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Compromise In The Service Industry Trenches: Have The Goose Torture Pate - Its Fabulous!

by The Bridge
06/21/2007

So we all know what foie gras is, and why it is evil stuff, right? You take a cute li'l duck (or goose) and jam a tube down its esophagus through which you pump obscene amounts of food - corn mash, or something similar - into its stomach several times a day. The force-feeding will last anywhere from a few weeks to five months, depending, generally, on whether or not the poor fucker survives that long. Fatal complications range from various fatty liver ailments to lacerations of the throat and difficulty breathing or moving due to extreme obesity. Oh yeah, and don't let the animal do too much moving. Defeats the purpose.

And it all results in a delicacy that's quite popular among foodies, particularly in high-end circles. Duck torture ain't cheap.

It is, apparently, quite tasty. One chef explained the appeal by saying, "It's a sublime texture, incredibly smooth and buttery, like silken tofu, actually." Tofu. Isn't that a riot?

Now, admittedly, I am not much of an activist. As a vegan, I limit myself to refusing to purchase animal meat or animal byproducts and pretty much leave it at that. I try to support vegan-friendly businesses, and, if someone asks what's so terrible about having a little French toast every now and then - and I think they actually want an answer - well, I'll tell 'em a bit about it, maybe suggest some good books/internet sites on the matter. But I try not to talk about it all the time. I usually request vegan options at restaurants in an undertone in order to avoid being perceived as haughty and pretentious. Because, honestly, a lot of vegans ARE pretentious and loud-mouthed and awfully similar to neo-con shock-show hosts or born-again televangelists, always honking on mightily about the moral superiority of their lifestyle. It's gross and it gives the movement a bad name, so I try my best to stay off the soapbox. No one is going to change their mind because I yelled at them or shoved pictures of bloodied baby chicks in their face, so best to lay low, let folks find their own way. All I really need to do to ensure a good night's sleep is make sure that I stick to my principles.

Well, I wish it were that easy. As any vegan -or Catholic, or pro-lifer or environmentalist - can tell you, governing your life by a strict set of moral principles is not something you can do on auto-pilot, and if it is, well, you're probably kidding yourself. Long ago, I accepted the fact that there is no such thing as being 100% vegan in this world. At some point, I will purchase something from a company that has subjugated an animal or two somewhere along the line. I mean, movies are filmed on celluloid. Movies, for crying out loud, are not vegan. Nor are the pills I have to take every day for a chronic condition. I am not going to stop seeing movies (although I do try to sneak in as much as possible.) I am not going to go back to the miserable life I had before my meds, nor will I be taking up a mortar and pestle and delving into the ancient art of apothecary, devoting my life to reproducing the effects of my medication in a botanical blend. I have other things to do. And I won't feel bad about it. If I hear of a cruelty-free drug, I'll try it. If I have the money and time to go to an all-vegan restaurant, I will. Do what you can, right?

But. Oh, I have a great big bootylicious But.

See, I'm no college graduate, and I don't have a whole lotta bill-paying skills to choose from. So I wait tables. The money's good and the job's not terribly monotonous. From the get-go, it's been a bit of a pain being a vegan waitress. I've only worked at two vegetarian restaurants - and one of 'em started selling meat midway through my time with them in order to draw in more business. Sadly, it worked.

However, until quite recently, I was working and living in Athens, GA, where it's slim pickings for an all-veg menu. But now here I am in lovely Philadelphia, where, just for example, I sit right now on South Street with a five-star gourmet vegan restaurant one block away, a pizza joint with all-vegan desserts (fucking CANNOLIS) a half-block away, three kosher vegan Chinese joints down the street and a health food store (where I work part-time) two streets over that features an all-vegan bakery, hot bar and salad bar. And this is a touristy section of town, known more as a good place to find cheesesteaks and the like.

So there are plenty of places for a gal to serve an animal-friendly menu for a living. Sort of.

See, it's also a big city, you know? Lots of job competition, and everyone wants a resume with in-town experience and - okay, I'm just making excuses for myself now, delaying the confession.

The five-star vegan place wasn't hiring when I got here broke and sick and desperate for money. All the Chinese joints hire mainly Asians and the job at the health food store barely made ends meet for me. So I papered the town with resumes and took the first good-looking job that came up: cute little bistro deal with a really small dining room but a pricey menu and a good rep. I glanced briefly at the menu before taking the job. It had a lot of fancy cooking terms and adventurous-sounding descriptors: vanilla-infused pear compote. Amber beer with curry essence. Butternut risotto with a beet coulis. Buncha European terms, buncha weird flavor combos - all hallmarks of the kind of a trendy, young cafe where rich foodies tend to drop major bucks.

o it wasn't until my first day that I saw what all this coulis and compote was drizzled on top of - namely, the aforementioned foie gras, as well as veal (if you don't know, just look it up: another horrific animal-torture-cum-delicacy,) and then the usual assortment of fine fish filets, chicken, beef, et cetera.

How can I justify serving this shit? My mind reeled during the first two days of training as I watched the two major offenders get plated, served and devoured time after time. The presentation of both is admirable; they're quite pretty dishes. But all I could see was the baleful eyes of phantom geese with bulging cheeks staring me down imploringly, their poor beaks clamped around a metal tube, throats rippling in misery.

On the second night, the server training me made my rent in tips. Plus change.

On the third day, after a discouraging afternoon of fruitless job-hunting, I had my first night on tables. I pushed the fish and chicken entrees as much as I could with some success. I tried like hell to sell the one vegetarian entree, a stuffed squash number. Still, I sold two veal dishes.

But listen, I told myself, if I don't show up for work next Saturday, they'll just hire another waitress. I'm not forcing anyone to eat the stuff. I'm not advocating it. I'm just carrying the plate to the table. Which is pretty much what a crack dealer tells himself. The main difference being that a crack dealer doesn't dress up his product with a ginger-scented apple jus and pronounce it in French so that it sounds nicer. He puts it in a clear baggie and calls it fucking crack.

At the end of the night - a relatively slow, easy evening - I had the equivalent of a week's pay at my other job. I went home and studied my various doctor bills which I suddenly had hopes of actually paying. I thought of all the burgers and chicken caesar salads and club sandwiches I have sold in my life. Is the deplorable treatment of those animals really any more excusable than the unapologetically torturous life inflicted upon "specialty" livestock? At least with veal, the dirty business is (somewhat) out in the open. While they may try, no one with half a brain is going to believe a breeder who claims that a calf living its entire, unnaturally shortened life in a cage too small to even turn around in is not unduly stressed by these arrangements. But lots of otherwise intelligent people believe that egg-laying hens are well-treated, that "free-range" necessarily means happy cows prancing through wide open pastures for all of their long, healthy lives. And that is quite far from being true. If I serve any meat - well, I might as well serve any meat. It's all bad stuff, in my eyes.

Is this still a weak rationalization, no better than the crack dealer route? I don't know; probably, to some extent. But if I were truly, 100% righteous, I'd drop my meds, swear off movies and Polaroids and go live on a tofu farm. The thing is, I'm a big girl now in the real world, where no one and nothing is 100% anything. "It's not fair," is a childhood chant now replaced by, "Life isn't fair." That doesn't mean I am going to quit trying to even the odds where I can. But it might mean that I'm going to keep this job for the time being, pay my bills and channel my pro-animal urges through avenues more likely to get results. I'll take a friend to that vegan restaurant without telling him it's vegan until the end, when he remarks on how damned good everything tasted. I'll tell anyone who wants to know - even a customer - exactly what the animals we eat go through. And I'll do it calmly and nicely and hope they want to learn more.

And I'll hard-sell the squash.

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