CHICAGO — Gourmets in Chicago can order foie
gras again after the city council on Wednesday repealed a
two-year restaurant ban on a delicacy that critics say is
produced at cruel expense to geese and ducks.
The aldermen voted 37-6 to drop the ban on
restaurants serving foie gras, an ordinance that had passed with
a single dissenting vote in April 2006. The city had issued a
few warnings to restaurants for flouting the ban and one defiant
eatery was fined.
Mayor Richard Daley had called the ban the
"silliest ordinance" the city council ever passed and said it
made Chicago "the laughingstock of the nation."
Animal rights groups decry foie gras as a
product of inhumane treatment as it is made by force-feeding
geese and ducks through a steel pipe put down their throats,
expanding their livers to 10 times normal size.
In 2004, California passed a law that will
end the production and sale of foie gras in the state in 2012.
Similar laws have been proposed in a few other states.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
criticized Chicago’s move to overturn the ban. "This is
industry’s dirty political manoeuvring at its worst," the group
said in a statement.
"Today, that compassionate decision was
reversed in a secretive, rushed bow to special interests that
benefit from the cruel treatment of animals. It goes against
what the vast majority of Chicagoans believe in."
Some restaurant owners, whose association
lobbied for the ban’s repeal, worried that other items such as
lobster, veal and even eggs could be barred from their menus.
"I thought it was us sticking our nose in something we
probably shouldn’t have even been in," Alderman Dick Mell told
the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, adding that veal calves and
chickens also suffer in confinement. "There’s some cruelty out
there, folks." – Reuters
