If Charlie Trotter hadn’t suggested eating Rick Tramonto’s liver to Tribune reporter Mark Caro, there probably wouldn’t have been a foie gras ban in Chicago.
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Caro—an entertainment reporter who’d interviewed and written stories about Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Michael Jordan, and Halle Berry—says he got a bigger reaction to his piece, “Liver and Let Live,” than anything he’d ever written in his 20-some years at the Tribune. In his smart, fascinating, and hilarious new book, The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight, he recounts how one reader in particular—49th Ward alderman Joe Moore—reacted, and how this set in motion a chain of events that would reverberate across the country.
“He didn’t initially contact any animal-rights groups, foie gras producers or restaurateurs to gain more information, and they didn’t contact him,” Caro writes. “The week after my story ran, he simply took action and proposed a ban on the sale of foie gras in Chicago.”
“I was like, ‘This is where I’m losing the animal people,’” he says. “But I had to do it. I really try to say, ‘This is what I’ve seen, this is what I know,’ but not, ‘This is what you should think.’ Intellectually, as you analyze some of this stuff, there are a lot of charges against the industry that are inconsistent. But that’s not to say it’s an absolute good/bad sort of thing.”
But the net effect of his experience is that Caro was swayed by at least one of the animal-rights arguments: eating factory-farmed chicken is far worse in terms of suffering than eating beef. Today he finds himself consuming a little more red meat than he used to, and much less chicken. He hasn’t personally banned foie gras, but after his cholesterol level skyrocketed during his research, he’s only had it a handful of times since he finished.v
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