Au revoir, Foie Gras

This delicacy's goose is cooked.
Yes, Foie Gras. The fattened liver of a goose has officially been banned from Chicago. Violators of selling it will be fined somewhere in the range of $250 to $300. Never mind that only about 4 (highly priced) restaurants in the Chicago-area serve foie gras, or that there are no farms in Illinois that raise geese for foie gras... I'm sorry, I was going to come up with something witty to put in here, but COME ON. This is most important thing that our representatives in Chicago can come up with? How about gang violence, homelessness, the rising gas prices, or how about more funding for education? But foie gras? Yeah, there are a lot of groups saying that raising these geese are treated inhumanely- with a tube shoved down their throats and force fed until their livers bloat to somewhere around 10x the normal size of a liver. Then they're slaughtered. The goose farmers say that the geese are taken care of humanely, but animal rights groups disagree. Blah. This just seems so first-grade.

However, for those Haute Cuisine connoisseurs, you can shed a tear in a month when the ban should go into effect. C'est la vie...