When they brought the salad I ordered in my business lunch the
other day, I looked down at one of those exotic greens they bring
in place of lettuce and I thought: phooey grass. Which prompted,
inevitably, a series of serious reflections about foie gras — and
the demise of freedom in our society.
Foie Gras, for the uninitiated, is Mardi’s ex-wife, the
one who cleaned him out in the divorce settlement. Although that
silly goose ate too much for her own good, Mardi still named a food
product after her: namely, the liver of a fattened goose. In recent
years, animal rightists and leftists have decried the practice of
force-feeding the geese. They have brought massive pressure to bear
on the haute and the haughty by discussing the matter at
high-society cocktail parties. It finally all became too much for
gourmet restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, who announced last week that
his establishments will no longer serve the stuff.
I have long admired Wolfgang, especially his most puckish dish,
the tongue-in-cheek. To see him reduced to eschew rather than chew,
told without due process he can no longer do a process, is tragic.
This is the most shocking expulsion from the liver pool since the
Beatles. Starving geese everywhere are gazing forlornly at the
Viennese Table of late-life delicacies now expunged from their
benefit plan. No one has taken a proper gander at what tastes good
for the goose.
Chucking the chuckles aside, let us take a hard look at this
feted fetish for keeping the lower orders off the high-end orders
at our eateries. Undoubtedly, there is a virtue in sparing all
living creatures unnecessary pain. The Bible includes a number of
laws designed to minimize animal discomfiture, even ordaining a day
off from work: “Keep the Sabbath… do no work… your servant,
your maid, your ox and your donkey…” (Deuteronomy 5:12,14) Still,
the animal’s role is to serve man as a worker in life and food
after death. This is its nobility, its calling, its fulfillment. It
provides a surge to the engine of man’s progress.
Despite the dispensation to feed an animal in ways which enhance
its quality as food (or the quality of its leather, wool or
feathers), the spirit of gentleness should be preserved. The Talmud
records a tradition explaining why the great Rabbi Judah the
Prince, confidant of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and compiler
of the Mishna, suffered painful kidney stones. They were a
punishment for the following incident. A lamb broke away from a
line of sheep being led to the slaughter and snuggled up against
the rabbi’s chest. “Go back,” he said gently. “This is what you
were created for.” Not gentle enough. If the lamb took the trouble
to appeal to him, he should have spared it the knife.
And yet… and yet… the grassy-green foes of foie gras are not
animated by this vision. With the notable exception of our own Ben
Stein, these beast-boosters are never pro-life. How do we explain a
movement of people who will allow you to take a nearly-born baby
and vacuum its brain out but won’t let you give a goose a second
helping of sherbet?
That great observer of humanity, O. Henry, anticipated this sort
of personality. He wrote an amazing story, “The
Theory and the Hound,” about a U.S. Marshal sent to Honduras to
extradite a Mr. Williams wanted for murdering his wife stateside.
Arriving there, the marshal finds two men calling themselves Mr.
Williams, each shielding the other from being definitively
identified and arrested. No amount of investigating succeeds in
cornering the rat. Finally, in desperation, the marshal viciously
kicks the dog in full view of both gentlemen. One of the men leaps
to his feet to protest and the marshal snaps the handcuffs on him,
saying: “Hound-lover and woman-killer, get ready to meet your
God.”
Or, as the prophet Hosea (13:2) declared: “The slaughterers of
men kiss the calves.”
This gives us an insight into the PETA activists who are
pro-choice. They believe like Professor Singer in Princeton that
man has no godly spark. He is nothing but an animal, and an uppity
one at that. How dare he presume to exercise dominion over the
creatures of the field, the sky and the sea? The animals are just
props in their war against Genesis, against God. They are not so
thick they don’t know an aborted child suffers more than an overfed
goose. The pain of that child is just a bit of human sacrifice in
their pagan war to unseat man from his imposture on the throne of
Creation.
Were I Mr. Puck I would say: “Live and let liver.” Then I would
label those phonies with the two adjectives they have so richly
earned: fey, gross.
