It seems safe to say that there have been few single issues more passionately debated in the food world than that of the production of foie gras. It is illegal to produce it in the United Kingdom. For a short time the City of Chicago banned it (although that decision has since been repealed). The state of California is currently under a deadline to cease production and sale of the product. Like Colonel Travis’s “line in the sand”,  chefs all over the country stood decidedly on one side of the debate or the other. Charlie Trotter became the poster child for the opposition, whereas people like Anthony Bourdain took strong measures publicly to help ensure its protection.

Ancient Hieroglyphic Depictions of Cruelty

As far back as 2500 BC it has been said that the Egyptians allegedly began force feeding birds, noting the apparent tastiness that resulted.

Thousands of years later we are still at it, although the process has become more technologically refined. Most notably, the French have taken the Egyptian ideas and made them one of the most important part of their food culture. They call the process of force-feeding the birds gavage, and it basically involves someone holding a goose or a duck and inserting a tube down its throat while feeding it a few ounces of food, two or three times per day. This goes on for a couple of weeks before the birds are finally harvested. The result is what we have come to know as foie gras. After gavage, the bird’s liver is said to be ten to twelve times the size that it was before.

Don't mess with the old French lady, she'll sit on your back and shove a tube down your throat too if you're not careful.

At first glance the process seems downright unpleasant even to simply describe, but pro-foie people quickly point out several things in defense of the practice. 1) The fattening of the birds before migration is natural. Their liver plumps up in a similar manner (albeit not as extreme) and then decreases in as the birds migrate. The same thing happens if gavage is stopped—the livers are said to return to their normal size. 2) Ducks and geese are obviously built differently than humans. They have no gag reflex and the insertion of the tube paired with the mere seconds that it takes to feed them is allegedly not uncomfortable. 3) Birds that live in the wild and have to fend for themselves, are purported to be under more stress than say birds that live their lives for several months at Hudson Valley Foie Gras Farm in Upstate New York.

Last year a friend of ours gave me a documentary about the Hudson Valley Foie Gras Farm and in my opinion, the operation looks pretty good. Yes, I understand that documentaries typically get the points across that advance their causes or agendas, but I was nonetheless left wondering why people were so willing to fall on swords about a product of which a very small percentage of the population partakes, while atrocities at factory farms go on daily and nobody blinks an eye.

Chefs are now seemingly forced into making a decision that alienates some in order to please others. Even if gavage is not painful, uncomfortable, or downright unhealthy for the birds, a cloud of controversy surrounds it that may well be easier to avoid by simply not serving foie gras—which is unfortunate because it’s so freaking tasty.

Enter Spaniard, Eduardo de Sousa. Sousa’s company Pateria de Sousa has been getting a lot of press in the last few years, primarily for winning the Coups de Couer from the Paris International Food Salon. This prestigious award is given yearly to innovators in the food industry. To hear Eduardo say it, it really “pissed the French” off that he was given the award. Eduardo produces what he deems Ethical Foie Gras. His geese roam around his pastures in Extremadura, feeding on figs, olives, acorns and other vegetation during the Fall, storing up for their migration. Now, don’t miss understand, his geese are not migratory geese, they’re domesticated, but they still feed as if they’re going to migrate. Then, during the winter, after their abundant feeding, the birds are harvested. Their sizable livers are then turned into pate and other foie products by Eduardo’s company.

In a side-by-side comparison, the gavage livers are still quite a bit larger than the pastured foie, but in taste tests, the latter is said to be amazing. Chef of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber (champion of local agriculture) describes his visit to Eduardo de Sousa’s farm as one of the most important culinary moments of his life. The following video is Barber’s recollection of his trip as well as a vision for producing foie of this sort stateside.

Personally, as much as I love foie gras, I feel that if we have the option to produce it without gavage, then why not? One of the downsides, if it is to be considered a downside, is that when we let the birds fatten naturally, they do it one time per year. It then becomes a truly seasonal product which we as Americans are not used to anymore. It wouldn’t kill us to get away from feeling the need to eat things like tomatoes all-year round, even when they are hard as a rock, flown in from Holland and gassed to turn them an acceptable color, but I digress. That is for a different conversation altogether.