Andrew Marr and the X Factor presenter Dermot O’Leary are among celebrities defying protests over the sale of foie gras at a butcher’s shop owned by a friend of Jamie Oliver. The television presenters are buying meat from Jack O’Shea despite protests in Primrose Hill, north London. O’Shea says he is determined to bring foie gras from France for his clients.
Oliver signed a photograph of O’Shea in his shop to show support. Marr, a BBC presenter who moved to Primrose Hill last year after suffering a stroke, said: “People have wanted a butcher in Primrose Hill for a very long time. For me the abysmal treatment of chickens in factory farming is a far bigger issue.” O’Shea said: “Eightyfive per cent of people here want foie gras. Jamie [Oliver], Mary Portas, Dermot O’Leary, [the comedian] Russell Howard and Andrew Marr wouldn’t come in if they objected.”
Production of foie gras is illegal in the UK because of the suffering of geese as workers push pipes down their throats three times a day to pump in grain and fat, causing their livers to swell to up to 10 times their normal size. Birds have difficulty standing, tear out their own feathers and cannibalise each other from stress. Selling foie gras is legal.
Peter Egan, who lives nearby and plays Hugh “Shrimpy” MacClare in ITV’s Downton Abbey, was appalled. “It dismays me to think that someone I admire as much as I do Andrew Marr should come back from a life-changing stroke only to embrace an appetite that gives no such option to the animals killed to satisfy his taste buds,” he said. “Only humans, celebrating their careless appetite to titillate their taste buds, subjugate all other creatures to horrendous violence.”
O’Shea said: “ If I thought an animal was being abused I wouldn’t sell it. I went out to the farm in France and [when] the farmer whistles for his geese they come galloping down the hill for feeding time. They sit on his lap and he gets this thing and pops it down their gullet.” But Egan hit back. “Mr O’Shea should try having his gut stuffed with grain, through a hose, before declaring it doesn’t bother the duck [sic].”
Jane Frampton, 33, who founded the London Vegan Actions group with sister Phoebe, 23, said: “We will carry on until we stop him.”