If you're heading into Hush Restaurant in Laguna Beach Saturday night, the folks outside advising you to steer clear of the duck are with Orange County People for Animals and Animal Protection Rescue League. As they've done elsewhere around Orange County, the two groups again join forces as part of their anti-foie gras campaign by visiting the front of the restaurant at 858 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.
As diners stick their valet tickets in their pockets, they will be told by the animal activists that foie gras is created by forcibly restraining ducks three times a day while a rough steel pipe is shoved down their throats to overfeed them to the point that their livers swell to more than 10 times the normal size–or, at least, they will get as much of that out as they can before the Hush door closes.
“If those who purchase and eat this product could only see the diseased organ inside the body of a filth-encrusted duck, the last place they would put this 'delicacy' is in their mouths,” writes veterinarian and “animal cruelty inspector” Dr. Holly Cheever in an announcement sent to OCPA members.
The group claims several local restaurants, including Five Feet, the Sky Room, Mr. A's and Laurel's, have joined the campaign to make Orange County “foie gras-free.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.