#ViaDagliScaffali is Essere Animali's campaign against the sale of foie gras in Italian supermarkets. Thanks to investigative work and public participation, major results have been achieved. The latest: Esselunga's decision.
In just over a year, four supermarket chains have already chosen to stop selling foie gras. The latest is Esselunga, one of the most important names in large-scale organised retail (Gdo), with 150 supermarkets and hypermarkets across Italy.
What has driven these companies towards the decision to stop selling foie gras — starting with the Pam-Panorama group (153 points of sale), then Eataly (considered by Forbes magazine one of the most influential brands in the world), the Consorzio nazionale Conad (for all listed products and own-brand products) and finally Esselunga — is a series of factors that it may be useful to analyse.
The campaign is called #ViaDagliScaffali and was born after the investigative team at Essere Animali documented foie gras production on French farms, in the country that is synonymous with this food considered a luxury — yet behind which lies a process that causes severe suffering to millions of ducks and geese, subjected to force-feeding.
The images in the video are suitable for an adult audience and cannot leave anyone unmoved. The solid foundation of our campaign is precisely the investigation, which has allowed us to give concrete substance to our demands. Almost as if to say: these are the conditions in which animals are raised for foie gras production, this is force-feeding — do you really want to keep selling it?
The choice to target supermarkets rather than, for example, calling for a national import ban is not accidental. Force-feeding is a practice condemned and prohibited even by the European Union, which has however allowed certain countries — including France (the others are Spain, Hungary, Belgium and Bulgaria) — to continue producing it.
Exports do the rest, and so foie gras reaches Italy too, where force-feeding is illegal. But calling for a national import ban would certainly have exposed us to a long and difficult campaign, and so we chose, for now, a partial objective — certainly more achievable, but with a concrete effect on the product's market: convincing Italian supermarket chains to stop selling foie gras.
"What prompted Esselunga and other supermarkets to stop selling foie gras?" To this question one could simply answer: people. Thousands signed the petition, joining the week of action we launched to ask the company to take a public stand and make its decision to stop purchasing foie gras known, following a commitment communicated by phone to our association.
A flash mob held outside the Esselunga in via Certosa in Milan, covered by the city's online daily newspapers, served as a corollary to four consecutive days of protest on social media that allowed hundreds of people to publicly express their dissent, pressing the company to engage with consumers until the long-awaited public statement.
Buoyed by this new victory, the #ViaDagliScaffali campaign continues. The next demands will be directed at Auchan, Bennet and Carrefour, towards whom 70,000 people have already mobilised through the petition.
Force-feeding is torture and each one of us can do something, in our own small way, to put an end to it. We have seen that it works.