sjacksmith
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Oh, Tempura, Oh, Morels!
I can see how one might want to justify the cruel practice of making foie gras by comparing it to the way a mother goose feeds her babies, “by shoving her beak down their little throats and vomiting half-digested food straight down their gullets,” but you must know a mother’s beak is not made of jagged metal, will not pierce their babies’ esophagus, and will not fill them with so much food their legs won’t be able to support their weight or leave them without enough strength fend off vermin. You may even be right that PeTA and other animal advocacy groups focus on the foie gras industry because it’s an easy target – it is easy for people to be appalled and outraged once they see how this most barbaric of foods is produced, since it is the most extreme form of animal cruelty. But it’s not so much the “scary” tube or the obesity of the ducks that bothers me - it’s the infections that develop after a goose’s anus ruptures and starts to bleed out because they have been force fed more than 30% of their body weight in a single day; it’s the bird that can’t turn its neck to snap away a rat that is nibbling on the dried blood stuck to the three remaining tail feathers; it’s the fact that these animals would die a horrible, painful death due to their grossly enlarged liver squeezing out all the other internal organs within days of this force feeding cycle ending if they were not sent to slaughter first; it’s the inhumane way the farm workers are treated, who are people – not “mother geese” – who work with little-to-no time off, in deplorable conditions, just so farms can turn the most profit. The fact that you even had to include a whole section in your review about the making of foie gras shows that even you have doubts about this product. If you didn’t, you would not feel the urge to have to justify yourself for indulging in something so blatantly cruel. You would have been better off not saying anything at all – at least then you wouldn’t have chosen to ignore the real science behind this process. You instead tried to play this off like those of us against this extreme form of cruelty are deluded for not being able to sit idly by while animals, who suffer needlessly in factory farms anyway, are tortured beyond anything that is necessary or appropriate, all so the upper echelon can gluttonously bask in their supreme dominance of things smaller than themselves.— July 13, 2009 5:39 p.m.