Chefs Perfect the Recipe for Compassion

I love to eat out in every city I travel to, but I make a point of avoiding restaurants that serve delicacies of despair like foie gras. Much to my delight, a growing number of chefs are shunning cruel foods—like foie gras—and adding vegan options to their menus. These culinary masters, while not making strictly vegan food like my good friend celebrity chef Tal Ronnen, are making sure that they avoid supporting the worst abuses that factory farmed animals have to endure.

First up, Amanda Cohen, the proud winner of PETA U.S.’s Faux Foie Gras Competition, proves that compassion doesn’t necessarily mean bland. Her mushroom mousse sounds way better than the liver of a cruelly fed goose!

Renowned Australian chef Kylie Kwong‘s yummy delights are based on ethical, sustainable, and environmentally friendly ingredients, and she refuses to purchase foods that are the direct products of factory farming and fish trawling practices. Fellow Aussie chef Annabel Meikle shuns ingredients like shark fin and only uses organic chicken.

Kylie Kwong

These ladies are following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Puck, who takes the cake for his profound commitment to more humane and environmentally sustainable cooking in his “Wolfgang’s Eating, Loving, and Living” program. His commitment includes not purchasing or cooking with meat that came from calves who were confined to tiny veal crates or pork from pigs who were forced to lie nearly motionless for months at a time in gestation crates. He also insists on using only eggs from free-range hens. And when it comes to foie gras—the enlarged, diseased livers of force-fed ducks and geese—you won’t find it in the master’s kitchen either.

You don’t have to be a master chef to encourage compassionate cooking—or eating! Take our “No Foie Gras” pledge today!

Posted by Jason Baker