Going back to the foie gras post from a week or two ago, Michael Ruhlman and Anthony Bourdain have a great little back and forth about the issue over at Salon.com. It's a great read, because it's actually very informative about what consumers need to know and it also shows the insanity of Chef Bourdain.

On a Fox News show last spring, in a debate pitting Assemblyman Panter against Ann Coulter (following her disparaging remarks about New Jersey 9/11 widows), Panter defended his colleagues' calls to have retailers pull her books. Do you see a correlation between the two substances he wants off our shelves?

I may find Ann Coulter utterly loathsome and reprehensible on every level, and I would greatly enjoy throwing a shit pie into her face, but the idea of yanking any books off shelves scares the hell out of me. This reeks on so many levels. Along with other wrong-headed, easy-fix, knee-jerk reactions to perceived food scares, Panter's attitude paints a gloomy picture of how we might be forced to eat in this country if the frightened, righteous people who want to ban everything because it might be unsafe get together with all the people who want to ban everything because it might be cruel, and the people who want to ban everything because it might be unhealthy. It's the perfect storm.

The worst thing is that foie gras isn't even one of the more horrible examples of raising animals -- and it's such a small sector of the food supply. But it's an easy target because it's fancy, and associated with the French, and the videos people see are lurid.

Cruelly raised foie gras -- the poor animals you see in the videos in tiny pens with tubes being, as they always say, "shoved down their throats" -- is bad foie gras. None of us would buy that stuff. That's not what we want, and that's not what D'Artagnan sells. In proper foie gras farming, the same feeder tends the duck every day, and more often than not, it's the duck who approaches the feeder. They have room to run around, to live a good, natural life -- even a pampered one -- compared with the horrifying and vastly more widespread practice of raising battery chickens.

Most Americans seem only to hear about foie gras bans relative to the so-called inhumanity of their force feeding. Just a little investigation reveals the fact that these ducks have to be super healthy to support all the weight they gain. It's also been widely reported that they have no gag reflex and their throats are naturally tough due to the way they eat in nature. And accounts by the journalists who've had unrestricted visits to these farms -- like Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune and Lawrence Downes at the New York Times, for example -- all suggest these ducks are far from inhumanely treated. The opposite in fact.

They live much better lives than any chicken that's been sold by the colonel, that's for sure. And really these ducks aren’t doing anything that a porn star doesn’t do on a regular basis.

Funny. But we are in agreement. In my opinion, the four farms that grow ducks for foie gras in this country -- especially the largest ones, in New York and California -- they ought to be made examples of by our legislators, not as places of animal torture, but rather as models of humane farming. Unlike factory hogs, which have their tails painfully cut off and never see the light of day before winding up as cheap grocery store pork, the billions of chickens that live packed wing to wing and live in their own ammonia-reeking waste, or the feed-lot antibiotic-laced beef -- if I had to come back today as an American farm animal destined for the dinner table, I'd choose to be a Moulard duck raised for my fat liver in a heartbeat.

Yes, it seems to me that the activists for whom the suffering of animals is unbearable, their lobbying against foie gras is not just bad time management, it's cynical time management.

Billions of chickens, hogs and beef are being harmed -- that's carnage on a far vaster scale -- but big agribusiness is a difficult and powerful target. They don't get much bang for their buck, from a political standpoint. It's much easier to go for the small artisanal farmer with little resources and no lobbying group in D.C.

And as an aside, as a reader of the news, I have to say it disturbs me that while people are being force-fed in Guantánamo Bay, politicians are wasting an hour or a minute complaining about poor ducks. Hell, Whole Foods is worrying about freaking lobsters and mollusks.