Chicago can relax now

The residents of Chicago have thrown open their shutters and the confetti is falling in the streets. Everywhere you go strangers are grabbing each other and planting fat juicy kisses on one another in collective celebration of: the return of legal foie gras. Yes friends, now chefs across the city can serve this worshipped delicacy without the liver police making a raid on their beloved kitchens and shutting them down in the wee hours of the morning. This much sought after tastiness can be traced back to the Egyptians, and all over the world people seem to crave this weird and fattening food.
Here's the thing. In an age where we can have any food we want, at any time of the day or night, in a city that is alive and vibrant and one of the worlds Mecca's of savory delicacies, do we really need to have what the French call "fatty liver"?
Now, I'm a carnivore, I eat meat, but at least I do it with guilt. I know I am eating an animal that was kidnapped, blindfolded and given a cheap cigarette, then backed quietly against a barn door and shot between the eyes. (okay, okay there may be some other version that includes electric anal prods or some such thing) but I enjoy my steak with a sense that some Karmic retaliation WILL be boomeranging it's way back to me some day. I accept that, pass the garlic.
But Foie Gras? Really, keeping geese and ducks in small cages, shoving tubes down their throats three times daily to fatten them up to the point of disease, then gutting them in order to feast on their sumptuous fatty livers just seems so, well, so unseemly. Aren't we a tad better than that? Don't we have enough fatty crap to eat what with all the lamb chops, steak fries, battered mushrooms in savory oil, steamed lobster in a carafe of melted butter-need I go on?
It seems to be the very height of American pseudo can-do that we have ingeniously grabbed onto a way to make a simple, and might I add innocent, duck become even fatter for us. It's like one of those horrible fairy tales that you start reading to your children only to discover it's riddled with grizzly tales of gruesome boogey men and disfigured and menacing trolls. "So, the shrivled old witch kidnapped the poor lost duck and put him in a wire cage no bigger than the little duck himself, forced an awful metal tube down his gullet three times daily, all the while chuckling to herself that she couldn't wait to cut open his FATTY LIVER and eat it raw!"
Maybe its because I grew up Catholic, or maybe it's the old hippie in me, but I draw the line at Foie Gras. Today I am stating for the record that I may still be eating food that once had a face, but I will not eat a liver that is fattened by torture.
Besides, one look at the average American backside tells us all that we have collectively too much junk in our perverbial trunk! Time to eat more sprouts and enjoy a little wine. Time to make peace with the fact that just because we CAN eat the fattened liver of an innocent duck, doesn't mean we should. I'm just sayin . . .