For Halloween this year, Pro-Animal DC’s campaign director Cady Witt dressed up in white thigh-high stockings with a ruffled apron and a cleavage-revealing corset top. Completing the look: a goatee and mustache, brown wig, glasses, chef’s toque, and funneled feeding tube.
She was, of course, Sexy Butterworth’s Chef and Foie Gras Proponent Bart Hutchins Force-Feeding a Duck. Her boyfriend was the duck.
On November 3, DC residents will decide whether to ban the sale of foie gras. The issue has brought together a colorful cast of characters. There are the activists for Pro-Animal, which has spent nearly half a million dollars to persuade voters that force-feeding ducks and geese to enlarge their livers is downright spooky. There’s Hutchins, the defiant foie fan whose Capitol Hill restaurant is a darling of the MAGA crowd. There’s José Andrés, whose celebrity cameo ruffled feathers (“If Duck goes, all goes next?”). And then there’s Olivia Gray—an actual duck who’s made multiple media appearances and become something of a mascot for the local anti-foie movement. The Swedish blue’s owner Meghan Abrego says her quacking companion hates foie gras (after seeing a video of how it’s made, “she walked away from it”) but adores the movie National Treasure (“She loves Nicolas Cage”).
Needless to say, this election fight has gotten very weird.
Starting with the Halloween costume: “Incredible. No notes,” Hutchins responded on X.
Later, though, the chef told me he had mixed feelings when he first saw the costume. He’s been getting hate mail and death threats, which he speculates mostly come from out-of-town activists. On one hand, the costume made him feel overexposed, like he needed to go hide. But he also found it flattering and hilarious. His one qualm: Witt wore a goatee rather than a full beard, “which was disappointing because it kind of made me look like a Gen-X, I don’t know, a fan of Pearl jam or something.”
For her part, Witt says Hutchins’s interactions with everyone on the Pro-Animal team have been “really positive!” She texts: “Good to be able to laugh and get along with each other, even while on opposing sides of an issue.”
While so much of politics feels serious and scold-y right now, Hutchins says at least some people seem to be having fun with the foie gras debate in a way it feels no one else is allowed to. Witt’s foie gras-themed costume wasn’t even the only one. A reporter for the libertarian magazine Reason dressed up as an engorged duck with a sign that read “My Liver My Choice.”
But the costume was not even the most surreal part of this election cycle, Hutchins says. That would be Olivia the Duck dining at his restaurant.
Olivia’s owner, Abrego, is an EMT with a caregiving business in Maryland and a bird-training side hustle. She got Olivia as an egg on eBay, which is apparently something you can do—”just be careful to read the instructions because you don’t want to accidentally get yourself a gator egg.” Since then, Abrego and Olivia have been attached at the hip/wing. “Ducks cannot be considered service animals at this time, because what service does she provide other than a smile? But she helps with my anxiety. She just helps with regulating my emotions, keeping me happy,” Abrego says. She describes Olivia as 68 percent human, 30 percent dog, and just 2 percent duck.
Abrego and Olivia have been all over town campaigning against foie gras, including at the DC restaurant that’s become most famous for serving it. Even though Abrego considers the production of foie gras to be “torture,” she can still see the opposing point of view and believes in civil discourse. Against the odds, Hutchins and Abrego developed a friendly rapport over social media DMs. Both were in interested in a public debate that never quite materialized. But along the way, Hutchins extended an open invitation for Abrego—and Olivia—to visit the restaurant.
So, on an early evening in mid-October, Abrego popped in for a bite with Olivia in a stroller. It turned out it was quite lovely inside the belly of the beast. Abrego enjoyed some prosecco and fries (“amazing”). For Olivia, the staff made some roasted tomatoes.
Hutchins, however, was not there that evening. Since then, Abrego has been pushing for a meeting. She posted a plea from Olivia inside Butterworth’s: “LISTEM UP YALL. I HAVE A VEMRY INPORTENT MESYGE FOR CHEF BART. PLZ HAVE A CONVEYSAYTION WITH MY MUMTHER ABOUT FOIE GRAS.”
Meanwhile, over on X, the foie gras debate took another unusual twist when José Andrés entered the chat.
“Sure but then let’s ban beef and pork and chicken,” the chef tweeted. It’s a point plenty of others have made: Why ban foie gras and not other questionable factory farming practices? But then: “….and also vegetables too because [there’s] a study that says that [there] maybe indications of suffering…..” He added that we should end childhood hunger first and concluded with an angel emoji.
No one seriously argues that vegetables suffer, one commenter responded.
But Andrés—who has been known to talk to his tomatoes—dug in: “I’m sorry I’m not as smart as you…..I’ve been cooking all my life but plants suffering or having consciousness or even feelings is a long old conversation by ‘intellectuals.'” He cited a Nature article about stressed plants “crying” and a 2013 New Yorker story where Michael Pollan considers whether plants can “think.”
While Hutchins is thrilled to have a big name like Andrés on his side, he doesn’t think talking about whether plants have feelings is a winning argument. But get Hutchins talking about foie gras, and he might take you down his own philosophical rabbit hole, referencing Kant and AI and what it means to be human.
All of which really comes down to this: Andrés would like to continue serving foie gras swirled in cotton candy on a stick, as he does at DC’s Bazaar Meat. And Hutchins doesn’t want anyone telling him he can’t stuff the delicacy inside of a gourmet Twinkie—a specialty that capped off his four-course “Foie Gras at the End of the World” tasting menu leading up to the election.
Now back to Olivia the Duck. She didn’t want to attend Hutchins’s foie gras dinner, obviously. “That does sound like a haunted house for Olivia,” Abrego told me last week. But she was still hoping to meet up with Hutchins.
On Halloween eve, it finally happened. A group of anti-foie activists were campaigning in Capitol Hill, near Butterworth’s. Meanwhile, Hutchins had run out of serving utensils for a private party and went out to get some. And there was Olivia the Duck.
“[Abrego] was like, ‘Oh, she gives high fives,'” Hutchins says, “and I reached and she said, ‘Oh wow, she hugged you.’”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
