Duck! The Foie Gras Battle Rages On, Again

Look, we've been through this before, though not on Capitol Hill. If we hadn't just posted our ode to organ meats, a sonnet to spleen, we 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 isn't about the debate itself. Instead, it's a suggestion to read the comments on the two posts, close to 200 vitriolic outbursts on the first one, last Saturday, 160 and climbing on today's update. Clear to us 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 protesters be damned.