In the lead-up to World Vegan Month (November), PETA Honorary Director Pamela Anderson is calling on TV chef Gordon Ramsay to remove foie gras from the menu of his flagship establishment in London, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and replace it with faux gras for the month.
“[F]oie gras is nothing more than a diseased liver produced in a real-life Hell’s Kitchen,” writes Anderson in her letter to Ramsay. “Given your exceptional talent, I have no doubt that you can create dishes to impress that don’t involve this cruelty.”
To produce foie gras, ducks and geese are force-fed several times a day until their livers become diseased and swell to up to 10 times their normal size. PETA U.K.—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—has released exposés of foie gras farms that revealed that birds used for the cruelly obtained food were sick, dying, and dead and that some had holes in their necks from being impaled by the feeding pipes. Foie gras production is so inhumane that it’s illegal in the U.K. and more than a dozen other countries.
Anderson is part of a long list of celebrities—including Kate Winslet, Ricky Gervais, Ralph Fiennes, and the late Sir Roger Moore—who have supported PETA’s anti–foie gras campaign.
Anderson’s letter to Ramsay is available here. For more information on the cruelty behind foie gras, please visit PETA.org.
