Foie ras

Cruel but delicious

Dominic Prince

ii— n most people the mention of foie gras provokes either horror or delight — there is little middle ground. On the one hand, the production methods used are, some say, cruel in the extreme. On the other hand, the taste of a fresh, swollen duck or goose liver is one of the great eating sensations of all time. I am a huge fan of foie gras (literally translated it means 'fat liver'). I've also witnessed how it is produced, and of that I am not a great fan. The choice I take is to eat it, enjoy it and forget how it's produced. On the whole, food production is not humane.

Foie gras is a delicacy once prized by the Romans which has, in France, achieved the kind of reverence reserved for sex or fine Burgundy. It is produced predominantly in south-west France, Hungary and Israel, but one of the largest producers in the world is located in none of these countries.

If you drive northwest out of New York into the Hudson Valley you'll eventually come to the headquarters of Hudson Valley Foie Gras. That a company can produce high-quality foie gras outside France is remarkable enough; that it is just 20 years old and thriving is testament to the endeavours and entrepreneurial spirit of the two men behind the venture, Michael Ginor and Issy Yanay, the coowners of the Hudson Valley Foie Gras Corporation.

Their story is one that should be heeded by all specialist food producers. When the pair started the business, Americans had little appetite for the product; now they cannot keep up with the demand they have created in restaurants across the country. US trade sanctions against French foie gras in February this year also helped.

But there is trouble ahead. The knuckleheaded governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has given in to the animal lobby and has signed up to ban any food product that involves force-feeding by 2012. Brussels, too, has demanded that by 2019 foie-gras farmers must find a more humane method of feeding the ducks and geese. In the interim the French government is going to ban farm slaughter, which means that the mom-and-pop artisan producers who kill their own ducks and sell the liver at the farm gate are going to be put out of business. Soon all foie gras in France will have to be intensively produced in the name of hygiene.

Of the ban in California, Issy Yanay at Hudson Valley says, The animal rights people got Schwarzenegger in a corner and now I think the ban will probably come to New York state. We were recently thinking about capital improvements, but if the ban comes here we will have to postpone that. There are all sorts of pressures on politicians. Pressure from people like your Paul McCartney. The animal rights people have their own agenda and they have declared that this is only the beginning. It is a war against animal production and it will be a disaster.'

Hudson Valley Foie Gras is located on two farms a stone's throw from Woodstock (the venue for the 1969 rock festival). In total, the two units, comprising 300 acres, house 75,000 Moulard ducks; and the company now produces hundreds of tons of foie gras every year.

The Moulard is a hybrid between the Muscovy and the Pekin duck, and it can be produced only through artificial insemination. It was developed by Yanay, who is something of a poultry expert, in the late 1970s, and is both disease-resistant and sterile. Geese are notoriously difficult to rear and the foie-gras industry had been wracked by disease and problems with feeding and breeding for a long time. The Moulard that Yanay bred was quick to grow and easy to feed. More than that, the fattened duck liver could compete for taste and texture with goose foie gras. Indeed, there are some, including, not surprisingly, Yanay and Ginor, who believe the Moulard duck to be superior to the more traditional goose.

Ginor is nothing if not a hustler, A former Wall Street trader who voluntarily signed up for the Israeli army and became press spokesman on the Gaza Strip, he set about selling, much like a door-to-door salesman, to restaurants in Manhattan and promoting himself as a foie-gras aficionado. After the initial success in Manhattan, he hounded chefs across the country, cajoling them into trying his product. Most restaurants tried once and were hooked, and Hudson Valley ended up signing deals with 73 wholesalers across the United States.

The company now employs more than 200 people, mainly immigrant Mexican workers, and sells about S12 million worth of duck product a year. With net profit margins at 18 per cent you can see what a valuable niche market they've created for themselves.

The practice of force-feeding geese and ducks — once they are fully grown — to fatten the liver has outraged the animal rights lobby. The force-feeding is known as gavage: it involves pouring cooked grain through a funnel into the birds' gullet. At Hudson Valley, they drop a pound of cooked maize into the ducks' stomach three times a day, for a minimum of 10 days. As with many waterfowl, when the duck is overfed, the excess food does not disperse evenly but turns into fat and lodges in the liver. The overfeeding distorts the body and causes the liver to swell to seven times its natural size, which, it must be said, cannot be the most comfortable situation to be in if you are a duck. At Hudson Valley thousands of ducks are kept in pens in huge barns.

Apologists for the production process will tell you that the ducks positively love being force-fed, that they rush up to the man with the funnel gasping for the 12inch tube to be inserted into their stom achs. Not the ones I saw. They positively shied away from the man and the funnel, although once he had hold of them there was little resistance. But as Yanay says, 'Whatever Schwarzenegger says, there is no way of producing foie gras without force-feeding.'

The end of the birds' life is pretty unpleasant, but the force-feeding lasts for a maximum of 16 days until the liver is distended enough. For the rest of the time, they are either being kept warm under artificial lighting or wandering around in the open air pecking at grass, feeding on corn and generally having a rather pleasant time. A battery hen has none of those luxuries, nor for that matter does a Danish pig, which spends its life banged up in a stall being jammed full of antibiotics and growth promoters.

Some years ago the supermarket Waitrose boldly announced in the run-up to Christmas that it was going to stock a duck-friendly foie gras. A farmer in Alsace had convinced the stores group that ducks of his particular breed actually force-fed themselves, penned in a maize field. What's more, claimed the farmer, they loved it. So taken was Waitrose by this that it decided to stock the duck-friendly goose liver, and even planned a press trip for food journalists. Much fanfare and razzmatazz were promised. Dates were set for the jolly and I dreamt that, soon afterwards, the shelves at Waitrose would be groaning under duck livers the size of footballs. Then suddenly the invitations were withdrawn, the trip was cancelled, and the penny dropped. There is no duck-friendly method of producing foie gras. It is cruel — but it is worth it because foie gras is delicious.