Posts from May 2005


Fuck _Newsweek_
01 May 2005

Yeah Newsweek, you suck.

In a recent article on foie gras (“A Flap Over Foie Gras,” May 2, 2005) Newsweek details the basic objections to foie gras and where they’re coming from (mostly PeTA, and a regretful chef from Chicago). The article is your basic boilerplate media coverage of any animal rights issue, though the article is framed by the 5000 year ‘tradition’ of foie gras versus animal rights activists who see foie gras as “fur on a plate.”

Two things about this article made me so angry this morning that I had to run to my computer to write about them:

1) Tradition is used to justify cruelty. “We’ve been doing it for 5000 years, so it must be ok.” This is complete, utter, and total garbage logic. We’ve been “doing” racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression for 5000 years too, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue doing them. Tradition has often been used as a stick to beat people down. It is being used now to deny equal rights to gay, lesbian, and transgender folks. It has been used to justify racism. It has been used to keep “wimmin’ folk” in their place. It comes as no surprise that tradition will continue to justify animal oppression either.

2) The article ends on an offensive note that helps to portray animal rights folks as kill-joy “food police,” and shows where the loyalties of the authors really lie. I’m guessing that this is particularly important for Newsweek since they’re accepting advertisements from the anti-animal rights group “The Center For Conusmer Freedom.” Here’s the relevant bit of text that the article closes with:

It’s all a huge misunderstanding, in the view of Michael Ginor, an owner of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the upstate New York farm that produces most of the estimated 420 tons (or 1.8 billion caloies) of foie gras consumed in the United States annually. Force-feeding ducks with a tube “does sound atrocious,” he admits, but he maintains that waterfowl, lacking the mammalian gag reflex, do not suffer from the process. “Foie gras is easy to attack: it’s for the rich, it’s unnecessary, it’s vain. It can be seen as all those things. But it’s been around for 5,000 years.” And Charlie Trotter himself would be the last to deny how good it is. Its texture meltingly soft as a chocolate truffle, its flavor a mouth-filling meatiness and sweetness that helps justifY humanity’s milion-year struggle to the top of food chain. Unless, of course, madame would prefer the vegetable reduction on her asparagus instead? (italics in original)

Animal cruelty is reduced to a “huge misunderstanding,” making animal rights activists look like sub-intellectual fools. And of course, the authors couldn’t resist mentioning our “struggle to the top of the food chain” (another anti-vegan/AR quip that I hear pretty often). Let’s chuck the authors in a cage with some hungry lions, and then we can talk about million year struggles to the “top” of the food chain….

The authors get in two final blows: the first blow is that suffering is tasty, reinforcing the idea that our tastes trump all, regardless of what horrid measures must be taken to produce those tastes. The second blow is the italicized bit about preferring “vegetable reduction.” Note that the question is addressed to “madame.” There’s a subtle double-insult here in which women are presumed to be hysterical, sensitive, and soft (e.g. prone to “misunderstanding” as described above) and in which those who do care about animal rights are feminized. Of course, “sirs” would never want a vegetable reduction because “real men” love to kill shit and eat it.

In sum, this is a thinly-veiled hack job in which the foie gras industry gets the final nod, and in which AR activists are made to look like feminized fools. Way to go, Newsweek. You suck.

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

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