Austin Restaurant Takes Foie Gras off Menu After PETA’s Pitch

For Immediate Release:
October 21, 2022

Contact:
Robin Goist 202-483-7382

After hearing from PETA that ducks used for foie gras are force-fed until their livers bloat and are then slaughtered, Nido at The Loren just confirmed that it has pulled the cruelly produced product from its menu ahead of its opening weekend. Video footage of the process is enough to make anyone lose their lunch.

“Nido made the right call in refusing to serve the diseased livers of birds who were painfully force-fed,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on other eateries that still offer this grotesquely vile dish to follow suit and urging diners to speak up for ducks if they see foie gras on offer anywhere.”

During foie gras production, several pounds of fat and grain are pumped into birds’ stomachs every day through tubes shoved down their throats, causing their livers to swell to up to 10 times their normal size. A PETA investigation into a foie gras producer in New York found that a single worker was expected to force-feed 500 birds three times each day, a head-spinning pace that frequently left birds injured and suffering. So many ducks died from ruptured organs due to overfeeding that workers who killed fewer than 50 birds a month were given a bonus. Other investigations into farms in the U.S. and Europe have revealed sick, dying, and dead animals, some with holes in their necks from overfeeding injuries.

Foie gras production is outlawed in more than a dozen countries as well as in California, and numerous companies, including Costco, IKEA, Sam’s Club, Target, and Whole Foods, refuse to sell it.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. The group’s letter to Nido’s chef Brad McDonald is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.