With about 1,000 New York restaurants offering foie gras, top chefs did not take kindly to the news. “This is idiocracy,” chef David Chang of the famed Momofuku global restaurant chain tweeted, adding: “Stupid short sighted and a misunderstanding of the situation.”“I think a ban on foie gras is ridiculous,” said James Beard Award-winner Ken Oringer, co-owner and chef at Manhattan’s Toro tapas restaurant that serves dishes like foie gras torchons with buttermilk biscuits and foie gras katsu sandwiches. He said he supports producers of foie gras in the Catskill Mountains about two hours north of the city. The 80-hectare Hudson Valley Foie Gras and the smaller La Belle Farm collectively raise about 350,000 birds for foie gras a year in a process that fattens the bird’s liver up to 10 times its normal size. The New York City ban could mean trouble for the two farms that are premier US producers of foie gras, with New York as their prime market.

Source: Taipei Times October 31, 2019 16:07 UTC