During gavage there are four ducks to a cage. Each cage is 1 to 1.5 meters (about 3 to 5 feet) by 63-83 cm in size (2 to 2.7 feet). The birds are hand fed. Force feeding increases the size of the liver, so the drakes need to be handled delicately (to avoid bruising the liver). Bruises costs money when the organ is harvested. For this same reason, no antibiotics are used and only vegetarian feed is allowed. In cheaper industries like with cows, dead animals are sometimes ground up and fed to their living colleagues.
This brings us to the harvesting of the liver. “I know why the caged bird sings” tells me that Maya Angelou has never been to a foie gras slaughterhouse. When the Drakes arrive they are hung upside down by their feet. One by one they are brought through an electrified water bath that kills them. And if that doesn’t do the job, immediately afterward a sharp blade cuts their entire throat (not just the carotid artery). This is to prevent any animals from surviving and suffering afterward.
The feathers are then removed and the liver is harvested by hand in front of a veterinarian (with bright lights and a surgical mirror showing the other side of the lobe). On average 0.5% of the lobes are bruised. This means that 0.5% of the animals who didn’t die before slaughter experienced enough physical stress to result in bruising.
The liver lobes are a pale yellow due to their all corn diet. The organ’s stringy veins are removed by hand, and the lobes are placed in a liver shaped mold and chilled. There is such an abundance of soft fat that a mold is needed to maintain the liver’s shape.
The foie gras made here in Montreal is ideally suited to the Quebecois diet. In France, a traditional gourmand would eat raw foie gras. But in Quebec 70% of foie gras is consumed cooked (with apples, etc). Olivier thinks that this might be because of the high soft starch content present in Corne Dente. The result is that Les Ferme’s foie gras is better suited for cooking applications like terrines. Their foie breaks down a bit less easily, and so holds up better under heat.
But where does this leave us? Is foie gras animal torture or more humane than harvesting broilers (the endearing poultry industry term for chickens)? Let’s compare the two starting with the general treatment of the birds.
(Broiler Source:National Chicken Council)
So P.E.T.A.’s argument that infections are more prevalent is somewhat disingenuous. No antibiotics are used with the Hudson Valley Foie Gras facility that I visited. Does that mean that other foie gras facilities uniformly follow the same standards? No, absolutely not. In every industry you see producers with different quality standards or who violate federally imposed guidelines. This facility does not use antibiotics, which means a higher possibility of infections. But when you pack 20,000 broilers in a 500 square foot space, their eyes and legs become burned from all the bird shit ammonia. Antibiotics become a must. Remember this the next time you hear about antibiotic resistant diseases. You are what you eat. Humans absorb antibiotics while chewing on delicious, antibacterial laden pieces of chicken all the time!
On the topic of treatment, if you’re anti-foie gras you should be vehemently anti- industrial meat. If you’re a meat eater, foie is a step up for you in both price and quality. But this still leaves the controversial elephant (screaming on fire) in the room – Gavage. Remember what I said earlier about blow jobs? Well, let’s remember a few things. Birds don’t choke or gag. This biological quirk is also behind the urban myth that if you give Alka Seltzer to pigeons, they’ll explode like hand grenades.
Duck’s throats are made for swallowing rocks ( which might also explain the lack of oral sex among avians). The “interior of a duck’s throat more closely resembles your fingernail than your flesh.” 5 The “Tissue at the bottom of a duck’s throat “crop” can comfortably swell to several times its’ size. Ducks naturally gorge” 6 (though to be fair not to this extreme). And ducks have separate passageways for food and air, unlike humans. 7 So force feeding does not choke a bird like it does a human.
So P.E.T.A.’s arguments regarding:
• Higher Mortality Rates – not compared to broilers so if you’re ok with
eating chicken meat, foie is more humane.
• Infections – no antibiotics are used, basically forcing the foie gras producer
to adopt more humane animal treatment than the rest of the poultry
industry. They can afford to do this since foie sells for much more money.
• Storage Conditions:
Cages are Cruel – Foie is cage free here.
Feed – Vegetarian for foie, no chicken carcasses are ground
up and fed back to the animals
• Asphyxiation – Separate passageways for breathing, though due to the
nature of gavage this is still a definite risk. But animal stress would show up as higher mortality rates and lower organ harvest percentages. These are still much lower than the broiler industry.
• Impaired Liver – Yes, absolutely there is no foie gras debate here. For 12.5 days the fowl’s liver is deliberately overwhelmed into an unnatural state.
We need to put this in context. A foie gras abbatoir is not a Club Med for corn lovers. Foie is a much more expensive food and has a powerful profit motive. That means making investments in treating the birds humanely is profitable. But in the cheaper broiler industry with its industrial volumes, intense competition and low margins, humanity becomes a difficult cost to include.
In an excellent Wall Street Journal article, Kenji Lopez-Alt sums this up more eloquently than I can:
“I am not an advocate for meat eating. Every time we eat meat, we are balancing an equation between our pleasure and an animal’s discomfort and death. What I hope to convince you of is this: If you believe it is O.K. to raise and kill animals for flesh, and that any animal we eat should be raised in as humane a manner as is reasonable, you should be O.K. with foie gras from the best farms … It is among the most humanely produced animal products one can buy in the retail food market.”