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Wednesday 8 October 2008

You’d think Prince Charles would approve of foie gras

Alexander Chancellor says that it is the sort of food which the Prince should like: free of chemicals and genetic manipulation, produced on small family farms, and steeped in tradition

Nevertheless, I was surprised by Prince Charles’s decision, for in some respects foie gras is the sort of foodstuff of which he might be expected to approve. There is nothing genetically modified about it. There are no chemicals or growth hormones involved in its production. And the best of it is made on small family farms by stout French peasants, whose way of life he so admires.

The Prince, being a traditionalist, might also be impressed by the antiquity of the process. The force-feeding of geese was practised by the ancient Egyptians, though according to Jeffrey Steingarten, the learned American food writer, ‘their purpose was most likely to obtain nice fat geese for the table, not fat livers’.

It was, says Steingarten, the Romans who first got excited about the goose’s liver: Pliny the Elder, writing at about the time of Christ, referred in his Natural History to its ‘excellence’, writing that ‘stuffing the bird with food makes the liver grow to a great size, and also when it has been removed, it is made larger by being soaked in milk sweetened with honey’. The Romans entrusted the task of force-feeding geese to their Jewish slaves; and it was the Jews who kept the practice alive during the Dark and Middle Ages and brought it with them when they migrated to France and Germany.

As Steingarten points out, it is perfectly possible that Jesus Christ may have eaten foie gras. But there is no evidence in the Bible that he did, and so lacking any divine approval of the practice, we must decide for ourselves whether it is acceptable.

The central question is, of course, how much suffering is caused to the birds by the business of force-feeding — or gavage, as the French call it. This involves pushing corn through a tube down their throats, and doing this four times a day during the last few weeks of their lives.

This can increase the size of their livers by up to ten times and leave them waddling about, with their bellies touching the ground. I have never witnessed the procedure, but it is hardly an attractive idea, and it isn’t surprising that many people should find it revolting and inhumane.

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