GOOD FOR THE GOOSE.(The Talk of the Town)

Advocates of animal rights, addressing the practice of overfeeding ducks and geese to fatten up their livers for foie gras, have for many years had a kind of exclusive hold on the literature of shock. It is a measure of how much ground they've gained lately that the food world has begun to decry their methods with imitative tones of outrage and despair. Take the current edition of The Rosengarten Report, a newsletter published by the Food Network personality David Rosengarten, where the issue is not how much ducks should be made to eat but how much duck should be eaten. In an article titled "Foiegracalypse Now!" Rosengarten bemoans "the end of foie gras as we know it," and urges gourmets to enjoy it while they can. (Inside: "Everything but the Quack: Great Ducky Products for Your Table.") He tells his readers that, all around the world, governments previously hospitable to foie gras--Israel (the world's third-largest producer), Hungary (its second), and even France itself (No. 1)--have charged the foie-gras-sie with finding a way to fatten the livers without what the French call le gavage. ("Doesn't that sound better?" he says.) Otherwise, they will have to give up the trade.

"It's impossible," says Michael Ginor, the co-founder of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, one of only two foie-gras farms in the United States. (The other is Sonoma Foie Gras, in the Central Valley.) "Foie gras has been produced for five thousand years using exactly the same mechanism." Besides, Ginor insists, the feeding method--by which roughly a pound of corn pellets are funnelled into each bird every day for a month--isn't painful, because ducks naturally swallow food whole. No matter. At the end of September, America got its first law legislating the dimensions of bird livers (not to be enlarged "beyond normal size") when California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed a bill banning the sale and production of foie gras in the state, effective July 1, 2012.

And so it was that some weeks ago Farm Sanctuary, an animal-rescue organization, threw a victory party at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. James Cromwell, who played the craggy-faced farmer in "Babe," arrived early, in a loose gray linen jacket, and began arranging a plate of crackers for the "faux gras"--tofu, seitan, lentils, agar-agar (dissolved in vegan vegetable stock). "My father was a horseman," Cromwell said. "He was a director and used to play polo with Will Rogers. As a kid, I never gave animals ...