In defence of foie gras

Apoll shows that nine out of ten Brits want to ban the import of foie gras. Crumbs! Haven’t they got anything more important to worry about? The Times says about 200 tons are imported from Europe every year. I only wish some would come my way. Though the same article says Waitrose stocks this greatest of all delicacies, I can’t remember seeing it in our local branch.

The trouble is that the campaign against these large, buttery duck livers (goose liver is rare) is based on Yahoo-worthy ignorance and antique disinformation, such as the fading photographs that used to circulate of webbed feet nailed to the shed floor. While I haven’t been able to discover the extent of industrial foie gras production, what one encounters in France is mostly artisanal, produced on farms, not factories.

As for ‘force-feeding’, it all depends on what you think this means. Certainly, the birds are encouraged to over-eat; gorging themselves in the autumn when there is a glut of food is the way these waterfowl prepare themselves for migration in nature. But I have witnessed the gavage, as the feeding process is called. I’m sorry to distress the anti-foie gras fanatics, but the birds are conditioned to queue up in an orderly fashion to swallow the feeding tube. They are not distressed, because ducks and geese do not have a gag reflex. The moistened grains that are the birds’ breakfast, lunch and dinner are pushed through a sort of food mill into the metal tube, direct to the stomach. If they could speak, they might complain of the monotony of their diet.

They are kept in relatively capacious pens, as individual small pens are being phased out in the EU. And far from being handled sadistically by peasant women, the birds are petted as they receive their rations from the farmers’ wives.