taboo & delicacy
The Ethics and Ethos of Foie Gras
by lisa m. dellwo & photography by jennifer may

So when I was asked to write about foie gras for Edible Hudson Valley, I initially demurred. “I like foie gras,” I told my editor, knowing that he would want me to explore the animal welfare issues that make the delicacy such a controversial food choice.

When he explained that liking foie gras didn’t necessarily disqualify me from writing the piece, I still resisted. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for what I’d find out.

Which made me feel small. Which meant I had to take the assignment.

For the uninitiated, foie gras—literally “fat liver” in French—is produced when ducks or geese are fed through a funnel in a process called gavage, or force-feeding. The process, which dates back to ancient Egypt and which artificially mimics the dietary habits of migratory geese, produces an oversized liver that is less dense and gamy and more buttery and delicate than a typical liver. Foie gras is typically used to make terrines, served cold, or it is sliced, seared over high heat and often served with fruit-based accompaniments that complement the liver’s flavor and texture.

It’s rich, delicious and expensive—a cholesterol extravaganza that I’d normally limit myself to once or twice a year (the temporary insanity of that dessert episode notwithstanding).

It is also a gastronomic hot potato. Not only animal rights activists but also garden-variety carnivores are repelled by the concept of force-fed ducks. Some cities and states have explored banning the sale or production of foie gras, largely because of the apparent cruelty of the gavage process. So before I even began researching this article, I became familiar with “the look”—the one friends would give me when I told them about the assignment. “The look” was usually accompanied by “You’re going to be against it, right?”

That’s exactly what I needed to find out. I had a pile of research to read, but I also had the advantage of proximity: one of the nation’s four foie gras producers is a mere two hours’ drive away from me.  I e-mailed Hudson Valley Foie Gras, knowing from my reading that the company allowed media to tour the facility, but expecting to be put off for days. Instead, less than 48 hours after my initial contact, operations manager Marcus Henley greeted me as I pulled into the 160-acre farm in Sullivan County.

Henley is a longtime poultry farmer whose soft Arkansas accent has survived years of working in the Northeast. He has the wary look and guarded speech of someone who has verbally fenced with opponents.  I’d given him little reason to surmise whether I was pro, con or neutral.  And yet, he was willing to show me every stage of production, including gavage and slaughter.  “We have an open farm,” he maintained.

We had timed my visit to coincide with the afternoon feeding of the ducks but—at my choice—not the morning slaughter. As Henley told me later, “Force feeding is the point of coming here.”

It was definitely the point, but we wouldn’t go there right away.  First, he walked me into a meager office suite adjoining the slaughter facility, which was being sanitized after the morning’s activities. The wood-paneled hallway was covered with framed menus from top restaurants, many of them signed by the chefs. Presumably they all featured foie gras.

There, in a cardboard box, were some duckling youngsters: 50 newborn Moulard ducks, yellow, fluffy and adorable, who had been hatched at a neighboring farm owned by the company. They are “sexed” (separated by gender) soon after hatching, and the females, who apparently do not produce wonderful foie gras, are sent to farmers in Trinidad, where the strong flavor of the Moulard hybrid is appreciated. (Some foie gras farms euthanize the female ducks soon after birth—this one does not.)

The youngest ducks are housed together in massive barns with large windows to let in the sunlight. When Henley arrived at the farm in 2001, they were kept outside in paddocks. He tried them in open fields so that they would be true free-range birds, but he found it difficult to control predation and sanitary conditions. So the ducks are in facilities that can be thoroughly sanitized between production cycles, and the loss to predators like hawks and weasels is minimized.

In one barn housing older birds that were still eating a normal diet, Henley demonstrated by walking among them that the ducks develop an aversion to humans. It was clear from the way they massed away from him that this was true. It was also pretty clear that he was carefully preparing me for what I might see later.

Finally, we reached the force-feeding barn, to which the birds are transferred at about 12 weeks old. After adjusting my eyes to the dim light in this chilly barn, I saw rows of knee-high enclosures, each about the size of a restaurant booth, and each with about 10 mature ducks within. Like all of the other barns, it smelled funky—about like any other barnyard I’d visited, but not nauseating or ammoniac, which would have meant sanitary conditions weren’t up to par.

Throughout the tour, Henley had peppered the conversation with bits of duck lore and anatomical explanations. For instance, ducks in the wild need to find and consume food quickly and then get back under cover, away from predators. So they have a crop at the base of their necks, a pouch that can hold up to a liter of food to be digested later. For instance, the esophagus lining of a duck is more hardened than that of a human, so that it can withstand the swallowing of a whole fish. For instance, the entrance to a duck’s trachea is not shared with the esophagus, so the funnel is not cutting off the duck’s airway.

The message was clear: ducks are different physiologically from humans, and I shouldn’t anthropomorphize when I see the gavage: I shouldn’t imagine that they can’t breathe, that their throats are being torn up and that they’re being fed more than they can handle. Those are all concerns that are expressed by almost anyone with an imagination who has heard about gavage.

I was ready. Apprehensive, but ready.

We walked about halfway up an aisle to a pen where a young woman was perched on a low stool. She nodded a greeting and then firmly scooped up one duck and planted it between her knees. With one hand, she positioned a funnel into the duck’s long throat; with the other, she felt the crop at the base of the neck. If it was full, it meant the duck hadn’t digested its previous meal and would not be fed this time. Then she took a measure of dry grain from a bucket and dropped it into the funnel, where it entered the duck’s crop with an assist from a small electric-powered auger that keeps the funnel from clogging. She pulled the funnel out, released the duck to the other side of the pen, and reached for the next duck.

“Is that it?” I thought. It was pretty anticlimactic. We watched a few more ducks being fed, and here’s what I noticed: The ducks were handled firmly and matter-of-factly. It wasn’t the kind of gentleness with which you’d treat a pet, but it wasn’t overtly rough or violent.  Force wasn’t involved, in either the capture or the feeding. Some of the ducks flapped around and squawked a bit before or after being fed, for a few seconds. None of them vomited. Nor did any of them go running up to the feeder asking for seconds.

We went further down the aisle, where Henley said we’d see ducks who were at the end of the process. Typically at Hudson Valley Foie Gras, that point arrives at 21 days. It used to be 28 days, but the cycle was reduced at the advice of an animal welfare specialist concerned about the impact of the longer period on the duck’s mobility and foot health.  Stopping at another feeding station, Henley pointed out that these ducks were significantly bigger.

“Veinte días?” he asked the feeder.

“Veinte,” she responded.

These ducks had been force-fed for 20 days. At that stage, it is critically important for the worker to feel the duck’s crop; any who have stopped digesting food are taken for slaughter, even if they haven’t spent the full 21 days in gavage. The 20-day ducks were bigger and somewhat grimier—they are washed several times during the process but not during the last 10 days. Their reaction to the gavage was about the same as that of the younger ducks—they didn’t come running to be fed, but they didn’t appear to fear it either.

The last thing I saw was birds on their first day of gavage. This is what Henley had been preparing me for when he talked of the aversion adult ducks develop to humans. He warned me that it is on the first day that the ducks experience the most stress, because they have not been handled by humans.

We watched. These ducks may have seemed a bit more flustered, but not much.

I drove away from the farm feeling pretty comfortable with what I’d seen. These were farm animals, no doubt—not someone’s pets or hobby ducks. But I’m not an animal welfare specialist. So I called one.  Dr. Temple Grandin, the noted author of Animals Make Us Human, and whose work in this field has made her the go-to person for people with questions like mine.

Grandin was surprisingly accessible, and listened patiently while I described what I’d seen a few days earlier. “It wasn’t upsetting,” I told her. “But I’m not an expert.”

That was all right, she told me. “How the public would react is part of the equation,” she said. It’s the wedding guest philosophy, or the airplane approach, she explained: If you took 10 people out of a wedding reception or off an airplane at La Guardia—in other words, a randomly selected population—and showed them a farming operation, it’s a good test of whether it’s cruel. She takes regular people to cattle slaughter operations for the purpose of seeing their reaction. “If it makes them puke,” then you have a problem, she said.

Moreover, it was acceptable to her that I’d been given the tour in a relatively calculated fashion, with a series of benign visits leading up to the gavage. She does the same with her cattle slaughter tours, preparing people for what they’re going to see.

At that point, I was feeling pretty comfortable with foie gras.

But not so fast.

Grandin told me that she will not eat foie gras, even though she is a meat eater. She has sufficient reservations about the process, and whether the 21-day gavage “pushes the biology” of the duck—that is, whether it is inducing a metabolic disorder and whether there is a large die-off of ducks toward the end of their lives.

According to Henley, the death rate of ducks at the farm is about five percent, about the same as you’d find in a commercial chicken operation, although the chickens are slaughtered at just seven weeks.

The question of whether the foie gras liver is diseased is one of the tenets upon which the animal welfare groups pin their objections to the product. A news article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association described a site visit by several veterinarians to Hudson Valley Foie Gras. As a result of the site visit, the association declined to pass two pending resolutions opposing foie gras productions. (The AVMA is one of a long list of organizations and government bodies who declined to enact foie gras bans after sending representatives to visit Hudson Valley Foie Gras.) However, one of the visiting veterinarians, although he thought the birds were well cared for, said that the process induced liver disease.

Ugh. Liver disease. But like every issue surrounding foie gras, it’s not that simple. For every doctor who says the foie gras is essentially a diseased liver, you can probably find two others who say it is not. Henley showed me a letter from Stephen H. Caldwell, MD, a liver specialist at the University of Virginia who had examined fatty duck liver at 18 days and wrote, “There is no disease.” Storing fat in the liver and thereby enlarging it, he pointed out, is an adaptive mechanism of birds preparing for long migrations.

That mechanism, in fact, is the basis for a fascinating new development in the world of foie gras. In Spain, a farmer named Eduardo Sousa has come up with what the BBC called “the holy grail of foie gras”—fatty liver produced without force feeding. His approach is to take advantage of the natural habit of wild geese (he uses geese, not ducks) to stuff themselves in advance of migration, storing lipids in ever-growing livers much as the force-fed ducks do. His product has produced a certain level of controversy—winning an award for excellent foie gras from a French culinary organization while being termed not foie gras by some gastronomes. But it is generating excitement from chefs and others who want to enjoy gavage-free foie gras.  Perhaps one day in the Hudson Valley, we will have that opportunity.  As Time magazine reported this summer, chef Dan Barber of Westchester’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns has asked the resident farmers at Stone Barns to experiment with Sousa’s techniques. The much anticipated results of this experiment are still in the waiting.

The title of the Time article was “Can Ethical Foie Gras Happen in America?” (August 12, 2009), which implies that it isn’t happening in this country at all. I don’t think that’s true. I watched ducks being treated with care throughout my visit to Hudson Valley Foie

Gras. They are force-feeding 12,000 ducks at a time (a number that astounded me—a lot of people are eating foie gras and the other products like duck leg confit produced at the farm), and I met a lot of those ducks. If what I saw was an elaborate front for a crueler shadow operation, they were spending an absurd amount of time and money on putting on a show.

In addition to talking to Temple Grandin, I had a conversation with Erika Voogd, an animal welfare specialist who has consulted with Hudson Valley Foie Gras over the past several years. It was on her recommendation that the force-feeding was reduced from 28 to 21 days. She also made recommendations regarding “humane harvest”—her term for slaughter—that she says the farm has implemented.  During each of her visits, including an unannounced one last summer, she was convinced that an operation that appeared in general to be humane was becoming more and more so. “If you’re going to do this,” she said, “They’ve tried hard to put in place a system that’s as noninvasive as possible.”

If you’re going to do this. It comes down to that. In one of my many recent conversations with friends about whether foie gras production was cruel, one of them finally said, “But foie gras is unnecessary.” Of course it is. It’s unnecessary in the way that fine Bordeaux is, or even bacon and eggs for breakfast. We don’t need it to survive. But if you believe that we join together at the table for pleasure as well as sustenance, then who defines what is unnecessary?  It’s truly an individual choice.

Just before I sat down to write this article, I watched a video on YouTube that has been used by animal welfare groups who oppose foie gras. It was a sort of snuff film that I’d read about in Mark Caro’s sensible book The Foie Gras Wars (which I recommend if you want to read more deeply into this subject). It had been shot, presumably with a hidden camera, by a worker at a Canadian foie gras facility. The mistreatment of ducks as shown on that video was repugnant, and I can understand why someone watching it would oppose foie gras.

But what was on that video bore no resemblance to what I saw at Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Obviously, you could argue that my fourhour visit wasn’t long enough to uncover abuse. But the company has made a point of opening its doors to visitors—from the media, from activist groups, from restaurant kitchens, from veterinary associations, from the public. As chef John Novi of Depuy Canal House told me, if the operations at Hudson Valley Foie Gras were inhumane, “They would have been exposed after all these years.”

About halfway through the reporting for this article, I told my editor that the ethical issue was a non-story as far as I was concerned. I wanted to write about the food. I visited the Culinary Institute of America, where an international competition of young chefs featured foie gras from the Hudson Valley. I talked about different preparations with a couple of chefs—including Novi from Depuy Canal House, who hasn’t eaten foie gras in years for health reasons but who always has it on his menu, and Shane Ingram, from the restaurant in Durham where I ate foie gras for dessert. He’d visited Sonoma County Foie Gras years ago and felt comfortable with what he saw.  That operation will be effectively out of business in a few years when California’s 2012 ban on foie gras production takes place.

Moving through the evolution of this story, I became convinced that the ethical issue was, after all, the story. If you don’t eat meat, fine. If you don’t want to eat liver (Dad!), fine. If you object to foie gras on humanitarian grounds, you should know that the sensationalist charges by activists do not always play out in reality. Educate yourself about the process. (Once again, I recommend Caro’s The Foie Gras Wars). You may still find that you’re uncomfortable with the product.

If you do like foie gras and want to continue eating it, you have a responsibility to know exactly how it comes to your table, and you should know that some farms outside of the country are not nearly as attentive to the animals’ well-being as the farm I observed. (Temple Grandin told me that if foie gras production were to be banned here or in the European Union, it would probably move to Eastern Europe, where “I can assure you [conditions] will be horrible.”)

It comes back to eating locally, knowing your farmer and demanding transparency about sourcing from restaurateurs. I can’t report to you about conditions at other farms, but my own observations and my conversations with animal welfare specialists leave me satisfied that the ducks at Hudson Valley Foie Gras are treated as ethically as possible, given their fate.