Bart Hutchins is the chef and owner of Butterworth’s in Washington, D.C.
In 1979, Jean-Louis Palladin arrived in Washington from Gascony, France, took up residence in the kitchen of the Watergate Hotel and proceeded to embarrass every serious cook in America. He sourced day-boat scallops from Maine when nobody here knew what that meant. Crawfish from Louisiana. Venison from Texas. He looked at American ingredients and decided they were worth taking seriously, which was either the most obvious thing in the world or the most radical.
But he discovered a hole in the American market: No one here produced fresh foie gras — raw fattened duck liver. You could get pâtés and canned products from France, but importing raw livers was forbidden. Because chefs, all of us, need to impress our guests, need to make happiness for people in ways that solve our own problems — a not-so-great childhood, physical defects, all manner of insecurity — Palladin did something ridiculous and heroic. He flew to France and illegally brought back fresh foie gras, hiding entire lobes of liver in the gullets of legal monkfish. He couldn’t list the delicacy on his menu, so waiters would whisper about it to trusted regulars. He did this about a mile from the White House.
In 2017, a few years into cooking seriously, I tried to make Palladin’s famous chestnut and foie gras soup for a Christmas menu. It is one of those dishes that sounds simple until you attempt it and then reveals itself as a kind of test. While searing the foie to achieve a caramelized flavor, I looked away for a few seconds to check my phone, and when I turned back the liver was ruined. I had failed it entirely, in the way that makes you stand over a pot understanding the exact distance between where you are and where you want to be. I was ashamed for months. I almost quit cooking altogether. I am not being dramatic: I genuinely considered whether I was in the right profession, whether I had any business standing in a kitchen at all, whether the whole enterprise of trying to do this thing well was a form of delusion.
I’m still here, and I think about that soup often. It is never lost on me that Palladin made it perfectly, at personal legal risk, because he wanted to serve the people of this city something perfect. Because he cared. Cooking can be glamorous at times, but it is more often than not a swift kick in the crotch, exacerbated by broken grease traps, long hours and financial burdens. And that delusional belief Palladin had, where you have to do this right or die of shame, is the thing I cling to.
There is now a proposed ballot initiative moving through Washington that would ban foie gras entirely. No producing it, no selling or serving it. Fines between $1,000 and $5,000 per violation. License suspension for repeat offenses. The initiative comes from Pro-Animal D.C., which is collecting signatures for its petition outside Metro stations and at farmers markets. The group is not alone: For several years, members of the DC Coalition Against Foie Gras have stood outside restaurants with megaphones and graphic images, pressuring them to pull the dish. In April of last year, their chanted slogans interrupted a wedding at the Omni Shoreham.
I am asking you to not sign the petition. But first I want to do something the other side rarely does, which is to take their concerns seriously.
Gavage — force-feeding through a tube inserted down a bird’s throat — looks terrible. I know because I have seen it. I understand completely why someone sees footage of it and reacts with horror. If you imagine the same thing done to human beings, it looks like violence.
But here is what I also know, and what the activists with the megaphones do not know and do not want to know because it would complicate the argument they have decided to make.
Ducks are not humans. A duck’s esophagus, where the gavage tube is inserted, is desensitized, without a gag reflex, and it is capable of swallowing whole crustaceans and scaly fishin the wild. Its windpipe is separate from the esophagus, meaning the gavage process has no impact on breathing. More importantly, this overfeeding is something the bird does naturally. Before their annual migration, ducks gorge — they stuff themselves with excess food. The calories are stored as fat, not only in the liver but in the expanded esophagus. (The verb “gorge” comes from this behavior.) What foie gras farming does is amplify a natural biological process rather than invent a cruel one. Recorded instances of force-feeding date back thousands of years, to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph.
Americans are often cruel to the animals we eat. I would happily sign a petition banning pigs raised in concentratedanimal feeding operations (CAFOs) or outlawing chickens that are debeaked and shoved into feces-smattered pens stacked like garbage. I take enormous pride in being able to purchase meat for my restaurant from small-scale farmers I trust, both because I think it’s better for our moral ledger and because those animals so obviously taste better.
The producer I buy foie gras from exemplifies the kind of care and attention good farming demands. Their ducks are raised for 15 weeks, about twice the poultry industry standard, in open barns. on a vegetarian diet. Force-feeding by hand happens three times a day for the final three weeks. Each feeding takes approximately 1½ seconds, and, from my observation, the ducks barely seem to notice it.
I have been to a lot of farms. I have seen animals treated with dignity, and I have seen them treated the way humans treat most commodities, which is to say with some form of abuse. The farm that produces my foie is the former; it practices the type of care and attention that I would like to see in all American food producers.
One of the anti-gavage campaign groups recently bragged on Instagram that it had hired its own lobbyist to make this product illegal. I cannot do that. I need to be in my kitchen cooking, delighting my customers and running payroll every two weeks.
But I think its model reflects a certain kind of politics. Money gets spent on lobbying and outrage. It gets you incensed by the topic of the day, the feeling moves through you, and then it’s gone and something else takes its place. That is not caring. Caring is in the details. The fidelity to excellence that Palladin practiced, that the best farms practice and that I hope to practice shares nothing with the shock politics of a megaphone outside someone’s wedding.
Palladin’s Watergate restaurant closed in 1996. We in this city have a loose relationship with our history, and, more often than not, when something is gone it’s gone forever. Banning foie would work the same way, censuring a generation of young cooks and ending the relationship they have with an extraordinary ingredient. Fewer serious people cooking foie means fewer people seriously caring about where it comes from.
I’m asking you to not sign the petition. Don’t help this initiative get on the ballot. If it succeeds, we lose another reason to care at all.
The post Here’s why I am proud to serve foie gras appeared first on Washington Post.
