Gawker is mad as hell. Next level, righteous fury stuff.
Makes sense. A lot of terrible things happened on Wednesday: Jihadis murdered 12 writers, cartoonists and cops in France, plus about 40 people at a police academy in Yemen, and who knows how many in Syria and Iraq.
But anyone who thought those were Wednesday’s real tragedies needs to check their privilege, because on Wednesday Jan. 7, 2015, a judge in California legalized foie gras. So while the world and its media were distracted by all that carnage, slaughter and societal collapse, Gawker kept its eye on the ball, and, Thursday morning, ran an article called “Foie Gras Is For Assholes” as its lead story for about 40 minutes.
Reading through this eight-paragraph screed is actually a bit boring, but it’s worth it for at least five sentences, because that’s where Hamilton Nolan compares foie gras to torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib. It’s as if he didn’t think the reader realizes that he thinks geese are people too, so he just went all out.
But geese aren’t people. They aren’t even terrorist people. Geese are fowl. Birds. And a particularly mean type of bird, at that.
And here’s something else: If these geese aren’t relaxed, pampered, disease-free, and about as coddled as any animal bred for slaughter* can be, they aren’t tasty. It’s basic, especially when eating the liver — a part of an animal that takes all the body’s toxins, goodness and sadness, and filters them. Nervous, sick, discontented animals are less tasty. That’s why good foie gras comes from happy places like rural Spain, not sad places like all of China. The pampered, fancy Whole Foods generation knows this. Hamilton Nolan — a writer living in Brooklyn whose name makes Tucker Carlson sound working class — ought to know this. But maybe self-awareness isn’t Hamilton Nolan’s strong point.
After all, this is a man who writes “I have news for you: you are an asshole,” then writes “you, too, are an asshole,” and then — only then — declares that goose liver is “the Abu Ghraib of poultry dishes.” If you’ve got a brain and a heart, you might wonder, how can this man exist? How can Hamilton Nolan be real?
If he didn’t exist, would we have to create him?
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*Slaughtering animals is how we make food**