QUANDARIES: One of many |
Friedrich Nietzsche wanted to be remembered as a nutritionist. He once suggested that “the ‘salvation of humanity’ depends [upon] the question of nutrition. . . . how do you, among all people, have to eat to attain your maximum of strength, of virtù in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?”Nietzsche himself was no lover of fine food. He ate simply, eschewed coffee and alcohol, and even liked his tea a little weak. But it is not a simple matter to apply his advice to our complex relationship to the modern food industry. Nietzsche urged us to craft through our own lives “a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.” There is much that is questionable and strange in the way we eat. Great suffering results and guilt emerges. Should we say yes to it?
Such questions have emerged here in Portland, the latest front in the nationwide battle over foie gras, which Chicago has banned because officials there believe it cannot be produced without excessive cruelty to ducks and geese. For more than a month the Maine Animal Coalition has staged Friday night protests asking people to boycott Natasha’s and Mims because they (like many other Portland restaurants, including Fore Street, Vignola, and Uffa!) serve foie gras. They have sent letters to the others asking them to stop.
The Animal Coalition is right that foie gras results from cruelty. Of course foie gras is not alone in this. The modern American food industry is perhaps the most extensive and productive form of organized cruelty ever devised. The daily holocaust of birds, fish, and mammals; the diabolical cocktails of hormones and antibiotics injected before slaughter; the horrific confinement and deliberate disfigurement — all on an unimaginable scale — it simply boggles the mind. If one were to somehow ignore the suffering of the animals involved, simply to imagine the workday of the people (mostly immigrants, all underpaid) who work with these animals is to feel your heart break.
PROTESTORS: Signs of change |
One of the selling points of meals in Portland’s best restaurants is that they indirectly mitigate these cruelties through their search for the best ingredients. That is the flesh of a slaughtered animal roasting over Fore Street’s applewood grill, but it almost certainly grew up relatively free to roam, graze, and grow. Menus increasingly draw our attention to just these aspects of their food. So while a great meal in Portland certainly feels life affirming, it is not exactly an affirmation that is moraline-free in the Renaissance style.Perhaps that is why these restaurants cling to foie gras (though Natasha Durham has said that she will phase it off the menu at Natasha’s, one of her two restaurants). The morality of foie gras works in precisely the opposite way. It is served only in these same restaurants, amid their quasi-virtuous ingredients, and yet it is the result of the most baroque of animal tortures (tubes, usually metal, are forced down the animal’s throat to force-feed it until its liver becomes engorged with fat and grows inside the bird to gargantuan size). Foie gras (a liver meat so buttery it almost melts at room temperature) asserts that some food can be so delicious — can touch the palate and affirm life so viscerally — as to affirm life’s cruelty with it. Foie gras, the possibility of it, frees fine dining from the unappetizing taint of sanctimony.
