Gordon Ramsay Shamed for Selling Vile Foie Gras From Tortured Birds – Again
Disturbing footage released last night reveals horrific cruelty to animals on foie gras farms that supply celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. In windowless sheds, row upon row of ducks are kept in tiny filthy cages with no space to move, covered in their own vomit, with painful broken wings and beaks, abscesses, eye injuries and bloody sores. Dying birds collapse panting from illness and exhaustion caused by the relentless ordeal of being force-fed grain through a tube several times a day. After weeks of this misery, the surviving birds are shoved into crates and sent to be slaughtered.
The harrowing investigation was carried out by our friends over at Viva ! , and documents the appalling conditions on five French farms belonging to the firm Ernest Soulard. After learning of the video footage, Gordon has reportedly suspended purchasing from the company – but to help end the nightmare for these birds, he needs to banish foie gras from all his restaurants permanently.
This is not the first time that the crinkle-faced cook has been caught serving up the liver of tortured ducks and geese. In May this year, a PETA US investigation of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which supplies his Manhattan restaurant, found similar scenes of cruelty, with ducks being violently force-fed through steel tubes. Experts have found that force-feeding in this way leads to oesophageal tears and splits, liver rupture and failure, heat stress and aspiration pneumonia.
Let’s hope that this time Gordon takes a leaf out of the book of principled chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and Albert Roux, who have said that they would never, ever serve a product made by abusing animals in this way. Even Morrissey has called the sweary Kitchen Nightmares star out on his use of a product which “is so cruelly produced that he’d be against it if he had an ethical bone in his body”.
The upsetting footage from Viva!’s investigation were sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s seen PETA’s video showing how geese are treated on a foie gras farm that supplies the department store Fortnum & Mason’s distributor, Georges Bruck .
If you agree that it’s a disgrace that British companies are still supporting the horrific foie gras industry, please take action here:
