Ban Foie Gras

 The Boston Globe had an article out yesterday about the growing nationwide movement to ban foie gras. 

Like a lot of people, I at first assumed this movement was just a bunch of annoying self-righteous busybodies looking for any available moral crusade. 

This attitude on my part lasted precisely as long as it took someone to describe to me for the first time what is actually involved in making foie gras.

From that point on, I was no longer thinking about the activists waving signs about this issue and how annoying they are—but about the birds. 

The birds who spend their entire lives under conditions of torture in order to serve up a fattier piece of liver. 

From that moment on, I was repeating, with Thomas Hardy, what he wrote of the "Blinded Bird"—"All this indignity, with God's consent, on thee!"

Groping thy whole life long; [...]

Enjailed in pitiless wire; 

From that moment on, I was with Ralph Hodgson—arrayed against the "Molochs" of the world, as he put it, who want to turn living avian flesh into sacrifices to human greed. 

I saw with open eyes

Singing birds sweet

Sold in the shops

For people to eat,

Sold in the shops of

Stupidity Street, as he wrote. 

And against these testamonies, what do the proponents of the practice have to offer? 

Against the cruelty of torturing birds to death slowly their whole lives long—what argument can the advocates of foie gras adduce? 

It's "tradition," they say. "We've always done it this way." 

As the Globe puts it: "[C]hefs who serve foie gras say it has deep culinary roots."

Tradition; deep roots—that is to say—as Shelley put it—"old Custom, legal Crime," which he called the eternal foe of Virtue!

Tradition— that’s to say, complying,

    With whate’er’s expected here;

[...] Upon etiquette relying,

Unto usage nought denying,

[...] With the form conforming duly,

Senseless what it meaneth truly

[...] Tis the coward acquiescence

    In a destiny’s behest,

To a shade by terror made,

Sacrificing, aye, the essence

    Of all that’s truest, noblest, best:

’Tis the blind non-recognition

    Or of goodness, truth, or beauty,

Save by precept and submission;

    Moral blank, and moral void,

    Life at very birth destroyed.

Atrophy, exinanition!

Duty!

Yea, by duty’s prime condition

    Pure nonentity of duty! (Arthur Hugh Clough)