Big shout out to the Bristol Animal Rights Collective. After just one vocal protest outside upmarket Montpelier eaterie Bells Diner, run by media-darling chef Chris Wicks, the restaurant has stopped selling Foie-Gras with immediate effect.
The Animal Rights Collective turned up for a second demo at the restaurant only to find that Wicks has already pulled the vile food for posh idiots off his menu. The Collective flushed with this success headed immediately for Juniper restaurant on Cotham Road where a very brief demo had the management there agreeing to ditch their food for sadists. Result!
Bristol Animal Rights Collective say they will be monitoring both establishments to ensure Foie-Gras stays off the menu. They say this about food:
Foie-Gras is the grossly enlarged liver of a duck or goose which has been force fed enormous quantities of food with a metal pipe up to 3 times a day. The birds livers swell up to over 10 time their natural size. Many birds choke to death when food is forced into their lungs. The production of this disease marketed as a delicacy has been banned in the uk but is still imported from France.
If you see any business selling this shit let Bristol Animal Rights Collective know. Let’s boot this nasty little trade out of Bristol.
“Vile food for posh idiots”? “Media darling” as a pejorative? I assume the Collective are taking the stance that not being “posh” or “media”-literate confers a moral superiority on them by default. This would explain why the postings on their website are horribly mispelled.
Here’s another “nasty little trade” floating around in Bristol- recreational drugs. They fund an industry of human exploitation- of violence, prostitution and God knows what else. But I assume because their use isn’t confined to “posh” people (in fact, I’ve seen them crusty buggers from the Collective plying their trade and I’d bet a week’s wages they all dabble) we’re not supposed to get up in arms about it.
Hypocrites, the lot of you, and thick to go with it.
That doesn’t seem like a very good analogy.
Foie Gras is a legal substance with a grotesque production method, whereas drugs are illegal substances generally of natural origin.
I think you’re grinding the wrong end of your axe.
Okay, fair enough, I’ll try again.
Foie gras is not criminal, correct, and its production methods are, for the last two weeks of the goose’s life, of debatable virtue- only for the last two weeks, mind.
Recreational drugs are criminal, and although of “natural origin”, are necessarily converted into the unnatural powders and pills, and subsequently exported, by criminals. These criminals have all sorts of nasty sidelines under their umbrella as well, such as murder, torture and prostitution of human beings.
More people in Bristol take drugs than eat foie gras. This is an unsubstantiated claim, true, but it’s pretty damn obvious. So: what I’m saying is that I resent Montpelier hippies who (and again, I am making assumptions here) either directly fund a criminal industry of human exploitation or tacitly endorse one in the “urban” culture around them getting on their high horses about a bloody goose.
Further, I could acknowledge that foie gras production is cruel (and there is some debate still raging as to whether it is), and that I honestly don’t care because it tastes so good. Even so I would be ostensibly less culpable than anybody else who eats meat, because the geese “suffer” for two weeks whereas every other animal which isn’t labelled “organic” is kept in miserable shitty conditions for its entire life. Better to eat foie gras every day than eat a battery hen once a week, in terms of gross contribution to the unhappiness of the world’s animals.
So why the furore over foie gras? Here’s why: because it is served in “posh” restaurants. That’s the bit that pisses me off, that in the promotion of these protests there seems to be an automatic assumption that “poshness” or being “upmarket” is inherently a bad thing, or that restaurants themselves are the symbol of the bloated oppressors of the bourgoisie against whom the heroic “great unwashed” (a phrase used by the BARC to describe themselves on Indymedia) pitch battle.
They seemingly don’t resent foie gras because it’s cruel- compared to the vast majority of meat production it’s like a big fuzzy hug. Nor is the cruelty in human terms of the recreational drugs pervading “urban” culture of any concern (that was the point I was trying to make -sorry if I got a bit frothy). Instead, like the folks who protested so vehemently against fox-hunting (which, yes, IS cruel), I suspect the BARC to be “class warriors” in disguise. This is certainly indicated by the language used on their site and postings. And this is in itself a horrible, dishonest stance.
I dunno. I don’t mind people protesting where they see things wrong. But I don’t think these folks are honest and I think they’re protesting out of resentment or for the joy of sticking it to the “capitalist pigs” rather than out of empathy. And I feel sorry for those in the restaurant business (which is hard as nails to make a profit in) who work 60+ hours a week to build something only to have some fake-aggrieved kid who wouldn’t know a day’s work if it smacked him between the eyes show up and shout “animal abuser” and try to kill your trade.
I just don’t think they’re big or clever, and I’ll stop there.