Foie gras continues to cause controversy. | Getty Au revoir, foie gras? The European Parliament considers a ban on the French delicacy.

France is forever defending the European Parliament's costly monthly trips to Strasbourg as important to its national heritage. Now another quintessential building block of the French identity is under attack in the institution: foie gras.

The delicacy, made from the fattened liver of overfed geese or ducks, may be about to disappear from the Parliament's restaurants after several MEPs complained that its production is inhumane.

The assembly's college of quaestors, a committee of five MEPs who oversee financial and administrative matters affecting parliamentarians, will consider the ban at a meeting Tuesday. After an internal debate, the group will submit its decision to Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament.

MEPs from the across the political spectrum have been agitating internally to get foie gras off the menu in the all of the Parliament's restaurants and cafés.

Keith Taylor, a UK Green MEP, 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 the sale of foie gras in all Parliament "restaurants and catering outlets in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.”

“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.”

Late last year, Taylor had already asked Schulz to take foie gras off the Christmas menu of one of the Parliament’s restaurants.

But 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.

“I will defend foie gras at whatever the cost,” said Elizabeth Morin-Chartier, a French MEP from the EPP and one of the five quaestors. “We are not going to be as stupid as those who like to offend their most treasured cultural heritage.”

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

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

Virginie Rozière, a French MEP from the S&D group, wrote to Schulz in April to argue that it would be difficult to ban something that has become an “inescapable ambassador of our culinary excellence on our continent.”

“This diversity must be preserved in our assembly, which has a duty to respect its commitment in favor of the traditional products of all member states,” Rozière wrote.

The other four members of the panel deciding the fate of foie gras on Tuesday include two MEPs from Poland, one from Bulgaria, and one from the UK.