On June 13 the City Council passed a resolution honoring several of Chicago’s top chefs, and as usual 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke offered the longest, most eloquent praise of the day’s honorees. “‘There’s no sincerer love than the love of food,’ the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw once said,” Burke intoned. Shaw, a celebrated vegetarian, also reportedly once said, “Animals are my friends . . . and I don’t eat my friends.” But that didn’t come up.
Perhaps on one level. The alderman says he, like his callers, believes that the production of foie gras is cruel–it’s made by shoving tubes down the throats of ducks and geese to force-feed them and fatten their livers. But Stone tells the activists, and anyone else who’ll listen, that he and his fellow aldermen overreached last year when they voted almost unanimously for the ban. “This is not about ducks,” he said. “It’s about the authority of the City Council.”
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Chicago, Stone added, has become a “laughingstock” around the country, mentioning Mayor Daley and a few out of town friends who he said have convinced him that the ban has to go. “If you do this, the next step is the City Council starts legislating what you serve, what you eat, what you cook,” Stone said.
A few months later, 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore got the foie gras ban passed over Daley’s quiet objections with help from the Humane Society and other groups. Then Moore, a coalition of unions, and several of his council colleagues led an even more aggressive campaign for the big-box living wage ordinance. The council passed the measure, but it was reversed when Daley convinced three aldermen to flip and support his veto of it.
But it’s hard to say if the push has actually influenced the aldermen. “It’s not an issue for people in my ward,” said Carrie Austin, whose ward (the 34th) was visited by PETA and Mercy for Animals activists. “Gangs and drugs and crime are more important to them than foie gras.” Austin said she thought foie gras was a waste of the council’s time and that she favored the repeal.
Smith marched into the restaurant, ordered two bottles of water, and asked the manager and a couple other workers if they’d heard of the flap over foie gras.
Jasso listened to Smith’s description of foie gras production and grabbed the clipboard. She said she’d once volunteered as an election judge for Pope but worked for one of his opponents in the last election. “Kids are getting killed down here, and he hasn’t done nothing about it,” she said.
