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For chef and diner, ethical choices crowd the menu

Foie gras? Ill-gotten caviar? Cruel caging? We now wade through moral dilemmas when deciding which foods should be on our plates.

By LAURA REILEY
Published April 25, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Associated Press] Foie gras, made of fattened duck or goose liver, is under fire because of methods used to procure what many find a delicacy.

Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck cleaned out his refrigerators last month.

Stricken from the menus at his 14 fine dining and 80 or so casual restaurants were foie gras the livers of force-fed ducks and geese and eggs from caged chickens. Gone is crated veal and lobsters that have spent time in crowded holding tanks.

So what's on the menu instead? A generous plateful of moral questions.

The dining public must increasingly navigate the dilemmas of food ethics. Animal rights groups such as Farm Sanctuary have worked to alert consumers to cruel conditions at factory farms and stockyards. Nutritionists decry trans fats, and environmentalists condemn long-line fishing. Human rights activists call our attention to the exploitation of farm workers in Central and South America. More and more, diners eat their conscience and restaurateurs wear their hearts on their menus.

Tampa Bay area chefs and restaurant owners have entered into the dialogue about food ethics, bringing their own challenges to the conversation. But it isn't easy, given a lack of reliable information and the difficulty of turning a profit with increased food costs.

"I sense when I talk to chefs that none of us has a really good handle on how to get information to steer our purchases in the right way," says Tom Pritchard, co-owner of Salt Rock Grill, Island Way Grill, Marlin Darlin' and Rumba Island Bar & Grill. "We're all kind of in a quandary, but there aren't any of us who don't think about these issues a lot."

Foie gras, just a start

After all that thinking, local chefs come to different conclusions. Foie gras doesn't appear on Pritchard's menus, but says John Harris, chef at Rusty's Sheraton Sand Key, "I love foie gras and can't take it off my menu. It's not one of the most popular items, but our business is mostly driven by hotel guests and they come in and order it."

Brett Gardiner, chef-owner of Hapa in Oldsmar, says foie gras bans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to eating ethically.

"I understand foie gras is unhealthy for you and that it's cruel. My concern is that I'd like to see an outcry for the millions of acres of rainforest that are slashed for the grazing of cattle for McDonald's hamburgers. I had foie gras on my menu; it didn't sell. But I was just reading that in Spain they are serving natural foie gras. The birds are just fattening up before migrating. The downside is that this only happens once a year."

Jeanie Roland, chef and co-owner of the Perfect Caper in Punta Gorda, sees things similarly.

"This whole foie gras issue has actually been something I personally have given a ton of thought. I use a humanely raised product from Sonoma Valley Poultry. . . . I have always used free range veal, pork and chicken when possible - but what about beef and dairy?"

David Miller, chef-owner of Savant Fine Dining in Clearwater, has no problem serving game meats, veal or foie gras.

"The Moulard duck's purpose is to be eaten," he says.

He's referring to the fact that the Moulard duck, from which foie gras often comes, is a hybrid of a female Pekin and a male Muscovy duck. It's a sterile species, born of human intervention, much like a mule is a cross between a donkey and a horse.

According to Miller, the duck is eaten, liver and all. There are greater moral conundrums to consider: "The duck is eaten, whereas a sturgeon is cut down the middle for its caviar, and the sturgeon dies."

Trouble at sea

Caviar, especially that from the Caspian Sea, poses another ethical question for local chefs.

"We generally don't sell caviar, but we're hoping that some of the new Northern California stuff can compete with the Caspian Sea, where there are so many Russian gangsters involved you don't know if you're supporting bad guys," Pritchard says.

The demand for caviar is high, but in the next 10 to 20 years the adult sturgeon is going to be so rare that it just may be banned, Gardiner says.

Some bay area chefs are concerned about the plight of the Caspian Sea sturgeon, others not so much, but there's near unanimity when it comes to long-lining fish (in which miles of line dangling baited hooks are dragged through the water), especially swordfish.

Miller, at Savant, won't serve it, nor will Cesar Labrador, chef of Keegan's Seafood Grille in Indian Rocks Beach. Both cite the ethical problem of by-catch (catching and killing nonedible fish that are thrown back), but also freshness.

For Kathleen LaRoche, owner of Black Pearl in Dunedin, there are other reasons.

"I don't do swordfish. When I first opened the restaurant, we got in a swordfish and it was riddled with tumors. It was absolutely revolting. I was shocked we would consider eating that."

Gardiner is another restaurateur who eschews long-lined fish, but he adds that even farm-raised fish have their problems: "A lot of farm-raised fish are really toxic from feed and runoff."

Out with trans fats

Overfishing and by-catch on the one hand, toxic farmed fish on the other. What's a chef to do? A raft of encroaching health concerns is nudging chefs to make other changes in the kitchen.

For Tom Pritchard, this means exploring cooking fats like rice bran oil to replace trans fats. Same goes for Harris at Rusty's, who has only one trans fat product left in the kitchen (it's for his scrambled eggs, but he's still experimenting with alternative oils to find one that works).

For Hapa's Gardiner, it means choosing organic Scottish salmon and natural heirloom American turkeys vs. other commercially available birds bred for their large breasts ("those birds are sickly and can't reproduce; they are almost deformed to get those big white breasts"), and patronizing organic produce farms such as the wholesale hydroponic Cahaba Club in Odessa. And Labrador of Keegan's chooses fresh over frozen whenever possible.

"I won't buy grouper if it comes in a box; it has to be fresh. I don't really have a problem cooking with previously frozen fish, but I would have to print that on the menu. My customers are accustomed to honesty, and I might as well educate them," he says.

Consumer education seems crucial in making incremental changes in the kitchen, especially when increased costs are passed on to diners.

"It's moving in the direction of consumers being willing to pay a little more if they know exactly what's on a menu," Gardiner says. "But it's hard to practice what you preach."

Laura Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 24, 2007, 21:16:25]