The foie gras must come from geese or ducks fattened in such a way as to reach a minimum weight of gr for goose foie gras and gr for duck foie gras and it should be noted that only selected breeds or lines of palmipeds are able to produce foie gras. For example, for duck foie gras: Muscovy duck Cairina moschata and Mulard duck Cairina moschata x Anas platyrhynchos.
The rearing phase. This period extends from hatching to the end of palmiped growth and concerns the most part of the breeding cycle, i. This phase takes place with systematic access of waterfowl to an outdoor course. Breeders are proud of this particularity that they want to maintain despite the risks, requirements and necessary adaptations that this entails tools to avoid possible attacks by predators, strict biosecurity measures aimed at preventing and controlling health risks such as avian influenza, etc.
It intervenes at the end of breeding and extends over a period of 10 to 16 days depending on the species. The palmipeds have particular anatomical characteristics possible alignment of the beak and neck thanks to the absence of cartilaginous glottis, elasticity of the walls of the esophagus… which allow them to swallow large preys such as fish or frogs and predispose them to the fattening phase during the production of foie gras.
Consequently, fat palmipeds have a very different anatomy and cannot therefore be compared to humans. In order to prepare the animals for fattening, a transition phase makes it possible to accustom the animal to feed by meal, thus developing its ability to fatten. But what if the geese gorged themselves voluntarily? On one farm in Spain, the birds do just that. However, the US district court has struck down the Californian ban on selling foie gras, which came into effect in , not because they have a view on whether the product is cruel, but because they decided it was unconstitutional.
Strictly speaking, it is not foie gras that California banned. This may seem like a semantic point, but it could be crucial in the next legal challenge. Overfeeding causes a chemical change within the liver as it stores fat cells, creating the smooth texture beloved by sybarites from the ancient Egyptians to the present day.
Around him there are fig and olive trees, and Spanish oaks heavy with acorns. There is such an abundance of food that the geese gorge themselves until the chemical change within their livers occurs naturally. I wanted to be sure that I could judge for myself how well-off these ducks were.
Labored breathing, discharge from the nostrils, and infected or cloudy eyes are all signs of sickness or stress. Bleeding beaks or feet and missing feathers would indicate rough treatment or fighting amongst themselves. I walked into the shed prepared for the worst, and instead was quite stunned.
Far from the cramped, cruel conditions shown in the videos and photographs I'd seen, here was an enormous shed, full of birds free to roam as they pleased. They congregated in groups, quietly quacking at each other, and roamed freely over the sawdust-strewn floor, even stretching their wings for a flap now and then. Granted, it did smell—a distinct barnyard aroma with a hint of ammonia the chicken shed we visited afterward had a much stronger ammonia smell to it —but, as anyone who's worked on an animal farm will tell you, all farms smell, just as before the introduction of modern plumbing, all cities smelled as well.
Incidentally, all the birds here are male. The female Moulards don't grow livers as well as males, and are therefore not as profitable. Like the other foie farms in this country, La Belle sends its female ducklings to Trinidad within weeks of hatching, where they are raised for meat.
It's true, there could have been more natural sunlight a few large screened windows with fans in them were spaced along each side of the structure , and the air could have been fresher. But all in all, aside from the truly free-range chickens I've seen in backyards and a few small farms in New England and New York, and some of the boutique chef-run "education center"—style farms, these were probably the most well-accommodated farm animals I'd ever seen.
When asked about the light and air situation, Herman explained that "the animals are kept off of antibiotics, so we have to keep them minimally exposed to the outdoors.
The birds seemed to show a mild aversion to us, flocking together and giving us a wide berth as we walked through the shed.
Chichi quickly spotted a single dead bird, which we inquired about. Eventually, the ducks became a little less edgy, and I was able to move in for a closer look. All signs pointed to completely healthy animals. Their beaks were clean, their eyes were bright, they had no trouble vocalizing, and their feathers were for the most part completely intact. They seemed to waddle around with a positive swagger, congregating at the water dripper and feeding stations.
The facts so far: For at least the first 12 weeks of their lives, these ducks were sitting pretty in a stress-free, spacious environment. The next shed was where the ducks spend their last 25 days—where the gavage takes place. Before we went inside, we were told that this was the only part of the tour where we would not be allowed to take photographs or video. Ah, I thought—a sure sign that what we were about to see was going to put us off our lunches or tasting menus, as the case may have been.
But Bob explained: It's not that they have anything to hide with the procedure itself; it's that they'd recently begun employing a new, custom-designed piece of technology that they didn't want the two competing farms to get their hands on.
We'd see it in action in a moment. We entered another long shed, this one filled from end to end with five-by-seven-foot pens, each one holding about 10 ducks.
Again, the ducks tended to congregate together, leaving more than half of the space in their pen empty. Occasionally, one would waddle out of the group for a stretch.
Just as in the other sheds, these ducks seemed healthy, albeit much larger these guys were on their third week of gavage, just a few days away from slaughter. We walked down row after row of pens, until we got to one where a worker was just about to start feeding. At La Belle, the ducks are fed three times a day, for a total of up to grams of their custom-designed feed.
As we watched, the worker—a petite woman—climbed into the pen and sat on an overturned box. One at a time, she pulled a duck toward her and held it between her legs with its neck arched upward.
She gently squeezed the base of the duck's neck "checking to make sure that he's finished all his food from the last feeding," said Bob , then eased a flexible plastic tube down the duck's throat. A machine whirled, a small bulge formed where the food was deposited, and the duck walked off, giving its head one shake, but otherwise seemingly unaffected. While most other farms in the world still use metal tubes to feed their ducks, La Belle has recently switched to a custom-made flexible plastic version.
This is the piece of technology that they didn't want us filming. However, a quick search on YouTube turned up this video , which is not dissimilar from our own experience this video shows geese in France. According to Bob, when the feeder feels the duck's esophagus, if there's any food remaining, she'll skip that feeding.
So, while the ducks are technically force-fed, there is a level of built-in anatomical control so that the ducks can't take in any more food than they can physically handle. That's more respect than most fast-food chains show for their human customers. La Belle has also started a program to reduce its workers' load.
Many farms require that the same feeder work with the same ducks for the entire gavage process to reduce stress on the animal. For a worker, this means three long feeding shifts per day, every day, for 25 days. A few years ago, they discovered that it's not the actual worker that the ducks grow accustomed to; it's just their sight and smell. They found that when they had two different workers wear the same set of clothes, the ducks would respond to the second as if they were still the first.
In fact, after starting their workers on this split-shift system, production of A-graded foie actually increased. I wouldn't exactly say that the ducks were lining up to be fed, as has been suggested by some foie advocates, but they certainly didn't seem stressed. By all activists' accounts, these ducks should have been so fattened that they could barely stand under their own power.
I didn't see one duck vomit, nor did I see any that couldn't stand or walk due to the weight of their livers. After the walking tour, we stopped back at the office for a tasting of a few of Bella Bella's products, as well as some straight-up fresh foie, seared on a George Foreman griddle, of all things.
Of all the foie I've cooked in the world and it's a lot , La Belle's has the unique property of being able to hold its shape well without rendering off too much fat, making it an ideal candidate for searing. We finished the day eating our foie, talking to Herman and Bob about their business.
Back home, I started doing some more research. We'd seen the process from start to finish, and from all outward appearances, the ducks seemed to live perfectly comfortable lives—at least, as good as you could expect for any farm animal. Certainly far better lives than the millions of cows and pigs and billions of chickens that are raised every year for our consumption. But the question I had was, why weren't they more uncomfortable?
Why doesn't a duck struggle with its large liver or with having a tube forced down its throat? First off, the key to understanding this is to make a very conscious effort not to anthropomorphize the animals. As waterfowl, they are distinctly not human , and their physiology differs from ours in a few key ways. Let's take a look at the foie gras duck, shall we? In this country, foie gras is produced exclusively from Moulard ducks. The offspring of a male Muscovy and a female Pekin duck, Moulards offer many physiological and temperamental advantages that make them ideal for producing foie, and I believe an understanding of the breed can help clear up a lot of misconceptions.
Muscovies are an incredibly hardy species. Though native to the tropical regions of South America, they are nevertheless able to adapt to temperate climates, and are even comfortable living in subzero conditions.
As such, they are nonmigratory. This is important, because it means that, unlike migratory species, they don't ever have the need to gorge themselves to put on extra fat that will carry them through long periods with no food. They are also an aggressive species; males attack each other with their bills and sharp claws on their feet.
Despite this, they are prized for their well-flavored, lean meat. Their robust nature and tolerance of many climates make them quite easy to farm.
Pekin ducks also known as Long Island ducks , on the other hand, were originally bred in China from wild mallards, and thus have many of the characteristics of that migratory species. They are relatively petite birds that are quite gregarious.
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