Look, we've been through this before, though not on Capitol Hill. If I hadn't just written an ode to organ meats, a sonnet to spleen, I probably wouldn't care. But over at Slog, Stranger managing editor (and foodie) Bethany Jean Clement has written a couple of posts about the furor surrounding foie gras. Specifically that John Sundstrom at Lark refuses to cave in to a nutball lunatic fringe called the Northwest Animal Rights Network, NARN for short, unhappy about his menu to the point of picketing the restaurant once a week. The subject of the outrage: Lark serves foie gras. No different than thousands of restaurants around the country, and in the mainstream of European culinary tradition that recognizes foie gras as a delicacy.
This post isn't about the debate itself. Instead, it's a suggestion to read the comments on the two posts, close to 200 on the first one, last Saturday, 160 and climbing on today's update. Clear to me that civil discourse--never a strong suit on the internet--has disappeared entirely from the columns of Slog. Name-calling and nastiness abound when there's anonymity for trolls.
Is foie gras a product of deliberate animal cruelty? A hamburger, for crying out loud, is infinitely worse. Not to mention bacon, fried chicken or lamb chops. But Seattle's self-satisfied arbiters of (other people's) morality have no long-range vision past their own navels, it would seem, and little tolerance for the notion that someone, somewhere, might actually enjoy what they eat, quack protestors be damned.
Leave a comment