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Washington: While the world’s eyes were on the blue wave that swept over US Congress, elsewhere in the nation’s capital, Australian Alex Butterworth was watching a much more specific vote.
On the ballot at this year’s election in Washington was Initiative 86: a proposed ban on force-feeding birds to enlarge their livers, and a ban on importing products derived from that process. Yes, a ban on foie gras.
In a one-party town (DC is the bluest city in the country and backed Kamala Harris by 92.5 per cent in 2024), the great foie gras debate was the only issue with the capacity to divide the electorate. At the centre of this food fight was Aussie expat Butterworth and his eponymous Capitol Hill restaurant, which has had foie gras on its menu since it opened in October 2024.
“It’s been amazing, the level of media interest,” Butterworth says. “It’s somewhat of an obscure, just DC-based issue but, obviously, it has potential nationwide implications. All of these things start somewhere.”
Butterworth’s is an easy target. In Donald Trump’s Washington, it quickly became a favourite for the MAGA crowd and visiting conservatives, mostly from the UK (and Australia, of course). On election night, its function room was booked out by the DC Republican Party.
But Butterworth and his team happily placed themselves in the firing line, and chef and co-owner Bart Hutchins relished his role as Washington’s chief foie gras advocate. Lamb tartare with onion rings and foie gras is a fixture of the restaurant’s menu.
But last week it introduced a four-course foie gras tasting menu: a Waldorf salad, foie gras and chestnut soup with Asian pear, duck with foie gras sauce (both from the same duck) and a foie gras Twinkie for dessert.
The campaign to “86” foie gras from DC menus was pushed by a group called Pro-Animal DC. Records showed it received most of its funding from groups in Oregon and California, leading critics to say the proposed foie gras ban was pitting local chefs and foodies against “out-of-town animal rights activists”.
Signs went up all around town asking voters to “save the ducks”. At Halloween, Pro-Animal campaign director Cady Witt even dressed as Hutchins force-feeding a duck. She donned a white chef’s hat, corset and stockings, while her boyfriend dressed as the duck.
Hutchins says foie gras can be a useful entry point for encouraging people to eat more of an animal, which is a part of his cooking philosophy. “We sell the ears, the feet, the kidneys and the livers, everything – because it’s wasteful not to.”
The proposed ban divided other local chefs. Biagio Cepollaro, owner of Roma Pizzeria, wrote in DC Journal that the force-feeding process caused “significant suffering” to the animals and should not be encouraged.
But Jose Andres, the celebrity chef and DC food legend, questioned whether the ban made sense. “So, we are banning all meats? If duck goes, all goes next?” he wrote on X last month. There were bigger issues facing Americans, he added.
Outside a polling place in Dupont Circle last week, Washington resident Stephanie Mercedes said she voted in favour of the ban. “Of course I don’t want birds to be force-fed!” she said.
A poll of 438 registered Washington voters, taken in 2023 and commissioned by an animal rights group, found 78 per cent support for a ban on foie gras.
Butterworth, a lawyer and former Liberal Party operative, observed, as only an Australian could: “As John Howard used to say, there’s only one poll that matters, and that’s the one on election day.”
But in the end, the polls were right – nearly three-quarters of DC residents voted to ban foie gras, including the mayor-elect, Janeese Lewis George.
Butterworth’s and the major foie gras producers have signalled plans to challenge the ban. And it could end up being costly for the DC council to enforce.
“DC government is already struggling with losing small business to Virginia and Maryland, and this is another slice in the death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts for DC small business,” Butterworth said. “[But] DC is very politically progressive, so the result is not a surprise.”
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