The Paradox of Perspective

This chapter shifts attention to the more general challenges and paradoxes of developing moral understandings around a contested food such as foie gras by asking, up front and center, how we can know if a practice is cruel and, for individuals who wish to be moral eaters, which side we must take. It offers analyses of the moral discourses, empirical claims, perceptions, and political strategies that both sides of the foie gras debate have employed. In doing so, the chapter unpacks the social antagonisms that anchor the contemporary gastropolitics of foie gras in the United States, revealing that the relational contexts that make symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them”—and the social antagonisms that they spur—continue to matter tremendously within the contemporary politics of food.