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Hansenista comments on Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras - Less Wrong
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Comments (62)
So far as I know it's not an acquired taste (e.g., generally unpleasant), so people would probably want it even if nobody were "bending their preferences".
They have to do some bending to get people to notice its existence in the first place, let alone deem it worthy of trying a first time. The fact that people insist on calling it by its French name, rather than "fat liver", is a testament to the marketing that has to be done to support interest in it.
I don't pretend this is a cure-all, or that we can always end livestock torture by not promoting its tasty products -- that would be endorsing a "just world fallacy". But sometimes we really do make our hard choices a lot harder than they need to be.
The study of variable quantities is called "al-jabr" not because mathematicians want to make it sound exotic, but because of historical accident. Unless you have particularly good reason to think otherwise, I would guess foie gras is the same way.
People are automatically repulsed by "fat liver". They're not repulsed by "the restoration". Foie gras needs to hide its original-language meaning to avoid turning away some people; algebra doesn't. Not a particularly relevant comparison, I think.
People who speak English are (possibly) automatically repulsed by "fat liver". French speakers are not similarly repulsed by "fois gras". The difference has little if anything to do with the practice of force feeding.
Americans are repulsed by just "liver", for the most part. It's unfortunate, organ meat is really good for you, and for the most part much cheaper than muscle.
Would the latter remain true in America if Americans were to lose their beliefs that organ meat is repulsive?
Probably the price of organ meat would go up, while the price of "normal" meat would go down. That's basically a winner for everyone.
Except those of us who already like organ meat...
Well, you people are disgusting anyway :)
Though the related expression* might lead one to believe otherwise, Jewish Americans consume chopped liver that is labelled "chopped liver" pretty regularly. Though I've got to say that chopped beef liver is much better than chopped chicken liver, so I have my doubts about goose liver pate (which I've never tried). Also, a little minced onion and salt makes it a lot more appetizing than it might be alone.
On a different note, make sure you don't eat liver from a carnivore.
*"What am I, chopped liver?"
Also, some hard boiled eggs.
Mmm... chopped liver...
I think most of the discussion of “bending preferences” and “acquired taste” underestimate the variance of tastes across the population. I've seen someone on LW saying that they didn't enjoy wine, and therefore suspecting that whoever claims to enjoy wine must be doing it for signalling. The idea that maybe some people actually enjoy wine and some don't doesn't seem to have occurred to them (where by some I mean ‘a sizeable fraction of the population’). Likewise, I'd be shocked to find that the fraction of people who actually like foie grass the first time they try it is <10% or >90%.