Growers and Grocers

After I pointed to The Herald’s editorial about Washington State’s bill to ban foie gras, I realized that it might be a good time to dispel common misconceptions that get mentioned with this hot-button topic.

First, what is foie gras? Foie gras (fwah grah) is the liver of a bird that’s been fattened through a force-feeding process called gavage. By the time the duck or goose is slaughtered, the liver has swollen to 10-12 times its normal size. Goose was the preferred bird until the discovery of the Mulard hybrid in the 1950’s, a sterile cross between a Muscovy male duck and a Pekin female that handles stress better than a goose. The industry has almost overturned since then: Duck accounted for roughly 5-10% of production in the 1940’s, and now it accounts for 80%. You can find historical references to foie gras from chickens, cranes, partridges, and any number of other birds, but modern research has shown that true foie gras only comes from a select few breeds of ducks or geese. Curiously, female ducks don’t produce very good foie gras.

The gavage process has been around since Roman times, though encouraging geese to eat heavily goes back to Ancient Egypt. Ashkenazi Jews brought gavage to the rest of Europe, including the Southwest of France, perhaps the most famous production region. Hungary and France’s Alsace are also big European producers.

Certain myths about foie gras pop up again and again in discussions of the topic, so here’s the skinny on fat liver.

• The birds are hooked up to tubes and force-fed continuously for their whole lives
  Ducks are force-fed twice a day during the last two weeks of their 12-week lives. Geese are fed three times a day during the last five weeks of their lives. Hudson Valley Foie Gras is unusual and uses a longer gavage with smaller amounts of food. Before the gavage, the best producers allow the ducks and geese to wander in an open field. Many industrial producers in Europe use battery cages, but no American producer uses them.
• The birds aren’t actually force-fed
  I’ve heard this from chefs and from people who “know someone who says.” If the ducks are penned, usually in groups of 10 to 12, the feeder holds one between his or her legs, opens its beak, and inserts the tube down to the base of the esophagus. S/he pushes a button, and up to a pound of food is streamed through the tube into the bird’s stomach (the amounts are higher for geese). The ducks are force-fed by any definition. Producers who cage their birds walk down the line, inserting the tube in bird after bird.
• The ducks can’t move after they’re force-fed.
  If they’re in a cage this is true, but only because of the cage. Penned birds can certainly move around after they’re fed. They walk over to a water trough so they can drink, as the feeding makes them hot and thirsty.
• The birds run to the feeder.
  This is another popular story with the pro foie gras camp.
  Geese often approach the feeder willingly. There is significant anecdotal and empirical evidence to back up this claim. But there is virtually no reliable evidence that ducks do this. Even Sonoma Foie Gras’s ranch manager denies that the ducks come to the feeder.
• The ducks suffer
  No research supports this, but it’s more complicated than that. Animal rights groups claim that “you can prove anything with statistics” but they don’t offer any concrete experiments in rebuttal. One could argue that the research only focused on one aspect of stress (levels of stress chemicals in the birds), but currently that’s the only thing out there. When the EU formed a committee to investigate the welfare of birds raised for foie gras, the committee concluded—somewhat unconvincingly—that foie gras production was detrimental to the birds (especially when raised in battery cages), but even they acknowledge the studies about stress levels.
• Ducks and geese eat that much food anyway
  This is another common statement by foie gras supporters. Looking at individual feedings, sometimes ducks and geese eat more in one feeding than they do during gavage: Look through the literature, and you’ll quickly run across the tale of the goose who ate four kilograms of carrots in one sitting. But they don’t eat that much in a sustained way for two weeks. If they did, you wouldn’t have to force-feed them.
• There are two producers in the U.S.
  Want to see if a reporter has done minimal research for an article about foie gras? See how many producers they mention. There are three commercial foie gras producers in the United States—Hudson Valley Foie Gras, Sonoma Foie Gras, and La Belle Poultry, also known as Bobo—though I know of a couple who are in the early stages or who are thinking of getting into this business.