INTRODUCTION 

One summer afternoon in 2006 I dropped by a restaurant called Bistro and Bakery Thuet, in downtown Toronto, entering as was my habit through its back door directly into the kitchen. I had arrived just in time to spot another unexpected visitor, Franco Prevedello, plucking a biscuit from a large unattended batch cooling on a baking sheet, and taking a large bite. On the surface of it there was nothing wrong with Prevedello helping himself. He had been a driving force in the Toronto restaurant scene for decades, was the signatory for the lease on the bistro’s premises, and enjoyed a business relationship with its chef and co-owner, Marc Thuet, that dated back to the eighties, when Prevedello had employed him at his Centro Grill & Wine Bar on Yonge Street. The problem had to do with something else.

“Franco!” I called out. “Stop! Those are dog biscuits!”

Prevedello stopped chewing and looked at me. And then after a pause flashed his trademark mischievous smile from beneath his bushy moustache, shrugged, and popped the rest of it in his mouth.

“They’re good!” he said.

My dog Bonko certainly thought so. For only the day before, when I was running errands with him, I had stopped for some bread at the bistro and chef Thuet had given me a bag of the biscuits. En route home, when I parked to collect something else on my list, I left the biscuits in the car with Bonko, who was napping on the back seat, with an air of sweet innocence about him. By the time I returned he was instead sitting upfront, looked charged, and sheepish. The aroma of the biscuits had apparently awoken him. Then he had managed something he had never even attempted before, and somehow extracted them from the driver’s door side-pouch. He ate all of them, right down to the last crumb, and then chewed the paper bag to bits, too, for good measure.

You might think that a dog treat that acts like smelling salts on a mutt with canine narcolepsy, like mine, and also pleases the palate of a top restaurateur must be something out of the ordinary. It was. This is the thing: just before he baked them, chef Thuet had churned the raw dough with a good dose of Quebec’s finest Grade A foie gras.

The initiative did not arise out of the blue. That year marked heady days for the anti–foie gras movement. Stateside, affirmative duck action was gaining the upper hand. It had already been two years since Governor Schwarzenegger of California had assertively demonstrated that he was capable of far greater empathy for ducks than, say, his wife, by signing into law an act that would ban both foie gras production and consumption in the state by mid-2012.Closer to home, Chicago city council had just voted to ban foie gras from all retail stores and restaurant tables within its city limits—an American first (although the ban would be repealed two years later). And the unofficial figurehead for that particular movement was none other that the city’s best-known and most accomplished chef, Charlie Trotter, who for “ethical reasons” had stopped serving foie gras in his restaurants back in 2002. The ten-times James Beard award winner was a virtuoso in the kitchen who had already proved singularly influential in driving trends, from the blind tasting menu to raw food. Trotter also happens to be a well-spoken and thoughtful man. Amongst chefs and the dining public, his credibility with regards to the rights of animals and livestock was nearly unimpeachable.

But chef Thuet did not see it that way. For he hails from Alsace, where foie gras is neither contentious product nor luxury item—but rather, a staple. It was there, in Strasbourg in 1780, that some four and a half millennia after the ancient Egyptians started force-feeding geese, chef Jean-Pierre Clause devised the method for turning its resultingly bloated liver into a silken terrine, and foie gras finally attained its apotheosis. “The goose is nothing,” Charles Gérard wrote in L’Ancienne Alsace à table in 1862. “But man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvellous product, a kind of living hothouse in which there grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy.”

Foie gras has been a cornerstone of Alsatian cuisine for centuries. Which is why it is rumoured that baby chef Thuet was weaned on the stuff mashed up on a little spoon. Some people even say that as an infant, he tumbled into a large, warm, and unset terrine of the stuff and—like Obelix and the cauldron of magic potion—derived from the dunking a secret culinary strength. Either way, he is one of the few chefs I know who has actually walked into a goose or duck pen with a feeding tube in one hand and a sack of grain in the other—and been mobbed by the hungry, expectant birds.

“They fucking love it!” he assured me, of le gavage.

Maybe, but perhaps not; all that is absolutely certain to me is that out there in the wilds beyond the holding pen, nature promises innumerable fates far worse than a spot of force-feeding. The thing about ducks and geese is that when left to their own devices, they will twice a year behave as do all migratory birds prior to the big annual trip and gorge themselves silly like a crowd of Americans at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas. The biannual binge leaves their livers naturally engorged. Which is why all those millennia ago hunters and cooks noticed that duck and goose livers were fatter and tasted better during their period of pre-migratory feasting. And the reason that they first put their minds to the simple task of replicating those circumstances all year round. In other words, those greedy ducks and geese brought this upon themselves.

So when word spread in the summer of 2006 that Charlie Trotter was coming to town to be a guest chef at Susur Lee’s flagship restaurant, Susur, which just happened to be situated on King Street West, right alongside Bistro and Bakery Thuet, chef Thuet got rather agitated. He did not want to seek out a confrontation, but neither could he let it pass unaddressed. Which is when he suddenly remembered having heard that Charlie Trotter had a dog—and decided to bake him a batch of special foie-graslaced treats.

When Trotter cancelled the engagement it was a great day for Bonko. Some of the biscuits ended up in gift bags at the Toronto International Film Festival. Others went to other spoiled hounds around town whose parents were Thuet regulars and were thus invited to partake of the foie gras biscuit leftovers. “Those dogs see me, they still wag their tales like crazy,” Thuet maintained years later.

That fall I moved into a house on a park in Cabbagetown, one of Toronto’s oldest neighbourhoods. And one day, returning home after a pleasantly long lunch, I disembarked from the cab alongside a Toyota Prius hybrid with a giant sticker on one door bearing the message “Say No to Foie Gras.” This obnoxious intrusion into an otherwise pleasant day was irritating, but I saw no driver about to confront, and by the time I got to my front door I had forgotten all about it. Until I opened my refrigerator to fetch a bottle of mineral water—and in my peripheral vision, a tin on one of the shelves on the door started dancing about, exclaiming in a speech bubble in my mind’s eye, “Pick me, pick me!”

It was a can of Hungarian foie gras d’oie given to me by my friend Arpi Magyar, a superb chef to whom I am forever indebted for letting me in on his secret of the seared-foie-gras-and-bacon breakfast sandwich. It was clear what I had to do: I got a knife from the drawer, cut the label from the can, popped outside, and stuck it under the windscreen wiper of the offending Prius. And then I went back home to work and forgot all about it.

Until a few hours later, when I was heading out with Bonko for an afternoon walk, and opened my front door to find a large envelope on my stoop. It was addressed to me by hand. In fact it said, “Jacob—you know better!” Inside was a stack of papers on the evils of foie gras. I looked around, combed the park, and peered down the street. Nobody. And no Prius, either.

In these modern times when more and more of us live in complete urban detachment from the pastoral life, oblivious to the workings of the farms that deliver food to our plates, it is increasingly inevitable that every good neighbourhood will feature at least an incipient pocket of crusading vegetarians—or self-hating carnivores, as I see them. But the news that there was a crazed ducks’ rights activist living close enough to me to know my name and address and to track my movements was nonetheless disturbing. Had they been rummaging through my recycling bin for spent foie gras jars? Did they know Bonko had a problem, too—and that his second-favourite treat was kangaroo strips?

Weeks passed before I saw the Prius again. When it drove slowly by, and then turned up a dead-end street perpendicular to mine, I followed at a discreet distance. The driver parked the car in a driveway at the top of the street. I hung about behind a nearby tree, and waited and watched. And out stepped the Giller Prize–nominated author of Mr. Sandman and The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy.

I suppose like a good neighbour I should have invited her over for dinner sometime. But I would not have known what to serve. I keep a healthy kitchen. You will find nothing processed here, not even sliced bread. The stocks are all made in-house. The only thing I take out of a can each week is San Marzano tomatoes and the only frozen foods in my freezer were cooked and put there by me. But while ever since Mark Bittman published Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, I have made a stab at eating a vegetarian dinner once a week, I remain an omnivore, without dilemma. When I buy lamb I buy a whole one, head and offal attached. Not all of the fish I eat is endorsed by Ocean Wise. And more to the point, to a lover of living ducks on a diet, my place would seem like a bloody film set from the Saw franchise.

My basement fridge always boasts an assortment of vacuum-packed confits for emergencies—Pekin for light lunches, and moulards for proper dinners. There are backup lobes of raw Grade A foie gras in the freezer, and jarred terrines in the fridge. I usually have a batch of vacuum-packed magrets aging in the meat drawer. And I always have jarred duck gizzard confit on hand for a quick luncheon salad with frisée and shallot vinaigrette. You will not find a customer loyalty card for Starbucks or Tim Hortons in my wallet, but I do have one for the Brome Lake Duck store in Knowlton, Quebec, where every tenth duck product purchase means you get to pick any item for free.

My children, Max and Simone, are showing every sign of carrying on this appreciation of the world’s first domesticated bird (thank you, China). It was some years ago—when they were aged about five and six—that I took them down to a Chinese restaurant called Pearl Harbourfront, on Toronto waterfront, for a ceremonial Sunday treat of their first Peking duck. The restaurant is Cantonese, and so their duck is not authentic, but they do a decent job all the same. But when I first spotted the waiter wheeling a trolley laden with the bird and its fixings our way, my customarily eager anticipation was tempered by the observation that the beautifully bronzed bird was still sporting its head. Would Simone now notice the obvious anatomical connection between lunch and the little stuffed fuzzy duck with which she liked to spend the night? My treat looked poised to backfire.

But when the waiter waved the platter around for its customary pre-carving parade lap, neither child noticed anything disturbing. Their interest was piqued when the busboys started setting up our table with little plates of hoisin, scallions, and a steamer basket full of pancakes. And they watched enraptured as our waiter carefully carved the duck into slices of moist breast topped with a little fat and a good shard of bronze glazed skin. He arranged them as prettily as he could manage on a large oval platter. Then he chopped the head off the carcass and with a flourish placed it beak outwards at one end of the platter.

Uh-oh, I thought. And then, as if he had planned it that way all along, the waiter lifted the platter from the trolley and placed it at the centre of our table, in such a way that the duck’s head was pointing directly at my daughter like a dart, its roasted bill dangling over the edge of the platter and straying into her place setting. Upper and lower mandibles were parted, revealing a shrivelled black tongue within. There was no way she was going to eat this bird, I thought. Far more likely that she would very shortly burst into tears.

At which point Simone picked up a chopstick, poked the head above the beak, right between the eyes, and said, “What’s up, duck?”