There are some very fancy markets in this town. They stock all manner of rare and exotic ingredients for a generally curious, often pretentious, and usually profligate clientele. There's a saying attributed to P. T. Barnum about the kinds of people who shop in these places, and God help me, I'm one of them.

There are some scams even I won't fall for, though. Consider the poultry section at Whole Foods Columbus Circle. Wandering around the store, I got the idea to make a dinner of seared duck breast with roasted shallots and acorn squash, sauteed wild mushrooms, escarole, and a thyme-infused red wine pan sauce.

I started thumbing through the individually-wrapped magrets de canard, the skin-on boneless breast of moulard duck. They are priced between twelve and fifteen dollars apiece. One magret would be enough for two appetizers, but probably only one entree. I'm facing the prospect of dropping over thirty dollars just for the protein component of a one-course meal for two.

Then I look down and see whole moulard ducks in the bottom of the poultry case. They all cost around twenty-five dollars. It takes a while for me to realize that this isn't a mistake, that Whole Foods is actually charging its customers more for two duck breasts than for the whole duck.

There are different kinds of decadance. There is decadence in which we take pleasure in a sense of our own sinfulness; where we do things we know we probably shouldn't, because it just feels good. As long as nobody gets hurt, I have no problem with this. But there's another kind of decadance, which is just flat-out immoral. It consists of a sort of willfully wasteful luxury. Of spending more than you should on something and then throwing most of it away, not because it's useless, but just because you don't care enough to extract its full value. It's the field full of skinned buffalo carcasses in Dances With Wolves. It's Marie Antoinette's cake. It's the magret de canard at Whole Foods.

For less than the price of two magrets you can get a whole moulard, and after a little knife work and a little time at the stove you can extract the two magrets and more. Cut up the excess fat and skin around the neck and body cavity and you can render it into cracklings and pure duck fat. Remove and bone out the duck legs, cook them in the rendered fat, and you have confit. Roast the bones and simmer them with aromatic vegetables and herbs, and you have two quarts of duck stock (reduce it and you have a quart of concentrated stock; reduce it some more and you've got a pint of rich, gelatinous duck glaze).

When you can have all these things with just a little extra effort, paying more for less isn't only foolish, it's a sin.