For most of this year, a proposed ballot initiative to ban foie gras in Washington, D.C., drew just a whisper of public opposition—from the usual crowd. First up was Bart Hutchins, the chef and owner of Butterworth’s, the Capitol Hill restaurant that has been MAGA diners’ safe space since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Banning foie gras, he wrote in the opinion pages of The Washington Post, would result in “censuring a generation of young cooks and ending the relationship they have with an extraordinary ingredient.” He is organizing a foie gras tasting menu, ostensibly to fund opposition to the bill. Marc Fisher, who rarely passes up an opportunity to troll D.C. libs, earlier this month called the proposed ban “an absurd attempt to mandate what people may eat,” one that “sadly does not reflect the division of public opinion but rather the extent to which cancel culture has scared people off expressing their views.”
But last week, D.C.’s most famous chef—and beloved humanitarian—joined the fray. “Sure but then let’s ban beef and pork and chicken … and also vegetables too because is a study that says that maybe indications of suffering … we have children hungry in USA and the World … lets end hunger and then we talk,” José Andrés tweeted, adding, “Lets concentrate on things that matter … cars with children are being shot by ICE, immigrants working in farms and restaurants being deported many with green cards and even citizens … so many other issues!”
Initiative 86, which is on next week’s ballot, asks voters to approve or reject a law that would prohibit the force-feeding of birds—defined as “inserting a tube into the bird’s throat to deliver excessive feed”—“for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size,” and ban the sale and distribution of products created through that process, including foie gras. Such a ban already exists in California, and in cities including Portland, Pittsburgh, and New York (whose 2019 ban is still being held up by legal challenges). The range of the critiques of these bans is broad, but Andrés’s—which was seconded by prominent right-wing podcaster Mary Katherine Ham—is perhaps the most common: that it’s trivial compared to larger societal problems, and represents a potentially slippery slope of government overreach.
Should the government restrict practices that cause harm, including on the dinner plate? It is a philosophical and legal question that gets at the heart of the role and limits of the state in a liberal democracy. It pits individual freedoms and pleasures against collective values and decision-making. But it elides the more basic point that in a democracy, citizens can and should use whatever political tools are available to them to try to change society to reflect their values—no matter how incremental that change may be. What some people consider “silly,” others see as a means to make the world just slightly less cruel to animals.
Foie gras is produced through a process called gavage, or force-feeding of birds like ducks and geese in the last few weeks before they are slaughtered. This is usually done by shoving a metal or plastic pipe down their throats to dump highly fatty and caloric corn-based feed directly into their stomachs. Since these animals tend to swallow food whole (the question of whether they do or do not have a gag reflex is debated), they are susceptible to being fed this way. This overfeeding rapidly induces hepatic steatosis, or fatty liver disease, meaning that the birds’ livers swell to between five and 10 times their normal size. It is these diseased livers that become a premium-priced foodie delicacy once the birds are slaughtered.
The process causes extensive harm, injuring the birds’ beaks, digestive tracts, skulls, and sternums and causing sores, lameness, reduced mobility, and increased on-farm mortality. This has made foie gras, like veal before it, not just a taboo but a leading target of the animal rights movement. The production of foie gras has been banned in over 20 countries, and both its production and sale have been banned in India and Brazil (whose ban comes into effect in January).
The argument for banning foie gras seems simple enough: We should not cause unnecessary harm to animals to cater to the whims of a small number of elite eaters. But then, as Andrés suggests, why not ban most meat, since upward of 99 percent of meat consumed in the United States comes from factory farms, where animals suffer as much if not more than on foie gras farms? The idea has certainly been floated. But much of politics is a question of working within the Overton window—the bounds of the possible. Calling for a ban on all factory farming, even if the ethical argument is sound, is likely a political nonstarter.
The problem for animals in democratic politics is that they can’t participate. They have no voice and are no one’s constituents. And so they depend on others to speak for their interests. This leaves the task of championing animals’ interests to concerned citizens and activist groups who must pursue pro-animal politics within the constraints of a political system not often inclined to hear their arguments. As such, the animal rights movement tends to be one focused on targets of opportunity, no matter how large or small; a sort of pragmatism of necessity. As the great American philosopher Richard Rorty argued, the core task of a politics of meliorism should be the reduction of cruelty for the simple reason that reducing cruelty improves society.
The animal rights movement targets cruelty in two ways: mitigation and bans. Mitigation, such as improved animal welfare practices, tends to be more viable at scale. While some campaigns, such as those seeking federal welfare protections for farmed animals, have gone nowhere due to entrenched farming and meat interests, there have been considerable wins like California voters’ passage in 2018 of Proposition 12, which banned the production and sale of products including pork and eggs that come from factory farms that use extreme forms of confinement. Ballot initiatives, like Prop 12 and Initiative 86, have long been a preferred tool of the movement because of a political disconnect on animal rights: It’s ostensibly a fringe and unpopular issue, in part because Americans eat more meat per capita than almost anywhere else in the world, so politicians usually ignore it, but pro–animal welfare measures tend to be popular with the public. Direct democracy, in the form of voter referenda, allows citizens to weigh in on ethical issues like animal treatment that make it onto legislative agendas far less frequently.
Targeted animal rights measures, like D.C.’s proposed ban, are especially likely to succeed; banning the production of duck and goose meat entirely would likely be a nonstarter in the city. But that doesn’t mean that a ban on just foie gras wouldn’t be consequential. There are only a handful of foie gras producers in the entire country, and the three cities that consume the most of it are Las Vegas, New York, and D.C. So banning it in one these places endangers the viability of the entire domestic industry. At the same time, a ban would hurt only a very small number of farms, restaurants, and eaters—so the opposition is not particularly powerful. The choice to target D.C., in other words, is not a random or trivial decision but a pragmatic, strategic one.
Product bans tend to be politically unpopular, especially in the United States, which has a libertarian streak on matters of government regulation. Opponents of pro-animal policies often argue that legislating what people can eat impinges on core freedoms, including gustatory pleasure—especially when the state should be, as Andrés argues, doing more important things for our fellow human beings. Call it foodie libertarian whataboutism. But the argument is a weak one. Indeed, it was not a champion of a strong state, but one of the world’s foremost libertarian philosophers, Robert Nozick, who wrote that the pleasure one gets from causing harms to animals does not outweigh those animals’ interests in not being harmed.
Besides, food is already one of the most regulated and politicized aspects of everyday life, its production, distribution, and sale shaped by countless laws about everything from food safety to working conditions to animal treatment. We banned trans fats because of public health harms, and surely no one is clamoring for the freedom to shove those down their gullet. But more to the point, especially in the case of ballot initiatives, the distinction between the state and one’s fellow citizens is a fine one. A ban on foie gras would not be the government legislating taste and gustatory pleasure for its own sake, but voters asking the government to prevent harm in the public interest. And while the enforcement cost—about $100,000 per year for a food inspector—might make fiscal conservatives and some on the City Council balk, it’s peanuts compared to other budget lines.
That leaves the charge that the proposed law is a distraction from graver ills, such as the plight of immigrants working in the food system. The easy answer here is that citizens have many concerns and government can do many things. As Zohran Mamdani has shown in New York City, government can give out free opera tickets while fixing potholes while winning legal settlements for fast food workers. But the more compelling answer, to paraphrase Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka, is that rather than counterposing human rights to animal rights, pursuing both can lead to a more robust and inclusive democratic politics. It would be what Rorty referred to as expanding the boundaries of our moral community, only across species lines.
Of course, opposition is just as much a part of democratic politics. The critics have every right to their opinions and concerns. Now it is up to the voters to decide. And no matter which side they choose, the very fact that we’re having the debate about banning foie gras has made a difference. The Overton window is now just a hair wider than it was before.
