- Golden State to ban foie gras on July 1, and will be only state to do so
- Ban states that over-feeding of ducks via tubes is cruel
- Ahead of ban, high-end restaurants serving abundance of decadent food
By Associated Press and Beth Stebner
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This is not a good time to be a duck with a fatty liver in California, though better times lie just ahead.
Chefs are loading their high-end menus with duck liver: terrine de foie gras, seared foie gras with mango chutney, foie gras salad and sweet foie gras for dessert.
And they are keeping secret the locations of their multi-course dinners to avoid protesters as a July 1 ban looms in California, the only state to outlaw foie gras.
Cramming in: High-end restaurants in California are squeezing in as much foie gras into their menus as possible ahead of a state-wide ban; here, a carrot soup topped with foie gras cream at Sent Sovi
Liver alone: Foie Gras is torched and made into a brulee at Sent Sovi Friday; the culinary treat will be banned on July 1
Demand for the delicacy created by force-feeding ducks through funnel-like tubes has never been higher as diners sate their palates with a product that soon will be banned for production and sale in the Golden State.
'The price has doubled. People are finding it hard to get it because the demand is so high,' said Tracy Lee of the San Jose-based traveling dining service Dishcrawl, which has organized a series of 15 secret, sold-out foie gras dinners. Her last one is Thursday.
While gourmands stockpile foie gras at $60 a pound, others are stomaching the frenetic food fest with disdain.
'High-end foodies and chefs stuffing down their throats excessive amounts of fatty liver from force-fed ducks in the run-up to the ban paint a pretty ironic picture,' said Jennifer Fearing of the Humane Society of the United States.
As the California foie gras feeding frenzy escalates, protesters in San Francisco and Los Angeles are staking out restaurants and even making reservations to tie up seats at dinners they know they'll never attend.
'Many people don't know what foie gras is or how it's produced and they're horrified when we tell them,' said Dana Portnoy, who shot undercover video inside a foie gras operation and organizes the San Francisco-area protests. '
Prep work: Chef and owner Josiah Slone, right, prepares a foie gras dish at Sent Sovi; renegade chefs across the state are loading their menus with the fatty duck liver
Duckadent: Guests enjoy a foie gras dish at the restaurant
Delicious dish: The food will be banned because of the cruel way in which foie gras must be prepared
Occasionally we'll run into antagonistic patrons, but that's usually when we're protesting at the foie gras benefit dinners.'
It's why Lee doesn't publicize the restaurants where her dinners will be held until a day before the date.
'So far we haven't had any protesters, which has been nice,' she said.
The California legislature gave the state's only producer, Sonoma Artisan Foie Gras, more than seven years to come up with a cruelty-free way to fatten the duck's liver when in 2004 it voted in the ban on producing and selling foie gras.
Absent that, a coalition of chefs have mounted a lobbying campaign to try to overturn the law in the future, and the foie gras dinners are funding that on-going effort.
Force-fed: A farmer in France force feeds grain to a duck as part of the traditional process to fatten its liver for foie gras
A mallard of life and death: Geese wait for their midday feed where they are force-fed to enlarge their livers; Israel and the Czech Republic have banned the practice
To the oohs and aaahs of about 30 diners, Chef Josiah Slone hosted a recent seven-course foie gras feast at his Sent Sovi restaurant in Saratoga.
He started with arugula with foie gras vinaigrette, moved to foie gras mousse with tartufata and English peas and seared foie gras with savoury rhubarb pie. For dessert: foie, peanut butter and chocolate.
FATTY TREAT OR CRUEL FEAT? THE TRUTH BEHIND FOIE GRAS
Foie gras - French for 'fatty liver' - is made from liver swollen to 10 times its normal size, which the lawsuit argues is acute hepatic lipidosis, a condition linked to obesity in animals.
Ducks' livers become so engorged by the feeding process called 'gavage' that the birds can't walk and have trouble breathing.
Gavage has been outlawed in a dozen countries including Israel, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
'For me, it was more of an educational dinner to talk a little about how foie gras is produced and the science behind how it's produced,' Slone said. 'Yes there are two sides to it, but understanding the line between science and emotion is very important for people.'
There are enough 'quality ingredients out there' that his California-French menu won't be lacking when it's gone, Slone said.
As someone who goes to extreme measures to source quality meat and vegetables, he thinks animal welfare advocates could end more suffering if they'd focus on practices at large confined animal farming operations producing beef, chicken and pork.
'I think the issue that the animal rights people have is a lot bigger than foie gras,' Slone said. 'Foie gras was sort of an easy target, sort of low-hanging fruit.
'But in the sense of improving conditions of animal welfare, ending some of the factory farming practices that big ag is defending is a very admirable goal.'
The California ban, which maintains that over-feeding ducks using a pipe stuffed down the esophagus is cruel, comes as four animal welfare groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture last month, making another point about foie gras.
They hope to secure a national prohibition by arguing that USDA is violating the Poultry Products Inspection Act by allowing 'diseased birds' to enter the food chain.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
A Tour of Historic California Vineyards - Huffington Post
This month I toured some of California's oldest vineyards with a group of winemakers who make wines from these vineyards. The vineyard tour and the dinner that followed were organized to raise funds for the Historic Vineyard Society, whose mission is to document and preserve these precious pieces of California's vinous heritage.
California's first vineyards were planted starting in 1779 by Franciscan missionaries directed by Father Junipero Serra. The vines planted were what have become known as Mission grapes, or Criolla, a term that covers a few varieties of pink grapes traditionally used for sacramental wine. The first non-Mission grape plantings in California, with European, or vitis vinifera, grapes used for fine wine making, were Jean-Louis Vignes's plantings in Los Angeles in 1833.
Northern California, especially Sonoma, became the focus for plantings shortly after some settlers there declared their independence from Mexico in 1846. Following the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded Alta California to the U.S., and in 1850 California became a state. One of the vineyards we visited, now known as Fredericks Vineyard, is thought to have been the first hillside vineyard planted, also in 1850.
The first non-Mission grapes were planted in Northern California in Old Hill Ranch Vineyard, one of the other vineyards we toured, in 1852. Hungarian merchant Agoston Haraszthy, who founded Buena Vista winery, made several trips to France, Spain and Italy in the 1850s and early 1860s to obtain cuttings of an estimated 300 varieties that he brought back to California.
Old Hill Ranch, which had been planted largely to Zinfandel, won an award in Europe for its wines in the 1860s. The press it obtained for receiving this award led to heavy plantings of Zin in Northern California in the 1860s and 1870s.
Unfortunately, these European grapes lacked resistance to the indigenous American phylloxera louse, which infects and poisons vine roots. These early plantings were therefore destroyed at about the same time as virtually all the vineyards of Europe were decimated by the phylloxera that had hitched a ride on cuttings of American grapes brought to England by botanists in the 1850s. As a result, the oldest vines still producing in California date back to the mid-1880s, when vineyards were replanted by grafting European grapes onto phylloxera resistant American and hybrid rootstock.
By the time of the replantings, in the 1880s and 1890s, Italians and other Europeans with winegrowing experience had arrived in the area. Their experience with planting a variety of grapes, so as to have a mix of grapes for blending, contributed to the phenomenon of "field blends" in many of these early California vineyards, dominated by the Zinfandel that had already proven successful. Other commonly planted grapes were Petite Sirah, Alicante Bouschet and Carignane.
According to Joel Peterson, founder of Ravenswood, who led my portion of the tour group, Zin was ideal for planting in many different locations because it is much more flexible than a grape like Cabernet Sauvignon, which gets vegetative in flavor when it's not fully ripe, or can taste like rubber tires when it gets too ripe. Zin varies with the topography and climate where it's planted. It typically takes on more strawberry and red fruit characteristics, but as the climate gets warmer, it can go from boysenberry, to mixed red and black fruit flavors, to blackberry, with lower acidity and higher tannins.
A mix of blending grapes can be used to accommodate the way Zin expresses itself in a particular site. Carignane gave acidity when Zin got too ripe. Petite Sirah provided tannins. Alicante Bouschet brought high concentrations of anthocyanins for color. So according to Joel, Zins contributed the perfume and spice, but mixed black grape blends produced a combination that was more balanced and capable of aging -- important considerations at a time when wines had to be much more structured and sturdy to survive in an era before the refrigeration and bottling techniques we have today.
In three of the vineyards we visited -- Old Hill Ranch, Bedrock (formerly part of Madrone Ranch) and Pagani Ranch -- 30 or more different grape varieties can be found.
The primary purpose of the non-profit Historic Vineyard Society, founded by Joel's son and fellow winemaker, Morgan Twain-Peterson, and three other winemakers, is to catalog California's historic vineyards and to identify and preserve the diversity present in these field blend plantings.
Morgan and other HVS board members can readily identify 20-25 varieties by sight. They've found dozens of varieties in these historic vineyards. Some are extinct elsewhere, like Castets, which is nearly gone from France. They've also found seven different types of Muscat and lots of Mission-type grapes. Some are still a mystery as there is no matching DNA for them in the database that now includes 10,000 grape varieties.
We ended the day with a delicious barbecue dinner accompanied by wines made from the vineyards we had just visited. The dinner was held under a tent in the middle of Bedrock Vineyard, which was purchased by Joel Peterson in 2004.
This beautiful vineyard was originally planted in 1854 by William Sherman and Joe Hooker, prior to their service as generals in the Civil War. Sherman was then a banker in San Francisco, who funded the operation, while Hooker was in charge of the farming. Their aim was to grow grapes and farm produce for the then burgeoning population of San Francisco. Three decades later, the vineyard passed to the former American Consul to China, Eli T. Shepherd. He was the one who had to deal with the devastation of phylloxera starting in 1886. Shepherd rejoiced when he managed to sell the vineyard on to Senator George Hearst in 1887. Hearst replanted, starting in 1888, on phylloxera resistant rootstock that he was able to obtain thanks to his connections with the University of California.
Hearst replanted to mixed black grapes, three-quarters of which were Zinfandel, but with some blocks that were up to 40 percent Alicante Bouschet or Gran Noir. There are amazing ancient vines of Mourvèdre, Grenache and even Mission grapes in this vineyard, from which Morgan and others are still making terrific wine. Of the vineyard's 153 acres, about 33 contain these old vines.
The vineyard was sold by Hearst's widow, Phoebe Appleton Hearst, to the California Wine Association, which held the deed through Prohibition. It was later sold to the Parducci and Domenici families. Following a conflict, settled by a coin toss, the Domenicis took control of what is now the Bedrock Vineyard in 1953 while the Parducci's took a smaller section of the vineyard with its winery (Valley of the Moon).
When Peterson purchased, the vineyard was not farmed that well. They removed 40% of the fruiting positions and cut back on irrigation, among other things. Now the vineyard is yielding a healthy two to two and a half tons per acre. Ravenswood, Carlisle and Bedrock were the first wineries to get grapes following the sale to Peterson. Lately Turley, Biale and Dashe are also making wines from these grapes.
For more about all four of the vineyards we visited, along with tasting notes on wines from these vineyards, see the full report on my blog here. For more information on the Historic Vineyard Society, see their website.
Follow Richard Jennings on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjonwine
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
This is disgusting! I had no idea what foie gras was until now and I am stunned. Why do humans sink so low? - Chrissy, MS, USA.... Wake up and educate yourself with something beyond People magazine. On the global scale of just how far a human sinks, force feeding ducks is way down the list... Maybe after people do something about stopping genocide, female circumcision and a few hundred other horrible things that are done against HUMANS... maybe then I'll take the time to worry about a duck. - Yirmin, USA, 30/5/2012 11:59...I suppose you are the type that believes that if you cant fix everything then we as humans should fix nothing. I have found thru my volunteer work, that the ones that complain and compare every animal welfare issue with the treatment of children and other horrible things are the ones who do nothing about any issues....animals, children, environment etc.
- Lauren, Los Angeles, 31/5/2012 02:42
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