My hometown of Chicago is starting to get quite a reputation for being the laboratory for every loony left idea that’s come down the pike recently. In the late 1980’s, the city followed the lead of Berkley and other enlightened enclaves of the left by making Chicago a nuclear free zone. Presumably, this means that any missiles launched by an enemy at the city will be issued a citation for violating the ordinance if the warheads don’t alter course and blow up some other place, say Madison, Wisconsin.

Then last December, the city became the latest major metropolitan area to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. Now before I hear from the non-smokers who want to take me to task for spreading second hand smoke and thus ruining their health, I would only point to the historic and cultural connections between food, drink, and the nasty weed. Smoking, despite its tarnished reputation, is in fact a social vice, as embedded in the fabric of human interaction as food, alcohol (a more addictive and destructive drug by far) and coffee. And give the food Nazis a few years and they’ll have coffee roasters and growers in their sights.

But a couple of months ago, the City Council decided to give in to the animal rights loonies and ban the sale of Foie Gras in the city’s restaurants. If you’ve never had Foie Gras or don’t know what it is, think liver sausage without the rye bread, dark mustard, and pickle. Made from the livers of geese, its name means “fatty liver” in French. And in order to achieve the best taste and consistency, goose farmers force feed the birds a high fat diet which causes their livers to grow up to 10 times normal size.

Now don’t get me wrong. I feel for the birds just as I feel for the turkeys that are crammed together on turkey farms, never being able to move more than a few feet for their entire lives. And let’s not forget the slaughtering of cattle and pigs, not a pretty sight I’m sure and not very healthy for the animals either.

Animals are bred, raised and slaughtered for the sole purpose of feeding human beings. We grow them as we grow crops like wheat and soy beans. How they meet their end or how they are treated when they are alive should concern us the same way that we should care for any living thing. But animal rights activists look at our food supply in an anthropomorphic way, wishing to ascribe the same moral tenets to food as they do to other humans – sometimes granting the brutes a superior moral frame of reference to people.

This is nuts. It has nothing to do with animals not having “souls” or even the fact that, with very few exceptions, most beasts are not self-aware and thus have a completely different conscious life than humans. It has to do with relative value. A human life – any human life – is more valuable than that of an animal. This self evident construct escapes the animal rights activists whose agitation presupposes no relative difference between man and beast.

But in lobbying for a ban on Foie Gras, the animal rights activists have become quite selective in their pity. In fact, it is pure politics. Foie Gras being an expensive delicacy ostensibly eaten only by the rich, PETA has hit upon an issue that boosts their profile in the activist community, thus assuring an increase in donations while politicians can strut and posture like peacocks in the barnyard, showing off their care and concern for the well being of our feathered friends. And since the delicacy can be passed off as a rich man’s treat, the City Council figured that they could inject a little class warfare into the issue just for good measure.

What they didn’t count on was a revolt by the proletariat against the idea that government should be telling people what moral choices they should or should not be making about what they eat:

Don’t come between foodies and their foie gras.

That was the message sent by Chicago diners who dug into foie gras dishes Monday, on the eve of the city’s ban on foie gras taking effect. High-end restaurants had special foie gras tastings to protest the ban, and even a few down-home sandwich and pizza joints added it to their menus for the occasion.

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“What’s next?” asked Gadsby, who also hosted an Outlaw Dinner last month at his Noe Restaurant & Bar in Los Angeles, where foie gras will be subject to a statewide ban by 2012. “They’ll outlaw truffles, then lobster, beluga caviar, oysters. There are diners who eat to fill a hunger urge, and there are diners who eat to be dazzled. If you take away the luxury ingredients, how can you dazzle them?”

The Chicago City Council passed the foie gras ban in April, joining California and several European countries that outlawed foie gras alleging animal cruelty.

The “Foie Gras Revolt” has people talking like it’s 1776 rather than 2006:

The ordinance bans only the sale of foie gras, so restaurateurs have speculated that they can get around it by giving away foie gras or serving it at private parties.

Gadsby jokingly wondered whether he could cook with handcuffs on. He said he’d like to hold underground secret foie gras dinners or label foie gras as “duck liver” or “monkfish liver” to sell it.

Meanwhile, various chefs have reported demand for foie gras mushrooming since the ordinance was approved.

Perhaps if we started calling it “Liberty Liver” we could get the anti-Francophiles on our side.

And it’s good to see that there are still some people who take a perfectly practical, all American view of liberty:

Kou Patra and Saurabh Shah, both physicians, attended Gadsby’s dinner on their first day in Chicago after moving from Cleveland. They recently returned from vacationing in France, where they ate foie gras regularly. “I can’t believe we moved to a place where they banned foie gras,” said Patra, 33.

Some Chicagoans are outraged at what they see as a patronizing law, even if they rarely eat foie gras.

“They might as well make a citywide bedtime ordinance,” said bartender David Brown, 29, who feasted on the outlaw ingredients with his wife, Jennifer, at 676. “It’s like banning smoking. If I’m a bartender, I don’t run a health club. We’re adults; we’re allowed to have bad habits.”

This tendency by my hometown City Council to micromanage the behavior and habits of adults is extremely worrisome. It is a harbinger of what may become commonplace in the near future; states and localities taking it upon themselves to shape our diet, eliminating or curtailing foods based not on whether the foodstuffs contain ingredients or additives that are poisonous or will make us sick but rather based on the nebulous and uncertain effect the foods will have on our future health – or, as in the banning of Foie Gras, the effect on animals raised for the sole and exclusive purpose of feeding people.

Travel down that road a bit and you can see the banning of all meat, regardless of how it is grown or managed. This is the goal of PETA of course. And the politicians who voted for this ban and who shamelessly gave in to the activists, should think twice about their surrender the next time they’re enjoying a steak at Harry Carey’s.