Getty Liver let live Leading MEPs recommend keeping foie gras on the European Parliament’s menu, rebuffing a campaign to remove it.

STRASBOURG — Fans of foie gras will be able to continue eating it in the European Parliament's restaurants.

Despite a pressure campaign to ban the French delicacy, an internal panel that oversees financial and administrative matters agreed on Tuesday to keep serving foie gras — made from the hyper-fattened liver of overfed geese or ducks — in all of the institution's food establishments.

“I am hyper-excited,” Elisabeth Morin-Chartier, a French MEP and one of the five members of the Parliament's College of Quaestors, said following a debate among the group. “It shows how much we must respect cultures."

The group will now submit its decision to Parliament President Martin Schulz. The other four members of the panel deciding the fate of foie gras included two MEPs from Poland, one from Bulgaria, and one from the UK.

Many MEPs from across the political spectrum had been fighting internally to bar foie gras from the menu.

Keith Taylor, a UK MEP from the Greens, sent Schulz a letter in March signed by 36 MEPs from several party groups — including Greens, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the European People's Party (EPP) — calling for a ban on foie gras sales in all EP "restaurants and catering outlets in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.”

Producing foie gras is illegal in more than a dozen countries across Europe

French farmers make foie gras by force-feeding live geese or ducks so that their livers expand. The practice is illegal in more than a dozen countries across Europe, including in the United Kingdom, where it is deemed brutal and unnecessary.

“The production of foie gras inflicts immense suffering on ducks and geese,” the letter said. “The scientific consensus is absolutely clear on this — it’s impossible to produce foie gras humanely.”

But many French MEPs have been rallying around their national delicacy — arguing that its production is a flourishing industry that generates 50,000 jobs in the European Union.

“The demand for foie gras is booming,” Morin-Chartier said. “In France, it is a very profitable sector and we have to preserve it.”

In France, the world's biggest producer of foie gras, the product is protected by law as part of the country's "gastronomical heritage."