A lot of birds have been consumed here in the past few weeks, from turkey and goose down to chicken and duck. And then so many game birds are coming into the shops: wigeon, teal, woodcock. A bird much smaller than any of those (indeed hardly bigger than a robin) has caused a kerfuffle in France, as you may have read.
Ministers there, it appears, are above the law, or at least are given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a particularly elaborate and, to many, disgusting, gastronomic performance - the eating of an ortolan: emberiza hortualana, one of the hunting family. The bird is neither on the list of those which may be shot as game - nor on the list of specially protected birds. Local pressure on hunting practices is strong in France, and even ministers, even, in this case, the Prime Minister Alain Juppe, doesn't want to go too far.
In fact, he is the villain on this, occasion which has enraged Brigitte Bardot. For the eating, of an ortolan is the culmination of a process of trapping the bird, then feeding it with grain for twenty one days, then taking out its gizzard, dumping it in armagnac, cooking and serving it in its own casserole, insides and all, beak and all.
Don't read on, if you are queasy. Then the gourmet puts a napkin over his head to retain all the odour (not, you'd think to hide his face for shame) and takes the whole corpse into his mouth, chewing it into a paste. Then swallows it.
Alain Juppe confessed recently that he had eaten one at a Gascon banquet. He is quoted by Figaro as saying that it was "amusing that while it is forbidden to hunt them and to retail them, you always find them in the good places", i.e. restaurants. Defenders of the hunt of these birds say they have been doing it since Roman times. Some Roman practices have been dropped, and we needn't go into that. The under the counter price for the ortolan may be as much as three hundred francs. At 8 to the pound, that's near enough to £40.
Are our own consciences clear, about the way we use the animals and birds which we farm and eat - or sell to foreigners? And the awful stuff we have fed to them and with which we have injected them? And, thinking of our own skins, what effect all this may have, physically, on us and our descendants.