Foie Gras Is Tearing D.C. Apart
· The Atlantic
In Washington, D.C., voters are thinking more than they usually would about ducks. The most contentious question on the ballot in the nation’s capital this midterm-election cycle is a referendum on foie gras, the extra-fatty liver delicacy made by overfeeding ducks (and sometimes geese) through a tube stuck down their esophagus. Selling foie gras has been banned in New York City, Pittsburgh, California, India, and Brazil; Target won’t stock it. On Tuesday, D.C. residents will decide: Should their restaurants still be able to serve it?
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In the lead-up to the election, anti-foie-gras advocates have imported Olivia Gray, a four-and-a-half-pound male duck from Maryland, to act as their mascot. A Capitol Hill restaurant has countered with a foie-gras tasting menu. A local publication predicted this week that the year’s hottest Halloween costumes would be foie gras–related. Residents are debating the usual moral quandaries of this issue: Is force-feeding ducks a practice so cruel it should be banned? Do people have the right to eat whatever they find delicious? But the real reason the ballot initiative is tearing D.C. apart is that it’s become a proxy for arguments about democracy.
The referendum, known as Initiative 86, would ban “force-feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size” within the district, as well as the sale or importation of any products resulting from such practices. It amassed more valid signatures from D.C. residents than any other ballot initiative in the city’s history—more, even, than Initiative 71, the referendum on recreational cannabis that, when passed in 2014, made it possible to (legally) buy a joint four blocks from the White House. Everyone I spoke with, including foie-gras fans, expects Initiative 86 to pass. Ballot measures tend to do well here, and proponents are essentially asking voters to choose duck happiness over a food they’ve probably never eaten.
The pro-ban side, headed by a group called Pro-Animal DC, has spent more than $470,000 lobbying for Initiative 86 to pass. Most of that money was spent this summer on hiring people to collect all of those signatures, a spokesperson for the organization told me. Supporters have been hanging SAVE THE DUCKS posters at Metro stops around the city. Olivia the duck has been making frequent appearances, including co-hosting a panel at George Washington University’s law school. Meghan Abrego, who bought Olivia on eBay when he was just an egg (and Abrego thought he was female), told me that she’s feeling optimistic heading into Election Day. The real question, she said, is not whether the ban will pass, but “What states will pick it up next?”
The anti-ban contingent is not formally organized. Few people seem eager to be targeted as pro–foie gras activists: Bart Hutchins, a local chef who has become the face of the opposition to Initiative 86, told me he has received death threats and has been followed to his car since writing an op-ed opposing the ban in The Washington Post. Hutchins co-owns Butterworth’s, the Capitol Hill restaurant serving the foie-gras tasting menu in protest of the referendum. He told me that the two farms that produce virtually all U.S. foie gras are run ethically; when he has visited the farm he procures Butterworth’s livers from, he said, the ducks don’t actually seem to mind gavage much. Sales from the tasting menu will benefit Hutchins’s Foie Gras Legal Defense Fund, which he says will be put toward mounting a challenge should the ban pass and financially supporting chefs who are fined for continuing to serve the dish, as he intends to do.
This fight is a microcosm of questions about money in politics and what powerful forces might really be behind a grassroots movement. Hutchins and his allies have argued that animal-rights groups are trying to, effectively, force their political views down District residents’ gullets: The initiative is mostly funded by the national organization Pro-Animal Future, which is based in Oregon; Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, headquartered in California, has also contributed money. (Even Olivia is not a D.C. resident.) On the opposing side, a major foie-gras producer based in New York is already rallying its lawyers to challenge the ban if it passes, Axios reported this week.
National organizations fund the activities of local chapters all the time, but D.C. is a particularly attractive city for outside interest groups to fund ballot initiatives: Because of its national prominence, initiatives that pass here are more likely to inspire similar actions across the country. And because its civic-minded voters are packed into a tiny geographic area, gathering petition signatures is easy. Six citizen initiatives have reached the D.C. ballot since 2014, and nearly 90 percent of the total funding for them came from outside the District. As much as they’re arguing about the merits of foie gras, Washingtonians are arguing about astroturfing.
Another popular argument against Initiative 86 is that no one in D.C. should be wasting any time on such a small issue in the first place. Yet I was ready to do my own civic duty. On Wednesday, I made my way to a church to meet Abrego, who was pushing Olivia the duck around in a stroller. Abrego wanted Olivia to appear at a town hall being convened there, but the church wouldn’t let Olivia in, so we stood outside. Some attendees recognized the duck and tried to pet him; D.C.’s Democratic nominee for mayor gave him a high five.
Then I headed from the church to Butterworth’s. Waiting for me were four courses of foie gras, including a Waldorf salad laid on a bed of “foie gras snow” and a “foie gras Twinkie” served with foie-gras ice cream. I’d had foie gras once before on the urging of someone who said the taste would change my life, but I’ve never understood the hype. I still found Butterworth’s version almost disgustingly rich; the duck breast, however, was a star. As I ate, Hutchins made sure I understood that his foie gras comes from ducks that live in open barns and keep to a vegetarian diet; the liver and breast on my plate may have come from the same animal, he said, which helps make farming more sustainable. A man sitting next to me, who said he was a Trump-administration staffer but didn’t volunteer his name, described himself as a foie-gras enthusiast. Nearby, another table started chanting, “Olé, olé, olé, olé; foie gras, foie gras” to the tune of the soccer anthem.
As an on-again, off-again vegetarian, I gravitate toward meat that is so thoroughly estranged from its animal origins that I could imagine it grew on a tree—like a chicken nugget. All in all, the ducks that made my meals at Butterworth’s probably had a better life than most animals I consume. Still, in the lulls in my conversation with Hutchins, my mind would sometimes flash back to Olivia in the stroller, or to the videos I’d seen earlier that day of ducks with metal tubes down their throat. Even if the birds live in an open barn and eat no meat, their livers swell up to 10 times their normal size. After about two weeks of force-feeding, the ducks get so fat they can’t really move.
Foie gras is a low-hanging source of suffering, and using a ballot initiative to bring the issue to a vote seems like a healthy-enough expression of democracy—certainly more healthy than eating as much foie gras as I did. In the Butterworth’s bathroom after my meal, I found myself staring at the rabbits on the wallpaper, feeling sick. Maybe I wasn’t built to handle that much liver. Or maybe the campaign and the backlash had both succeeded in forcing me to think about the political and moral dimensions of my food. That’s democracy at work.