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Foie gras, the luxe delicacy made from fatty duck or goose livers, is no longer contraband on California menus.

A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a statewide ban on the sale of foie gras, which is made from the engorged liver of ducks or geese that have been force-fed to create the food's signature rich, creamy taste.

Animal rights activists have long denounced foie gras as a product of animal cruelty. In 2004, California voters approved a ban on the production and sale of foie gras in the state, but it didn't take effect until eight years later. Now U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson has ruled that the ban clashes with an existing federal law that regulates the sale and distribution of poultry products.

The three plaintiffs in the case include two foie gras producers and Los Angeles-based Hot's Restaurant Group, which filed suit the day after the ban took effect in 2012.

Indeed, Hot's Kitchen, based in Hermosa Beach, Calif., is among the many restaurants in the state that have been skirting the ban ever since it took effect, illicitly stashing and serving foie gras. Chefs and foodies likened the ban to Prohibition, and "duckeasies" popped up to satisfy demand for foie gras, which usually sells at a premium in high-end restaurants. But by offering it free as a gift from the kitchen, restaurants argued they weren't "selling" foie gras or violating the ban.

Last night, California chefs rejoiced on Twitter. Chef David Bazirgan of San Francisco's Dirty Habit wrote:

CALI FOIE BAN OVERTURNED . GOOD THING I ALWAYS HAVE IT ANYWAY!!! We have lots of FOIE gras for tonight… http://t.co/qQNfQ33gw5

— david bazirgan (@bazsf) January 7, 2015

After Wednesday's announcement, Bazirgan quickly created a four-course foie gras tasting menu that sold out within a few hours. "We were slammed and the chef sold out, but we're doing it again tonight," Jamie Law, public relations manager for Dirty Habit, tells The Salt.

Animal rights groups have vowed to appeal. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals President Ingrid Newkirk says force-feeding ducks and geese is akin to torture and won't be tolerated.

"A line will be drawn in the sand outside any restaurant that goes back to serving this "torture in a tin," and whoever crosses that line identifies themselves with gluttony that cannot control itself even to the point of torturing animals," Newkirk told us in an email.

The state has not said whether it will appeal the decision. A representative from California Attorney General Kamala Harris' office told us, "We are reviewing the ruling."

Meanwhile, restaurants from Los Angeles to San Francisco are offering celebratory treats, from seared foie gras on a stick wrapped in pink cotton candy to foie gras and beef burgers.

Celebrity chef Thomas Keller, who has been a vocal opponent of the ban, said both of his Yountville Calif. , restaurants, The French Laundry and Bouchon, will start serving foie gras again this spring.

"We are thrilled to be offering our guests the opportunity to enjoy this delicacy again," Keller said in a statement.

It is still illegal to produce foie gras in California, but Wednesday's ruling makes it legal to sell it, which means the state's restaurants are free to import it.

Although a handful of celebrity chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, oppose serving foie gras, most welcomed the recent news.

"It's like a right of passage to be able to serve it," says Chef Josiah Citrin of Melisse, a French restaurant in Santa Monica with two Michelin stars. "It'll be on our menu all this week."

foie gras

The Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from Canadian oil sands down to the U.S. Gulf Coast, isn't just an infrastructure project. It's also a symbol for the fight over the future of energy.

Energy

Infographic: How Tar Sands Oil Is Produced

Producing oil from Alberta's tar sands emits more pollution than traditional oil drilling, so many environmentalists want that crude left in the ground. And more broadly, they want the world to turn away from climate-changing fossil fuels toward cleaner forms of energy, like wind and solar.

Mike Hudema, who works with Greenpeace Canada as a climate and energy campaigner, is one of those activists. He says he sympathizes with people who need jobs: He has family members who work in Alberta's oil fields. Still, Hudema considers it a victory when big oil companies announce delays in new oil sands projects.

Last September, Norway's Statoil postponed one project for at least three years. Before that, French oil giant Total S.A. shelved a planned project.

"Total cancelled its multi-billion-dollar tar sands project," Hudema says, "And they've stated fairly openly that part of the reason for the cancellation is because of lack of pipeline capacity."

Energy

Canadian Regulators Investigate Mysterious Tar Sands Spills

The Keystone XL pipeline is one project that would boost capacity. And companies do say the ability to transport crude out of Canada is one reason they delay projects. But there are other reasons that are just as important, says Greg Stringham, vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

"It hasn't been one single pipeline that has been the cause of that re-evaluation," he says. "It has been labor; it has been competitiveness; it has been the corporate decisions."

Those corporate decisions include the question of where a global company will choose to invest its money. And today — especially with low oil prices — it's not hard to find more lucrative investments.

Energy

What You Need To Know About The Keystone XL Oil Pipeline

The Keystone XL approval delay is just one setback for an industry Stringham says has a bright future. Canada's oil sands produced more than 2 million barrels of crude per day last year.

New projects are in the works, Stringham says, and output will grow.

"It is to the point where it has gone from just a Canadian industry to a North American industry and we're on the verge of moving it to a global industry," he says.

So, Stringham says, companies aren't waiting for the Keystone XL pipeline. There are other ways to move oil: trains, barges and alternate pipelines. He says as long as the U.S. and the world wants oil, Alberta will find a way to supply it.

Energy

Blocking Keystone Won't Stop Oil Sands Production

For opponents who want to keep that oil in the ground, like Hudema at Greenpeace, that means more battles ahead.

"When we talk about tar sands development we're talking about going against the biggest carbon bullies on the plant," Hudema says. "Every major multinational oil company is involved in this development."

Comparing their resources to his, Hudema says he thinks environmental groups are doing a pretty good job. And every day that Alberta's tar sands oil stays in the ground is another victory.

oil sands

greenpeace

Keystone XL Pipeline

oil

When I asked Tina Fey how she felt about the attack at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I wasn't aiming for a big headline — though that's exactly what her answer produced.

She was facing a roomful of journalists at the TV Critics Association's winter press tour Wednesday, talking up her latest television series — an eccentric comedy, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, that was developed for NBC but will be unveiled to the world on Netflix.

And although she looked supremely uncomfortable every second she was answering the question, the woman who led the writers' room at Saturday Night Live when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11 seemed a perfect person to ask about the importance of satire in a free society when gunmen kill a dozen people at the offices of a magazine for the humor it has published.

"Obviously, that news is terrible and tragic and upsetting," Fey said. "When you look at that, or you look at even the controversy surrounding The Interview, it makes you remember how important free speech is, and it absolutely must be defended, and you cannot back down on free speech in any way."

I had a follow-up question: Did she ever face pressure to limit her satire? "I think the closest memory I would have of that would have been back doing [Saturday Night Live's] 'Weekend Update,' which was a long time ago," she added. "But even that was a different era. Because in a social media era where you make a joke on American TV and it can go worldwide, it's a different environment. But ... we're Americans. ... Even if it's just dumb jokes in The Interview," we have the right to make them.

Fey's answer landed in stories published everywhere from Time magazine to the Toronto Sun, Huffington Post, Glamour magazine online and BuzzFeed. And — along with heartfelt commentaries from Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien — it offered a stark reminder that even as we hunker down inside the bubble of a press tour focused on the next six months of TV, this stuff we television critics obsess over can have a much larger meaning.

The struggle to cut through the nonsense of the industry to expose that meaning can be a central challenge at the TV critics press tour, where publicists, stars, producers and network executives are trying hard to both avoid hurtful controversy and maximize attention.

Television

TV In 2015: Late-Night Shuffles, Big Goodbyes And More

Even Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, focused on a woman trying to build a new life after she is rescued from a doomsday cult, finds its roots in a dark scenario that recalls the crimes of polygamist Warren Jeffs and the man who kidnapped several women in Ohio, Ariel Castro.

"The first several weeks that we were with the writers we spent talking about all the heaviness," said Fey, acknowledging the show had to at least acknowledge the dark side of its concept before trying to make people laugh. "In a weird [way] it reminded me of going back to SNL after 9/11 and [saying], 'OK, we're going to do comedy. We're going to find it.' "

Schmidt co-creator Robert Carlock said their show was a modern take on Mary Tyler Moore's now-classic sitcom setup: a suddenly liberated, boundlessly optimistic single woman in the city. It may say something about TV in 2015 that they are telling such a traditional tale by giving Kimmy Schmidt an outrageous personal back story. In an age where 500 streams are accessible with a mouse click, subtlety may be the new buggy whip.

As critics here try sorting through the quickly changing nature of television, one guy who helped kick-start that revolution, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, uses the oldest of old-school media technologies to explain how people's TV-watching habits are changing in a video-streaming age.

So far, the company is resolute in refusing to reveal specific viewership figures for each of its shows. But he did say that their data reveal that Netflix users tend to watch more than one episode of a show in one sitting and they tend to finish one show before moving on to another. Just like people read books.

Later, Sarandos told me that their data on House of Cards revealed that users reacted badly to a scene in the first episode in which Kevin Spacey's character strangled a dog. His character, powerful Congressman Frank Underwood, was also speaking to the camera, which their data showed viewers also didn't like.

And while some users who didn't like the dog-killing came back to the show, many viewers who reacted badly to Spacey's speaking to the camera — a technique that is a central feature of the series — did not, Sarandos said.

His point was that their data didn't really lead Netflix to try to change how Spacey, executive producer/director David Fincher and creator/executive producer Beau Willimon were shaping the series.

But I also noted that no matter how much technology is changing how we consume media — essentially leading consumers to expect as much content as possible, as cheaply as possible, as soon as possible — some patterns are as old as the printed word itself. Much as we change, we also stay the same.

That's a lesson worth remembering as critics here sort through press conferences outlining the next six months of TV, even while the turbulence of the real world occasionally intrudes.

Great art reveals us like nothing else. The struggle, over the next 12 days of the winter press tour, is to suss out exactly what the next few months of TV shows really say about what we value, what we hate and what moves us in a media world where boundless tragedy is just a mouse click away.

When I asked Tina Fey how she felt about the attack at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I wasn't aiming for a big headline — though that's exactly what her answer produced.

She was facing a roomful of journalists at the TV Critics Association's winter press tour Wednesday, talking up her latest television series — an eccentric comedy, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, that was developed for NBC but will be unveiled to the world on Netflix.

And although she looked supremely uncomfortable every second she was answering the question, the woman who led the writers' room at Saturday Night Live when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11 seemed a perfect person to ask about the importance of satire in a free society when gunmen kill a dozen people at the offices of a magazine for the humor it has published.

"Obviously, that news is terrible and tragic and upsetting," Fey said. "When you look at that, or you look at even the controversy surrounding The Interview, it makes you remember how important free speech is, and it absolutely must be defended, and you cannot back down on free speech in any way."

I had a follow-up question: Did she ever face pressure to limit her satire? "I think the closest memory I would have of that would have been back doing [Saturday Night Live's] 'Weekend Update,' which was a long time ago," she added. "But even that was a different era. Because in a social media era where you make a joke on American TV and it can go worldwide, it's a different environment. But ... we're Americans. ... Even if it's just dumb jokes in The Interview," we have the right to make them.

Fey's answer landed in stories published everywhere from Time magazine to the Toronto Sun, Huffington Post, Glamour magazine online and BuzzFeed. And — along with heartfelt commentaries from Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien — it offered a stark reminder that even as we hunker down inside the bubble of a press tour focused on the next six months of TV, this stuff we television critics obsess over can have a much larger meaning.

The struggle to cut through the nonsense of the industry to expose that meaning can be a central challenge at the TV critics press tour, where publicists, stars, producers and network executives are trying hard to both avoid hurtful controversy and maximize attention.

Television

TV In 2015: Late-Night Shuffles, Big Goodbyes And More

Even Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, focused on a woman trying to build a new life after she is rescued from a doomsday cult, finds its roots in a dark scenario that recalls the crimes of polygamist Warren Jeffs and the man who kidnapped several women in Ohio, Ariel Castro.

"The first several weeks that we were with the writers we spent talking about all the heaviness," said Fey, acknowledging the show had to at least acknowledge the dark side of its concept before trying to make people laugh. "In a weird [way] it reminded me of going back to SNL after 9/11 and [saying], 'OK, we're going to do comedy. We're going to find it.' "

Schmidt co-creator Robert Carlock said their show was a modern take on Mary Tyler Moore's now-classic sitcom setup: a suddenly liberated, boundlessly optimistic single woman in the city. It may say something about TV in 2015 that they are telling such a traditional tale by giving Kimmy Schmidt an outrageous personal back story. In an age where 500 streams are accessible with a mouse click, subtlety may be the new buggy whip.

As critics here try sorting through the quickly changing nature of television, one guy who helped kick-start that revolution, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, uses the oldest of old-school media technologies to explain how people's TV-watching habits are changing in a video-streaming age.

So far, the company is resolute in refusing to reveal specific viewership figures for each of its shows. But he did say that their data reveal that Netflix users tend to watch more than one episode of a show in one sitting and they tend to finish one show before moving on to another. Just like people read books.

Later, Sarandos told me that their data on House of Cards revealed that users reacted badly to a scene in the first episode in which Kevin Spacey's character strangled a dog. His character, powerful Congressman Frank Underwood, was also speaking to the camera, which their data showed viewers also didn't like.

And while some users who didn't like the dog-killing came back to the show, many viewers who reacted badly to Spacey's speaking to the camera — a technique that is a central feature of the series — did not, Sarandos said.

His point was that their data didn't really lead Netflix to try to change how Spacey, executive producer/director David Fincher and creator/executive producer Beau Willimon were shaping the series.

But I also noted that no matter how much technology is changing how we consume media — essentially leading consumers to expect as much content as possible, as cheaply as possible, as soon as possible — some patterns are as old as the printed word itself. Much as we change, we also stay the same.

That's a lesson worth remembering as critics here sort through press conferences outlining the next six months of TV, even while the turbulence of the real world occasionally intrudes.

Great art reveals us like nothing else. The struggle, over the next 12 days of the winter press tour, is to suss out exactly what the next few months of TV shows really say about what we value, what we hate and what moves us in a media world where boundless tragedy is just a mouse click away.