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Week after week, the animal rights activists arrive before the Portland City Council. They are at City Hall to decry the luxury meat pâté de foie gras. In the past year, 43 people have given three-minute testimonies against the sale of the French delicacy in Portland; zero in favor.
First, they explain foie gras, which is the liver of a goose or duck that has been fattened by a process of force-feeding. The testimonies get gruesome, explaining the plastic tubes some farms use to shove food down the ducks’ throats.
Then, a heartfelt plea: “I want to really encourage you to take a quiet moment and think about the insanity of this,” said speaker Andrea Kozil in the spring, for example. “Why wouldn’t we want to ban the sale of that here in Portland, to make Portland more a sign of the times?…It’s 2022.”
Exactly. Portland in 2022 means a homelessness crisis. Rampant car theft and property damage. A homicide rate poised to easily overtake the record-setting 92 homicides in 2021. Pâté that is sold at as few as five upscale restaurants doesn’t clear the bar.
Three political insiders, who have sat through many of these testimonies since last December, say there’s about as good a chance that a goose liver becomes mayor of Portland as that it becomes an outlawed food. (“Read the room! Foie-get about it!” one said.)
“Politics is the allocation of scarce resources; you have to prioritize,” says Pacific University political science professor Jim Moore. “For a politician to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about homelessness—it’s all about goose livers’? I can see why they are steering away from this.”
But last week, Portland voters approved a paradigm shift in City Hall. Soon, 12 commissioners will make policy decisions without having any responsibility for Portland’s day-to-day operations. Could their eyes turn to the lowly goose?
Back in December 2021, when the nonprofit organization Animal Equality began its campaign to ban foie gras (French for “fatty liver”) in Portland, two commissioners expressed support for a possible ordinance: Commissioners Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio. Both offices have since backed way off.
Mapps’ office says that “given the multitude of crises facing the city, banning foie gras is not a priority for our office.”
Rubio’s office passed the buck to Multnomah County, saying the city of Portland does not have “the proper resources and structure” to ban foie gras.
“Unlike other major cities, Portland does not hold a bureau dedicated to public health and food regulation,” says Jillian Schoene, Rubio’s chief of staff. “We indicated to the coalition of advocates that we would be more than happy to help advocate to the proper agencies.”
Animal Equality isn’t buying it.
Portland lawyer Sarah Hanneken is leading the organization’s charge to ban foie gras here. The New York City Council banned foie gras in 2019, but the law has been gummed up in court since and has not gone into effect. California banned it back in 2004.
“It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence if Portland City Council is saying, ‘We don’t know how to enact this very simple sales ban,’” Hanneken says. “If they can’t do this, then some of these complicated issues facing our city are unlikely to be resolved.”
Hanneken drafted a proposed ordinance and enforcement solutions for the City Council so that if it voted to ban foie gras, it could basically be plug-and-play. “We are very confident legally,” Hanneken says, based on her own legal expertise and the fact that she consulted with Lewis & Clark Law School.
Animal Equality notes that the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability manages bans on single-use plastics and plastic foam containers. Similarly, a foie gras ban could also be enforced only when a customer complains.
Unlike single-use plastics, which a few years ago were omnipresent in the retail landscape, foie gras is served at only a half-dozen high-end restaurants in town.
Chef Gabriel Rucker is famous for his creative use of the meat, including in dessert. This fall, his restaurant Le Pigeon has featured “Grape Crunch,” grape and goat cheese ice cream, black pepper anglaise, meringue and basil with a foie gras profiterole (cream puff).
As Rucker and his staff prepped for dinner service at Le Pigeon one October afternoon, Rucker gave a chilly “no comment” about the proposed foie gras ban, and his staff hustled a reporter back outside. Next door, sister restaurant Canard serves $23 foie gras dumplings.
Argentine restaurant Ox did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Laurelhurst Market would not comment other than to confirm that it serves the pâté and “stands behind its production.” (The restaurant sources from Hudson Valley Foie Gras in New York.)
Hanneken, who is vegan, says the force-feeding process—called “gavage” in French—is “tremendously cruel” and can lead to injuries such as perforation of the bird’s esophagus and stomach rupture. The geese and ducks’ diseased livers grow up to 10 times their natural size before slaughter, she says.
Time will tell what effect Portland’s newly passed charter reform Measure 26-228 will have on special interest groups like Animal Equality.
Melanie Billings-Yun, a former co-chair of the Portland Charter Commission, says the 12 city councilors in the new system, with their own geographic districts, can be more responsive to their constituents and public demand.
“The foie gras question would definitely have a better chance of being raised under the new governing system, as the City Council will be larger and focused on legislation,” Billings-Yun says. “Under the current system, our four city councilors are vastly overstretched, their time taken up with running bureaus that manage the day-to-day operations of the city.”
Portland’s first election with ranked-choice voting and new geographic districts will be held in November 2024.
Hanneken says the ducks and geese ideally won’t have to wait that long. She does like the prospect of being able to find a foie gras champion among 12 councilors rather than only five.
“When it comes to animal welfare, if we always wait for other issues to be resolved, there’s always going to be something,” she says. “But this isn’t a zero-sum game. We can enact simple animal welfare reforms while also dealing with these complicated issues.”