Owain Yeoman Is Peta’s Dumb Animal Of The Month: Anthony Bourdain, Foie Gras And Cooking Fortnum & Mason’s Goose
OWAIN Yeoman has created a “crime scene” hazard tape and chalk body outlines of geese outside Fortnum & Mason’s. If he coloured it in and added a pond, we’d toss him some spare change. But Yeoman is not after cash for his art – he wants to make an orchestrated point in public. The Mentalist star is doing it for PETA in a protest against the store’s sale of foie gras.
He holds a sign declaring:
“F&M: Investigate Compassion – Ban Foie Gras”.
Says he:
“In the UK, foie gras production is literally a criminal procedure – so why is a shop that prides itself on its British heritage still selling this cruel product? We’re encouraging all compassionate people to shop elsewhere until Fortnum & Mason stops selling foie gras.”
Yeoman once played a chef in Kitchen Confidential, an American TV show based on Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. On the show lots of meat got cooked. When he;s not in the kitchen with the meaty treats (see photo below), Yeoman is a champion of vegetarianism.
It was Bourdain who said:
“I think that it’s an artificial issue,” he told the crowd. “I think that PETA…has chosen an easy target. It’s a luxury item that most people haven’t had. It’s expensive. It’s suspiciously French. It’s hard to pronounce. It just sounds bad, you know? You’re feeding a poor goose or duck more than it would ordinarily eat. It looks bad. They did those grainy films… It’s not like that. That’s not the way foie gras that he buys [Eric Ripert] or I ever bought or any responsible chef at any quality restaurant would buy: a distressed, unhappy animal is bad food…inarguably that kind of suffering and stress leads directly to the quality of food that we don’t want.”
He added:
In proper foie gras farming, the same feeder tends the duck every day, and more often than not, it’s the duck who approaches the feeder. They have room to run around, to live a good, natural life — even a pampered one — compared with the horrifying and vastly more widespread practice of raising battery chickens.
In this clip, Yeoman’s character wonders why anyone who hates killing an animal can wear leather shoes. He should tell it to the dumb animals who shill for Peta.
It might just be that Yeoman is not so very different to F&M – they both give the punters what they want.
FACT: A Yeoman is a member of the Yeomen of the Guard or Yeomen Warders of the Tower of London – aka… A Beefeater…
Posted: 15th, June 2011 | In: Celebrities Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
