[For the intro to this story and another model resolution, click here.]

Model Resolutions, continued:
#2 Eat More Foie Gras

This is my personal New Year’s resolution for 2007, actually. And it has something of a dark back story. You see, my former neighbor used to run an intimate, tasty restaurant in Sonoma called Sonoma Saveurs, known in part for its inventive preparations of foie gras, a rich, butter-textured, expensive delicacy made from the artificially-fattened livers of ducks and geese. (Foie gras means “fatty liver” in French.) He was also a part owner of one of the three foie gras farms in the U.S., Sonoma Foie Gras (pictured above). But after radical animal rights activists vandalized his restaurant, threatened his family, and burglarized his farm, he shuttered his bistro and was forced to sell his house.

These terrorists – and I don’t use that term lightly or even happily, because in general I support the animal rights movement – are bolstered ideologically by mainstream politicians who have been busy lately outlawing foie gras. It’s already a crime to serve it in Chicago; as of 2012, Governor Schwarzenegger will have made it illegal to produce or sell foie gras in California. (So much for the rest of my neighbor’s livelihood.)

In the meantime, I intend to down as much foie gras as my own digestive system can handle. I’m just not convinced that harvesting it is a lot crueler than other animal-slaughter methods, especially mass-produced beef and chicken, which I slashed off my grocery list long ago. The whole campaign strikes me as a little hysterical, and definitely tainted by the Francophobia that caused people to flush French champagne down the toilet at the dawn of the war in Iraq.