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Plate to Palate | Eating foie gras a matter of personal choice, Susan Jung says

Susan Jung

Reading Time:3 minutes

Published: 10:32pm, 7 Feb 2015

Last month, a judge in California lifted the American state's ban on the sale of foie gras, which went into effect in 2012. Because the law didn't prohibit serving it, just selling it, renegade and defiant chefs had been getting around the ban by "giving" it away as an amuse bouche, or as an extra, unlisted course on their tasting menus.

When the law was introduced, animal rights activists rejoiced. They argued it was inhumane to jam a metal tube down a goose or duck's neck in order to feed it the large quantities (more than the animal would eat under normal circumstances) needed to fatten the liver. In the past, there's no doubt that many foie gras production facilities were extremely cruel. I'm sure that even today, in some farms, the birds are kept in tiny, filthy pens, watched over by people who are indifferent to the animals' suffering. However, more enlightened and modern foie gras farms are careful to raise the animals as humanely as possible, giving the birds room to roam, watching over their health and checking on them to make sure they're fit to be fattened.

In "The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not Unethical", a 2010 piece for Serious Eats (seriouseats.com), J. Kenji Lopez-Alt writes about visiting one of these enlightened places, La Belle Farms, in the Hudson Valley, in New York state. No part of the production facility was off-limits to Lopez-Alt and his team during their visit. He saw ducks living in an enormous shed, where they congregated in groups (it wasn't through lack of space, but because they're sociable animals); the owner explained he would like them to be free range but because the animals aren't given antibiotics, their population could easily be decimated if they were infected by bacteria from wild birds. Lopez-Alt witnessed the ducks during gavage - the so-called force feeding - but, as he writes, "while the ducks are technically force-fed, there is a level of built-in anatomical control so that the ducks can't take in any more food than they can physically handle … I didn't see one duck vomit [from overeating], nor did I see any that couldn't stand or walk due to the weight of their livers."

Ducks, he continues, don't have a gag reflex (which is why waterfowl can swallow fish that are much wider than their necks) so putting a tube down their throat doesn't make them suffer (La Belle Farms uses more pliable plastic tubes, rather than hard metal ones). Lopez-Alt writes that in the wild, ducks and geese deliberately gorge on food when preparing for their long migration to warmer climates - they naturally fatten their livers to store energy, although not to the extent seen in foie gras production.

Lopez-Alt and Mark Bittman, in his recent op-ed, "Let Them Eat Foie Gras", argue that foie gras is an easy target because it's considered a food eaten only by the wealthy; furthermore, because it's generally consumed as an occasional treat, production levels are relatively low, making it easier for consumers to give up. Bittman writes, "To single out the tiniest fraction of meat production and label it 'cruel' is to miss the big picture, and the big picture is this: almost all meat production in the United States is cruel."

Lopez-Alt writes, "If you are going to protest anything, it should be the industrial production of eggs, where chickens are routinely kept in cages so small that they can't even turn around for an entire year. The problem, of course, is that you tell people to stop eating cheap eggs, and nobody will listen. The leaders of the anti-foie movement know this and use it to their advantage, using video and photographs taken from the worst of the farms … and making it seem like all foie production is as despicable."