Results tagged “foie gras” from Birmingham Mail - Restaurant Spy

It shouldn't surprise me, I suppose.

I had six months as a vegetarian after I visited a slaughterhouse in Scotland to cover the Carcass of the Year contest when I was a young reporter. And my older son had a meatless spell as a teenager, I'd guess in an attempt to impress some girl on whom he had his eye at the time.

Now my younger son has announced his intention to forsake meat - though he's still willing to eat fish and pragmatically says he may eat meat when he visits a good restaurant.

Which means that at home I'm having either to cook special meals for him or veggie dishes for the whole family.

The chef at one of Birmingham's best known restaurants tells me that he's taken foie gras off the menu - not because of the animal rights protests taking place, but simply because it wasn't selling well. Perhaps the activists are winning the propaganda war.

But how long, I wonder, before it disappears from menus to be sold under the counter - a bit like booze in the United States' sorry and misguided Prohibition era?

I can't help thinking there would be an added excitement if a waiter furtively whispered: "Wanna score some of our special pate, man?"

Perhaps the animal rights campaigners should worry that forbidden pleasures are often considered the best.

Foie gras, a current target for the animal rights movement, is much admired by gourmets. Small wonder for it's rich, creamy and gloriously flavoured.

But the force-feeding of geese and ducks to produce the enlarged livers that are foie gras is a nasty and brutal business. It's impossible to argue otherwise.

A small, inoffensive and not very noisy demonstration by a group opposed to the production and consumption of foie gras took place outside the restraurant at which I was eating yesterday evening. I admire that they were willing to give up their Friday night when most of the rest of Birmingham was unwinding with a beer or glass of wine.