Force-feeding, factory style.
Photograph: Owen Franken/Corbis.
What has food got to do with morality? There are environmental and animal rights issues, of course, but also the question of whether taking pleasure in eating is good or not. This 7-9 September will see the 26th annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery at St Catherine's College; this is its sure-to-generate-controversy topic.
To declare an immediate interest, Claudia Roden and I are the co-chairs of the event, and I've been responsible for putting together the programme. You're invited.
The Symposium, founded by the late Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin (now a patron), has been famous, in the distant past, for serving fairly dismal Oxford College-standard Saturday night dinners, at which none of the world's best-known food scholars (always in attendance) as much as noticed the damp fish or over-cooked chicken, as their minds were on higher things than what they were actually eating.
This has now been remedied by the joint efforts of the wonderful chef of the college (St Catz) and two cookery writer Symposium Trustees (it's a registered charity), Caroline Conran and Anissa Helou, who with him plan the meals. This year's deliciously moral meals will consist (as nearly as possible) of minimal food-mile ingredients that come from no further than 25 miles from Oxford.
However, it wouldn't really have the undertone of subversion essential to the Symposium if there weren't a note of dissent - so I'm hoping to see at least a small amount of well-travelled foie gras somewhere on the menu.
What with our good friend Chicago chef Charlie Trotter approving the legislative ban of foie gras from Illinois menus (and Wolfgang Puck happy to see it disappear in California in the future), I thought I'd include a speaker on foie gras on the panel on "foods that present moral problems."
The more I looked into it and reflected (and I've actually witnessed the gavage, the "force-feeding" at first hand - in which the ducks waddled up, with every appearance of eager greed, to swallow the flexible feeding tube), the more convinced I became that there is almost no ethical problem about the normal, non-industrial production of foie gras.
On the other hand, Raymond Blanc has witnessed the production of Kobe beef in Japan. Now that's something really wicked. So I've booked Raymond to tell us about it. He'll be on the panel with the Italian film director, Armando Manni, who makes the world's most expensive olive oil - and will be explaining why (in oil as in life) "extra virgin" on the label is not always the whole truth - and several others. Ruth Reichl, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, is giving the keynote talk.
And there are lighter moments: Alicia Rios, the Spanish woman who hilariously urged us to "Eat London" in Trafalgar Square (on 28 April), will give a workshop on "making edible hats." Sorry, make that "ethical edible hats."
