Whose Liver Should We Cook Instead—Dubya's?

Mark Caro's book The Foie Gras Wars is alarming

Russell Simmons said it best: "We do so much greedy and selfish s--t to animals, but this is somewhere near the top."

That's the kind of spicy celeb bitching The Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro serves up in his new book on the über-politically correct subject of goose and duck liver destruction. Title's The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight. Wow, really? Even more than the battle to get Hollywood actresses to eat something? Apparently so.

Here are the dirty details: After about 12 weeks of free-range living, a duck or goose (almost always a duck these days) has a metal tube dropped down its throat twice a day for two to three weeks and is fed a corn-based feed that fattens it up. Ducks store fat in their livers, so the livers plump up to 8-10 times their normal size. They're yummy.

But isn't this hideous treatment akin to pinning a calf down so it can't walk (the method behind our veal consumption)? Or Angelina Jolie hauling out the kids for press-release purposes? Oh forgot, we're on the animals here:

Caro has the nasty deets on the celeb angle in Wars—complete with Moby, Gloria Steinem, Martina Navratilova, among others, testifying at testy animal-rights hearings—as well as the nasty celeb cooking wars. For ince, TV star and staunch anti-foie gras chef Charlie Trotter thinks we should cook the liver of pro-foie gras chef Rick Tramonto instead of some poor duck's. Down, boys!

I suggested to author Caro we just cook up Dubya's liver instead and call it a day. After all, he's to blame for all the evil currently going on in the world, right?

"Considering where Bush's liver has been," Caro, who's signing copies of his tome tonight at Book Soup in West Hollywood, shot back, "would you consider eating it under any circumstance?"

He has a point.