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INTERVIEW: The Foie Gras Wars author Mark Caro

by Drew Lazor

Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro's The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight (Simon & Schuster) is a hearty, funny and informative look into the complex struggle surrounding foie gras (fwah grah), or the fattened livers of ducks. The delicacy is adored by chefs and gourmets, yet despised by animal rights activists who feel that gavage, the force-feeding practice used to produce it, is inhumane.

Inspired by the UPenn grad's 2005 front-page Tribune article on celebrity chef (and former foie fanatic) Charlie Trotter's abrupt decision to quit serving the stuff (it started a chain of events leading to Chicago's since-repealed foie ban), the book explores Philly's 2007 foie gras battles at length — London Grill owner Terry McNally, Hugs for Puppies firebrand Nick Cooney, councilman-at-large Jack Kelly (who presented a foie gras ban for Philly) and a number of other local personalities are featured.

In addition to appearing this Sunday at London Grill, Caro will sign and discuss the book on Tuesday, April 7 at the Penn Bookstore. CP caught up with the author during some down time on his West Coast press tour.

City Paper: When did you decide to extend your Tribune piece into this full-length book?

Mark Caro: It was pretty soon [after the publication of the story], actually. It got so much attention, and it really was sort of amazing to me, for someone who was mostly writing about entertainment and film. It got picked up everywhere ... pages and pages of blog entries, columns in the Tribune, the New York Times, Newsweek, Page Six. I thought that obviously this struck some sort of chord. It was not that people cared much about this French delicacy — the chord was people really had conflicted ideas over how animals are treated, and what we think is tolerable for the treatment of animals.

[I thought the book] would be a good way to get at all these different issues ... the deniability we have and the lack of knowledge we have on where our food comes from is a ripe topic. The foie gras thing is a way to root it in an actual story with specifics and characters, instead of some broad thing about your humble narrator going from farm to farm and telling you what's what.

CP: For the longest time, many people's only exposure to foie gras was seeing it on Iron Chef. Is Charlie Trotter responsible for getting Americans to start talking — and arguing — about it?

MC: I think it was already getting there. There was already a very effective campaign against it, by the time Trotter [decided to stop serving foie]. California had already passed its ban at that point, which goes into effect in 2012. [But] I do think that Trotter being the first really prominent chef to get rid of it was really novel, because it definitely drew a lot of attention.

It's a constant tug of war of associations. Most peoples' association is negative, but most people are not foodies and haven't gone out to farms and seen it. There's something so visceral about a duck being force-fed, but there are nuances in their biology. The nuances — [most people] just don't know about them.

CP: So how do we know what's fact, with conflicting information coming from both sides of the debate?

MC: That was one of my biggest frustrations in doing the book ... why I wanted to be an objective third party telling you everything. I was watching a video tape of one of the California [foie gras] hearings, and a senator said something like, "One side says one thing and one side says the complete opposite — I don't know what to believe."

If you had every duck in foie gras getting its throat torn out [by gavage], you wouldn't have any foie gras production. If there was a huge percentage of ducks with holes in their throats because of feeding tubes ripping them apart, there would be a much higher mortality rate and they wouldn't have a product. Logic does dictate that if there were really being mangled by this process, [foie gras farmers] would be losing a lot.

I went to Hudson Valley twice, then France, and [California's] Sonoma Foie Gras. In France, many [foie gras farms] didn't even know we were coming. We just saw a foie gras sign, pulled off on the side of the road and they asked us if we wanted to see the birds. And the process you see doesn't match up with YouTube, with all those horrific videos — it's just not what it looks like.

If you wanted to see [the process behind] the chicken sandwich you ate this afternoon, they'd say no due to biosecurity or insurance reasons. There's no transparency with the things we eat every day, but this thing that's supposedly torture, you can go see. You're not going to be as distressed by it as you think you would be. It takes a few seconds and the ducks don't really seem to be bothered by it. That's not to say that someone who's anti-foie will go see it and say, "I think this is good." But someone who's been led to believe that it's a horrible, sadistic process will come out saying, "This looks like a sort of agriculture."

CP: Are there cultural implications to Chicago alderman Joe Moore and Philadelphia councilman Jack Kelly's attempts at a foie gras ban?

MC: There's definitely a populist aspect to it. Kelly really banged that populist drum. [But] clearly he hadn't done any research into the issue ... the basics of animal agriculture seemed to elude him. My only thought when interviewing him was he's pushing this bill for a city of more than one million people, and he's asking what a ducks' normal life span is. [He didn't know] that ducks that aren't used for foie gras are killed at half the age. Foie gras ducks at least get 12 weeks of hanging out free-ranging and being in a big barn before they even start the [gavage] process. It just seemed like basically he heard about the Chicago issue and threw it out there.

CP: In the book, you detail your diet, in which you avoid the consumption of mammals and eat only poultry/birds. Still sticking to the same plan?

MC: It's kind of the same — a mish-mosh of me trying to be conscious. Though a couple guys from PETA said that, from a strictly ethical point of view, beef is more ethical than chicken because cows live better lives. I'm still not eating Big Macs. If I'm in a restaurant I'll mix it up ... I do eat beef occasionally. I don't order pork much unless I know about the farm. I am eating a greater variety of things now than when I started the book ... don't know whether that's a good or bad thing. I like supporting ethical farms rather than drawing the line and mammals or birds.

CP: When is the last time you ate foie gras?

MC: Yesterday [March 27], actually. They did a thing over at [Napa Valley's] Rubicon Winery passing hors d'oeuvres. They had a mushroom strudel with one [type of] foie gras and a little torchon slice with another one.

If someone gives it to me and I'm being polite, I'm not going to say no. But I was at a restaurant the other day and saw it on the menu, and I did not order it. Have it in moderation. I haven't personally banned it, but I'm not really seeking it out, particularly.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)