Outside a campaign watch party in the U Street Corridor in Washington on Tuesday night, the calmest presence was Olivia Gray, a duck cradled in her owner’s hands while a crowd chanted “Save the ducks!”
Olivia arguably had more at stake than anyone else at the rally.
Initiative 86, which bans the force-feeding of birds and the sale of foie gras in the district, won 73 percent of the 169,753 votes cast in Tuesday’s election.
Starting in July 2027, the delicacy, for which geese or ducks are force-fed until their livers swell to several times their normal size, are set to disappear from the menus of Washington’s restaurants and shops.
Businesses that continue selling the dish could face fines of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation, according to the measure.
“This is a huge awakening,” Meghan Abrego, Olivia’s owner, said of the result.
The vote, she added, showed people in the district “that animal welfare can still be on the ballot, and people can still make changes.”
Olivia, who is 4, has been a face of the campaign for the ban for months. Ms. Abrego, 41, a content creator, described Olivia as “68 percent human, 30 percent dog, and 2 percent duck.”
A pet turned mascot, Olivia toured the city to collect signatures on a petition to get the measure on the ballot and posed for photos.
Not everyone was celebrating the outcome of the vote.
Among the measure’s critics was José Andrés, the celebrity chef who owns restaurants in the city and founded the disaster relief group World Central Kitchen.
In the weeks before the vote, he argued on social media that if the vote forced foie gras from ducks off the menu, then beef, pork, chicken and perhaps even vegetables would follow.
He noted that he had been through a similar initiative in California, the first state to ban both the force-feeding of birds and selling of foie gras, despite years of lengthy legal challenges.
Mr. Andrés suggested that voters had bigger problems to confront, including child hunger and immigration raids sweeping up restaurant staff and farmworkers.
Mr. Andrés did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While he made his case online, some fellow chefs were making theirs on their menus.
In the week before Election Day, Bart Hutchins, the chef at Butterworth’s on Capitol Hill, served a four-course foie gras dinner that included his take on the Twinkie, filled with the delicacy instead of its traditional white cream.
It sold out, and the proceeds went to a fund to cover his restaurant’s fines once enforcement starts.
On a rainy Friday after the vote, a menu posted outside the restaurant still listed a $29 plate of lamb tartare with seared foie gras and an onion ring.
Mr. Hutchins said he was not worried. He expects legal challenges like those that surfaced in California and New York City, where bans were proposed.
Given the lack of dedicated funding for enforcement for a law he considered poorly written, he doubted that the ban would be enforced within the next decade.
“I don’t think there’s any rush to start complying with a ban that is not instituted and not proven to be legal,” he said.
Enforcement will fall to D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment, whose inspectors are expected to fold the new rule into its routine food inspections. City officials estimated the cost of enforcement at $314,000, according to a fiscal impact statement. But the budget has no room for it in any fiscal year from 2026 through 2029, the statement notes.
Marcus Henley, who is farm manager for Hudson Valley Foie Gras in Ferndale, N.Y., which he said is the largest producer of the delicacy in America, said that the voting result in Washington is only the beginning of a fight.
His company plans to challenge the ban in Washington as it did in New York City, he said. New York City passed a ban on the sale of foie gras in 2019 but its implementation has been tied up in legal challenges.
“If you are able to create the precedent of these kinds of bans, where does this stop?” Mr. Henley said. “It’s very disruptive to the national market.”
Supporters of such bans have heard that argument before.
For years, according to Natalie Fulton, the media and content lead for Pro-Animal DC, past efforts to rid the city of foie gras fell short. In 2023, the DC Coalition Against Foie Gras started protesting outside restaurants to get foie gras off their menus.
But it was not a lasting solution. A new restaurant would open and serve foie gras, or a targeted one would claim to have dropped the dish and quietly kept serving it. Lobbying the City Council had failed, too, Ms. Fulton said.
What changed this time?
“Having Olivia the duck as a mascot really helped,” Ms. Fulton said. “It really allowed people to connect the process with the individuals that this measure would affect.”
With this ballot measure in the books, Olivia’s reach may not stop at the local level.
Next, she has her sights on seeking a federal ban.
“Olivia and I are in our primes,” Ms. Abrego said. “We need to keep pushing forward.”
Sheelagh McNeill and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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