fats were perfected around the same time as Sinclair's novel.
The main difference between the two revolves around the fact that one comes from an animal, and the other was created in a laboratory. Foie gras has been served since at least the ancient Roman days. If Caesar was frying with Crisco, it's somehow been lost in the annals of history.
It's presumptuous to believe that by eliminating foie gras, the food industry transforms itself into a benevolent entity. By focusing on foie gras, animal rights activists are targeting a niche market that involves comparatively few birds. In comparison, Kentucky Fried Chicken slaughters close to three-quarters of a billion chickens per year, while engaging in cruel and horrific practices, including the clipping of the birds' beaks, and often, the breaking of the chickens' legs to ensure a complicit animal. The fact remains that billions of animals are slaughtered each year for human consumption.
It's no different with the "free range" chicken eggs that are sold for three times the cost of normal eggs at the supermarket. Supposedly, these chickens are happier because they aren't kept in a chicken coop all day, but are free to roam around, pecking at the ground like a carefree chicken. While this seems noble, at the end of the day, the chicken is still bred to service eggs; when it doesn't, it ends up in a McNugget box.
I'm all for the ethical treatment of animals, although I'm not in PETA. But is it really force-feeding a goose when the goose lacks a gag reflex? If the feeding causes the bird no pain, and if it were to be otherwise slaughtered for human consumption, how is this somehow more heinous? If one is opposed to the slaughtering of these birds for their fattened livers, then one must be opposed to the slaughtering of these birds at all times.
At the same time, I applaud the New York City Health Board for making a definite effort to improve the health of its denizens. Americans are fat enough; by helping to reduce the amount of unnatural toxic goop that oozes into the arteries of New Yorkers through trans fats, you are confident that Americans will find some other way to slowly poison themselves.
If you truly care about animal welfare, get people to eat less meat. But keep government out of the process. All this ends up doing is discrediting both.