Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz says he is proud to support local foie gras producers after campaigners target restaurant
One of the world's top restaurants, Mugaritz, has been fined after animal rights campaigners targeted it for serving foie gras from force-fed ducks who were slowly bled to death after having corn rammed down their throats to bloat their livers.
But Andoni Luis Aduriz said he was proud to pay the fine for buying from an unlicensed source as a way of showing support to local farmers who produce the best quality foie gras on smallholdings that cannot obtain licences.
Sources at the restaurant said Aduriz bought his foie gras from Momotegi, a smallholder farm that used similar methods to those of larger producers with licences – and that the livers were tested by a private laboratory used by Mugaritz. But campaigners said Momotegi broke laws and inflicted cruel deaths on the animals. Aduriz denounced a wave of threats against himself and Momotegi's owner, Olga Posse, whose smallholding is close to the restaurant.
Posse fled to nearby Galicia over the summer after receiving threats.
"It is hard to debate with people who orchestrate a campaign that includes direct insults and wishing that I was dead," wrote in his blog. Aduriz is a former disciple of Ferran Adrìa of El Bulli restaurant fame and was voted the world's best by fellow chefs polled by Restaurant magazine last year.
Earlier this year Posse was tricked by a group from the pro-vegan Animal Equality group into being interviewed for what she thought was a report by some journalism students on the problems of small farmers.
In the film Granja Momotegi – Igualdad Animal on Vimeo, she admitted that local health authorities "turned a blind eye" to her farm. The film showed ducks being force-fed, which is legal, but also showed them being killed by having their throats slit with a knife without being stunned. They took several minutes to bleed to death.
"Posse defended this cruel method claiming that it allowed her to produce livers with less blood in them," Animal Equality said. "They bleed differently," Posse told the camera, saying that her high-profile clients were proof that her method worked. "They don't want foie from anywhere else."
Animal Equality, which seeks "equal consideration and respect" for animals and the abolition of what it calls "animal slavery", now targets Twitter users who mention they are going to Mugaritz.
"Other establishments, including some with more Michelin stars than us, also used livers from the Momotegi farm," said Aduriz, whose restaurant is near Renteria, in Spain's northern Basque country. The Basque region has one of the highest concentrations of Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. They include Martin Berasategui and Arzak, though it was not clear if they were also Posse clients.
"I am against any unjustified suffering inflicted on any living being, but I am just as much opposed to any obsessive humanisation of animals which tries to wipe out cultures that form part of our social and cultural diversity," Aduriz said.
"A small administrative sanction is a sacrifice I am prepared to accept in order to defend smallholders, artisans and those people who try to maintain our fragile culinary patrimony," he said.
Foie gras production is being targeted by animal rights campaigners around the globe. California has banned its sale, Italy's Coop supermarket chain stopped selling it in October and the British caterer Compass Group, supplier to Michelin-star restaurants, has dropped foie gras from its list.
Foie fans argues that the "gavage" method of force-feeding with tubes has been used for more than two centuries and that ducks and geese have no gagging reflex so the process is not painful or disturbing to them.