FOIE GRAS FAUX PAS

When you stop to think of it, most of the food we eat is pretty funky. Beef – muscle fiber, connective tissue, blood (let’s not kid ourselves; even kashering gets rid of only some of it) – even from lamb and veal. Babies, mind you. Organs – who knows what kind of poison has made its way through those? Chickens roll around in barnyard shmootz. Fish swim around their own waste.

But, the most disgusting is foie gras, the fancy name for goose liver. A kosher species, you say? Just broil it up, grind with onions, eggs, and a little schmaltz, and good Shabbos, right? Only if you are a culinary ignoramus who thinks that Thousand Island dressing is haute cuisine.

Foie gras producers force-feed sweet little goslings, offspring of our beloved Mother Goose, by inserting a feeding tube and swelling their liver to the size of footballs. Our lovable goslings, who would otherwise have a life expectancy of 60 years are then slaughtered. Even the pictures give you the creeps, maybe more than watching a cow being shechted, another case for vegetarianism.

Kosher foie gras? Why not treife? A clear-cut case of tza’ar ba’alei chayyim, inflicting pain on an innocent animal, n’est pas? Not so easy. One of those black-hat high-rollers from Bnai Brak, who owns controlling interest in a foie gras operation, posed the question to rabbinical authorities from – you guessed it – Bnai Brak. One of them, age 90, pronounced foie gras permissible, opining that the rule of tza’ar ba’alei chayyim is suspended when “the suffering has some tangible benefit to man.” This, of course, is tantamount to the Medellin drug cartel claiming that it is selling cocaine “only for medicinal purposes.”

Ironically, the snooty Upper West/East Side kosher-chic consumer doesn’t get much Israeli foie gras. The primary supplier of kosher foie gras to the US is France. Who would have guessed it? The same country that thinks horsemeat is a delicacy and an Erector Set project gone wrong is a wonder of the world, has us believing that livers au hepatitis are haute cuisine.

My fellow Jews, arise! Don’t be hoodwinked! Just schmeer some honest-to-goodness gehakte leber on your challah. Paris will soon start looking like Calcutta.