Foie gras, a truly great delicacy, comes from duck and goose liver. There are a variety of ways to serve it but my favorite is quite simple: fried with just a bit of salt, where the outside is an appealing roast brown and the inside remains soft, just firm enough to cut into wafer slices which literally melt on the tongue. A good liver must be large — weighing as much as one and a half pounds — and be very faint yellow in color. For many years, France, Hungary, and Israel have led the world in foie gras production. In the United States, a group of responsible farmers with an eye and an ear toward humane production and ecological sustainability has perfected the technique that results in a prime-quality liver.

This delicacy sits at the center of a controversial debate that has been unfairly and dangerously hijacked by overzealous animal activists and vegans who have managed to garner an inordinate, undeserved amount of media attention in their efforts to cajole restaurants into banning foie gras from their kitchens. And, amazingly, restaurants — including most recently, The Metropolitan and The Tiburon in Salt Lake City — have capitulated to their irrational, under-researched demands. As well, shame on media outlets for not doing the right type of background research that should generate fair, responsible reporting. The recent KUTV Channel 2 report concerning Tiburon’s decision to discontinue foie gras was a shoddy piece of journalism, terribly one sided and misinformative.

Consumers and business owners — not tyrannical activists — must retain their proper rights to make decisions about their food. To make their case, activists take advantage of media professionals who know little, if anything, about agricultural production and use outdated video showing force-feeding techniques that already have been disavowed uniformly by farmers. To wit, the anchor on KUTV’s Channel 2 (the Salt Lake City CBS affiliate) who couldn’t even pronounce the French phrase correctly in the introduction to the video story.

However, allegedly well-meaning activists — who laughably reckon their protests as a modern-day Underground Railroad — have no other interests than to gain publicity, which, in turn, is used as a springboard to gain organizational membership and funding. Groups with seemingly innocuous names of good work and faith have managed to fool media, celebrities, opinion leaders, and the public alike.

As a public relations educator, I am reminded of the 1989 scare involving ALAR, a now-banned plant growth regulator, which temporarily paralyzed the apple industry in the state of Washington. A group called the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) targeted CBS’s “60 Minutes” to do a report about ALAR’s carcinogenic effects. The ensuing publicity brought on Congressional hearings in which Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep, recruited slyly by the NRDC, testified tearfully saying that as a mother she would never give her children apples again.

Incidentally, the carcinogenic effects would only have manifested themselves had an individual consumed thousands of apples a day. (I don’t think it would be cancer that would be killing someone.) It took months before sanity returned to the public forum and the citizenry was willing to take the informed counsel of a scientist rather than an actress on such issues. In fact, the ALAR scare has come to epitomize backlashes based more on propaganda than on facts, such as the current brouhaha over foie gras.So here are some salient facts. And, they reflect the current scientific evidence available, which has hardly been shared by activists bent on emotional scare tactics and who are willing to use clearly outdated physical evidence. See if you’ve seen any of the following in these media reports.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, these facts are provided by the Artisan Farmers Alliance, a Washington-based group that represents America’s foie gras farmers and others involved in artisanal agricultural products.

“The livers are produced using a hand-feeding process called gavage in which the waterfowl are given a measured amount of food at meal time, rather than having constant access to food. The process, carried out for between 14 and 28 days, takes a few seconds and is repeated 2-3 times each day. The ducks are fed by the same person throughout the entire process.

“More …

“Independent veterinarians and scientists have concluded that the hand-feeding of ducks for foie gras causes no harm to them. Foie gras is an extension of naturally occurring processes. A duck’s physiology is very different from that of a human. The difference between ducks and humans are differences which allow ducks to eat by swallowing wriggling, spiny fish, and to migrate by storing extra energy (fat) in their livers.

“First, ducks lack a gag reflex. Their esophagi have an insensitive lining, allowing them to swallow large fish and other prey in the wild. This ensures pain-free hand-feeding for the birds.

“Second, in nature, ducks gorge themselves before migration, storing extra energy by fattening their livers. This effect is reversible, both in the wild and in foie gras farming.

“Finally, several studies have been conducted by Dr. Daniel Guemene, the leading expert on the physiological effects of gavage and a scientist with the National Institute of Agronomic Research in Nouzilly, France. The studies have shown that foie gras production does not cause stress, pain, fear or disease in the ducks.”

In addition, other evidence is available from the American Veterinary Medical Association, including the following excerpt from a 2006 letter addressed to the Chicago City Council by Dr. Lawrence Bartholf, a long-time veterinarian deeply involved in the cause of animal welfare:

It’s time to call out the phonies here. To the activists: Provide empirical evidence that your symbolic, hysterical publicity-driven crusades actually make a difference in animal welfare. I would like to see activists instead engaged in the less sexy, albeit more difficult and comprehensive, work of reorienting the world to a compassionate movement in farming where cruelty-free meat is the norm, not just the work of a small band of earnest, hard-working farmers who already distance themselves from the corporate conglomerate machines.

More bluntly, activists need to butt out: Don’t dictate how restaurants should conduct their business. Also, ensure that your miscreant zealots in your groups don’t commit criminal vandalism.

Finally, restaurant owners: You are under no obligation to heed these ill-informed fools. If your business model was well crafted with planning and research, then your response in these sorts of situations should include those elements of planning and research. You would do well to join the competition educating the public and the media on the true meaning of sustainable, high-quality food, not the empty-headed symbolic terms that make hypocrites feel good on the outside but actually damage the core of what it means to have a responsible food movement which benefits all stakeholders involved.