- Golden State to ban foie gras on July 1, and will be only state to do so
- Ban states that over-feeding of ducks via tubes is cruel
- Ahead of ban, high-end restaurants serving abundance of decadent food
By Associated Press and Beth Stebner
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This is not a good time to be a duck with a fatty liver in California, though better times lie just ahead.
Chefs are loading their high-end menus with duck liver: terrine de foie gras, seared foie gras with mango chutney, foie gras salad and sweet foie gras for dessert.
And they are keeping secret the locations of their multi-course dinners to avoid protesters as a July 1 ban looms in California, the only state to outlaw foie gras.
Cramming in: High-end restaurants in California are squeezing in as much foie gras into their menus as possible ahead of a state-wide ban; here, a carrot soup topped with foie gras cream at Sent Sovi
Liver alone: Foie Gras is torched and made into a brulee at Sent Sovi Friday; the culinary treat will be banned on July 1
Demand for the delicacy created by force-feeding ducks through funnel-like tubes has never been higher as diners sate their palates with a product that soon will be banned for production and sale in the Golden State.
'The price has doubled. People are finding it hard to get it because the demand is so high,' said Tracy Lee of the San Jose-based traveling dining service Dishcrawl, which has organized a series of 15 secret, sold-out foie gras dinners. Her last one is Thursday.
While gourmands stockpile foie gras at $60 a pound, others are stomaching the frenetic food fest with disdain.
'High-end foodies and chefs stuffing down their throats excessive amounts of fatty liver from force-fed ducks in the run-up to the ban paint a pretty ironic picture,' said Jennifer Fearing of the Humane Society of the United States.
As the California foie gras feeding frenzy escalates, protesters in San Francisco and Los Angeles are staking out restaurants and even making reservations to tie up seats at dinners they know they'll never attend.
'Many people don't know what foie gras is or how it's produced and they're horrified when we tell them,' said Dana Portnoy, who shot undercover video inside a foie gras operation and organizes the San Francisco-area protests. '
Prep work: Chef and owner Josiah Slone, right, prepares a foie gras dish at Sent Sovi; renegade chefs across the state are loading their menus with the fatty duck liver
Duckadent: Guests enjoy a foie gras dish at the restaurant
Delicious dish: The food will be banned because of the cruel way in which foie gras must be prepared
Occasionally we'll run into antagonistic patrons, but that's usually when we're protesting at the foie gras benefit dinners.'
It's why Lee doesn't publicize the restaurants where her dinners will be held until a day before the date.
'So far we haven't had any protesters, which has been nice,' she said.
The California legislature gave the state's only producer, Sonoma Artisan Foie Gras, more than seven years to come up with a cruelty-free way to fatten the duck's liver when in 2004 it voted in the ban on producing and selling foie gras.
Absent that, a coalition of chefs have mounted a lobbying campaign to try to overturn the law in the future, and the foie gras dinners are funding that on-going effort.
Force-fed: A farmer in France force feeds grain to a duck as part of the traditional process to fatten its liver for foie gras
A mallard of life and death: Geese wait for their midday feed where they are force-fed to enlarge their livers; Israel and the Czech Republic have banned the practice
To the oohs and aaahs of about 30 diners, Chef Josiah Slone hosted a recent seven-course foie gras feast at his Sent Sovi restaurant in Saratoga.
He started with arugula with foie gras vinaigrette, moved to foie gras mousse with tartufata and English peas and seared foie gras with savoury rhubarb pie. For dessert: foie, peanut butter and chocolate.
FATTY TREAT OR CRUEL FEAT? THE TRUTH BEHIND FOIE GRAS
Foie gras - French for 'fatty liver' - is made from liver swollen to 10 times its normal size, which the lawsuit argues is acute hepatic lipidosis, a condition linked to obesity in animals.
Ducks' livers become so engorged by the feeding process called 'gavage' that the birds can't walk and have trouble breathing.
Gavage has been outlawed in a dozen countries including Israel, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
'For me, it was more of an educational dinner to talk a little about how foie gras is produced and the science behind how it's produced,' Slone said. 'Yes there are two sides to it, but understanding the line between science and emotion is very important for people.'
There are enough 'quality ingredients out there' that his California-French menu won't be lacking when it's gone, Slone said.
As someone who goes to extreme measures to source quality meat and vegetables, he thinks animal welfare advocates could end more suffering if they'd focus on practices at large confined animal farming operations producing beef, chicken and pork.
'I think the issue that the animal rights people have is a lot bigger than foie gras,' Slone said. 'Foie gras was sort of an easy target, sort of low-hanging fruit.
'But in the sense of improving conditions of animal welfare, ending some of the factory farming practices that big ag is defending is a very admirable goal.'
The California ban, which maintains that over-feeding ducks using a pipe stuffed down the esophagus is cruel, comes as four animal welfare groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture last month, making another point about foie gras.
They hope to secure a national prohibition by arguing that USDA is violating the Poultry Products Inspection Act by allowing 'diseased birds' to enter the food chain.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
California's Overseas Voters Received Late Ballots For Presidential Primary - Huffington Post
This story comes courtes of California Watch.
Elections officials throughout California missed a deadline to send 8,250 ballots to overseas and military voters for next week’s presidential primary, prompting a lawsuit and swift settlement over the weekend between the state officials and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Eleven of the state’s 58 counties violated the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act by failing to send ballots to voters abroad on April 21 – 45 days before the primary. While about 5,450 of the late ballots were sent out within two days of missing the deadline, some were delayed as much as a week.
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit [PDF] against California for missing the deadline, but Secretary of State Debra Bowen reached an agreement on the matter that same day, federal officials said. As part of the settlement, the secretary of state's office will hold training sessions with at least one election official in each county before the general election in November.
David Tom, elections manager for San Mateo County, said his county was on schedule to send ballots to the 739 overseas voters who requested their ballots through the mail. But at the last minute, a county Board of Supervisors candidate had to be removed from the ballot.
“Every ballot had to be reprinted,” Tom said. “That may have caused us to miss the deadline date.”
San Mateo County has 2,266 overseas voters in the military, Tom said. The majority of them requested their ballot electronically, but the county was six days late in physically mailing the rest of the ballots.
“It was not something that we did intend,” Tom said.
The San Mateo County elections office was aware that it missed the deadline and made sure to send the remaining ballots to their destinations via express mail, Tom said. County elections officials will be contacting overseas voters who have not yet returned their ballots to offer them the option to return the ballot by express mail at no cost, he added.
“We’ll certainly be much more conscious in ensuring that nothing gets in the way of meeting the deadline,” Tom said. “It’s going to be on our radar even more so than it is today."
This is the first primary election in which states have had to comply with new regulations under the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, said Benjamin Wagner, the U.S. attorney representing California’s Eastern District.
Under the new law, states have to send ballots to overseas voters 45 days before federal elections and allow the voter to choose how he or she wants to receive the ballot – either electronically or through the mail, Wagner said.
“Nobody is intending to disenfranchise the military,” he said. “Each of them (the counties) have their own elections officials and registrars of voters, and they’re all trying to comply with new regulations. What this enforcement action is intended to do is put some teeth behind that statute.”
California is not the only state that has struggled to get ballots to every overseas voter on time, Wagner said.
“It’s been happening in other states on kind of a rolling basis as we get close to those states' primaries,” he said. “It was not quite as cooperative of a process as it has been here in California.”
The lawsuit’s less-than-24-hour turnaround indicates the Justice Department already had been working with the secretary of state to resolve the problem, Wagner said. A total of 19 counties violated the law by delaying ballots or failing to provide the voter with an option – or both, Wagner said.
“There’s a sufficiently widespread problem with compliance in California that we thought it was important to bring some enforcement action,” he said. “The parties have reached an agreement on what is the proper outcome of the case.”
Secretary of State Bowen gave counties “repeated reminders” of the April 21 deadline, according to a press release from her office. Contra Costa, Fresno, Modoc, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Shasta, Sierra, Tehama, Trinity and Ventura counties still missed the date.
Stephanie Snyder is a reporting intern at the Center for Investigative Reporting covering the California Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown. To read more California Watch stories, click here.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
This is disgusting! I had no idea what foie gras was until now and I am stunned. Why do humans sink so low? - Chrissy, MS, USA.... Wake up and educate yourself with something beyond People magazine. On the global scale of just how far a human sinks, force feeding ducks is way down the list... Maybe after people do something about stopping genocide, female circumcision and a few hundred other horrible things that are done against HUMANS... maybe then I'll take the time to worry about a duck.
- Yirmin, USA, 30/5/2012 19:59
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