What Can We Learn from Liver?

In the summer of 2003, animal rights activists targeted the Santa Rosa, California home of Didier Jaubert, a French-born lawyer and entrepreneur, and his American wife, Leslie. Their house was splashed with red paint, the locks on the house and garage doors filled with glue, and "murderer" and "stop or be stopped" spray-painted on the house and car. Jaubert was a partner in a soon-to-open business venture called Sonoma Saveurs, a specialty shop and café, located in a historic adobe building on the plaza in downtown Sonoma. The café would feature a variety of locally made artisan food items, including foie gras. The day after the vandalism, an anonymous poster on an animal rights website called BiteBack wrote, "We cannot let this restaurant open ... Jaubert needs to hear that people will not tolerate this atrocity."

Jaubert's business partners were Laurent Manrique, the French-born corporate executive chef of the Aqua Restaurant Group in San Francisco, and Guillermo and Junny Gonzalez, the owners of Sonoma Foie Gras. Two nights after the attack on Jaubert's home, Manrique's Marin County home was vandalized in a similar way by "concerned citizens," as they were called on BiteBack, which also posted the two men's home addresses. Red paint was thrown at his house, paint thinner splashed on his car, the garage door and car locks sealed with glue, and the words "murderer," "torturer," and "go back to France" spray-painted on his property. The next day, Manrique found a videotape in his mailbox. The video was shot from the bushes in his front yard and showed him in his living room playing with his toddler son. An unsigned note was taped to the video. It read that that his family was being watched and demanded "stop the foie gras, or you will be stopped."

Two weeks later, activists broke into Sonoma Saveurs and caused an estimated $50,000 worth of damage to the historic building. They covered walls, appliances, and fixtures with red paint and graffiti ("foie gras = death," "end animal torture," "shame," "go home," and "misery"). They poured concrete down the drains where sinks and toilets were going to be installed. Then they turned on the water, flooding the building as well as its neighbors, a jewelry store housed in another historic nineteenth-century building and a women's clothing store. A gloating account of the attack was posted soon afterward on BiteBack. The tactic of pouring concrete represented "the forcing of high density feed down the throats of ducks. The damage this will do to the plumbing symbolizes the damage done to the ducks' digestive systems by force feeding them." Additionally, the flooding would "punish" Guillermo Gonzalez for "depriving the ducks he tortures to make foie gras of water in which to preen and bathe." The post continued, "Now Guillermo will be sure to have a swim when he opens the door."

No one directly claimed responsibility for these acts, and no arrests were made. After adjusting the business plan and menu and forsaking the original logo of a smiling duck, Sonoma Saveurs opened later that year, but closed soon after. The Sonoma County police chief described the attacks to reporters as a "sophisticated campaign of domestic terrorism." Upon the advice of local law enforcement, Manrique installed a security system at his home. "I came to America because it is the land of free speech," he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. "But all of this, involving my family like this, is going way too far." Manrique left the venture soon after receiving the videotape, citing obligations to his restaurants in San Francisco. Jaubert, too, called foie gras part of his cultural tradition and pleaded for more reasonable forms of protest than vigilantism. As he told the Sonoma News:

If you don't like foie gras, I can understand. If you don't want foie gras to be sold, you can demonstrate in front of the store, you can write letters to the editor. But to destroy a historical building, to attack a family's home, to do this at night and to be proud of your actions — this is very difficult for me to understand.

Who Cares About Foie Gras?

This event, and those that followed elsewhere in California and around the country, centered on a particularly contentious food item — foie gras (pronounced fwah-grah). This specially enlarged "fat liver" of a goose or duck is a popular food in French cuisine and one that animal rights supporters find morally repugnant. The debate centers on how foie gras is made. To enlarge and fatten the liver, the goose or duck is fed measured and increasing amounts of grain (typically corn and/or a mash of corn and soy) through a specialized tube or pipe during its last weeks of life. This process is called gavage in French, which most easily translates into English as force-feeding, and the person doing the feeding is the gaveur (if a man) or gaveuse (if a woman). During the gavage period, which ranges between twelve and twenty-one days depending on the farm, the bird's liver grows six to ten times in size and increases from approximately eighteen percent to up to sixty percent fat by weight. A duck foie gras averages about 1.5 to 2 pounds (compared to about four ounces for a non-force-fed liver). Gavage and its product, foie gras, are alternatively acclaimed and reviled by different parties.

Renowned culinary historian Silvano Serventi writes that foie gras is "synonymous with pleasure of the senses." As a dish, it is typically served as a small-portioned first course. It can be eaten hot as a quickly seared preparation, often accompanied by a sweet fruit garnish. More traditionally, it is slowly cooked over low heat and then served cold as a pâté or terrine. It is silky in texture and rich and unique in flavor. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once called foie gras "one of the most delicious things on the planet, and one of the ten most important flavors in gastronomy."

While a fairly new delicacy in the United States, foie gras is a food of global origins and has long been considered a symbol of luxury and prestige. Ancient historians have traced practices of domesticating and fattening waterfowl for their livers back to ancient Egypt; papyrus scrolls and stone reliefs, including two that hang in the Louvre museum in Paris, depict the process of moistening grain to feed to geese through hollow reeds. These practices traveled throughout eastern and southern Europe (where sizable foie gras industries still exist in Hungary and Bulgaria) and took hold in France, where foie gras has played a leading role in the country's world-famous culinary canon for over two hundred years. There, until the mid-twentieth century, foie gras — made mostly from geese, but also from ducks — was primarily a seasonal food (harvested in autumn) that was reserved for fine dining restaurants and families' special occasions, especially at Christmas and for celebrating the New Year.

Following World War...