Foie Gras Without Force-Feeding?
In a post at The Ethicurean, I noticed a link to an article describing a Spanish foie gras that received the Coup de Coeur award for innovation at the Paris International Food Salon.
The surprise here isn't the country of origin: Spain, like Belgium, produces a small amount of foie gras. Look instead to the farmer's technique.
The producer claims he made the foie gras without force-feeding the birds, relying on their tendency to bulk up for migration. If he's got the real thing, he would be the savior of the foie gras industry. Animal activists focus on the force-feeding; take it away, and their argument disappears. Of course I felt the urge to comment.
It's always been possible to produce high-fat livers without force-feeding the birds through gavage (using a tube to feed the birds, a practice that dates back to Roman times). But consumers have never accepted the product as foie gras. Well, not for a couple hundred years. I note that the article doesn't mention how the innovate foie gras tastes next to traditional foie gras.
Geese, which Pateria de Sousa uses, might adapt to "free range foie" more than ducks would. Geese sometimes eat more on their own than they get in a foie gras feeding, though they don't sustain that eating habit as long as gavage lasts.
But geese cause headaches for foie gras producers. You can't artificially inseminate them, so a farmer can only sell fresh foie gras during the winter season, when Spring's goslings have come of age. And they stress more readily than ducks. When the stoic Mulard breed came on the scene in the 1970s, it transformed the industry overnight. Fifty years ago, 90 per cent of the birds for foie gras were geese. Today, only 20 per cent are.
I'm skeptical of the Sousa product; if it were that simple to produce good foie gras without force-feeding, someone would have done it. As I say, non-force-fed foie gras is the Holy Grail, and everyone's looking for it. Still, if anyone has more information, I'd love to hear it.
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