How many people eat foie gras

Foie gras is far from the only cuisine subjected to bans — horse meat, shark fins, beluga caviar, and unpasteurized milk are some of the foods barred in numerous states due to concerns over ethics, animal endangerment, or public health. But foie gras producers say they have been unfairly targeted. Saravia pointed out how the foie gras legislation belonged to a package of New York City animal welfare bills seeking to restrict everything from fur sales to horse carriage rides.

Just knock on the door. But DeSoucey maintains that the most egregious treatment of animals consumed for food occurs at factory poultry farms run by corporations such as Perdue and Butterball, which routinely denied her requests to visit, she said. Perdue also points out that it has worked with animal rights groups like Mercy for Animals to lead the way in making factory farm reforms. Foie gras advocates, in contrast, argue that the public primarily objects to the feeding tubes given to ducks because they are overly empathetic to the animals.

In the wild, they swallow rocks and sticks. So, some of it [the foie gras opposition] is anthropomorphism. The birds do not have teeth and swallow their food whole. Because they are vulnerable to predators in the wild, ducks consume food quickly, storing large quantities at once thanks to an esophagus that widens as they feed. We do not shove tons of feed down his throat. We feed the bird three times a day, and whatever the bird is able to digest, we drop in the crop.

Josh Balk, vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States , objects to the idea that foie gras can be produced without abuse.

Wild ducks, for example, do not eat to the point of suffering adverse health effects, he said. He predicts that foie gras will be legislated away just as cockfighting and dogfighting have been. Daguin says that treating ducks well is the key to good foie gras, however. Originally from Gascony, France, she has played a pivotal role in the U. In , she began to introduce American chefs, accustomed to buying canned foie gras from Europe, to fresh versions of it produced in the U.

The liver is not going to be big. She noted that each feeding of a duck or goose takes roughly five seconds and generally the same individuals conduct the feedings to prevent the birds from becoming anxious.

The three daily feedings take place over about an day period, she said. Logical thinking should be that if you want something to be banned, ban factory-farmed chicken. In August, Dr. Holly Cheever, a veterinarian and vice president of the New York Humane Society, told the New York Times that the ducks and geese consumed for foie gras are in liver failure and have difficulty breathing by the time their organs are harvested.

Conversely, Dr. Their feathers are scraggly and wiry if present at all , there's often blood coming out of their nostrils, and their faces and feathers are caked with vomit and cornmeal. A duck drinks scummy water out of a communal trough running in front of it, while, just upstream, one of its less fortuitous bunkmates sits dead with its head lolling sideways, half submerged in the cloudy green water.

I've no doubt that farms like this exist in the world, and it is a terrible, atrocious tragedy. If this was how all foie—or even all meat—was produced, I'd become a vegetarian today. But video or photographic footage of one badly managed farm, or even a thousand badly managed farms, does not prove that the production of foie gras, as a practice, is necessarily harmful to the health or mental well-being of a duck.

Foie gras production should be judged not by the worst farms, but by the best , because those are the ones that I'm going to choose to buy my foie from, if at all. So the real question is: Is the production of foie gras torturous under even the best of conditions?

Those on one side would answer yes. How could force-feeding an animal ever be considered anything but torture? On the other side are those who claim that American foie farms are positively idyllic, with ducks waddling around spacious pens, even queuing up for their gavage; that, for a duck, none of the things we consider uncomfortable stress them out in the least.

But who's right? We'd be free to see anything we liked, no doors would be locked, and we'd be taking cameras and notebooks with us. With a production of around 2, birds a week, La Belle Farm is the second largest of the three foie gras farms in the country the others are Hudson Valley Foie Gras, located a few miles away in Sullivan County, and Sonoma Artisan Foie in California.

Despite its relatively large size, La Belle Farm is still a vertically integrated farm. Unlike with more industrialized chicken, pig, or cattle operations in the US, or foie farms in Europe and Canada, every step, from breeding the ducklings to raising the chicks to performing the gavage to slaughtering, processing, packaging, and shipping, takes place right on-site. Owner Herman Lee—who immigrated from Hong Kong in to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology before going on to start Bella Poultry, one of the most well-respected chicken operations in the Northeast—began raising Moulard ducks for foie gras in , after spending several years studying the industry both at home and abroad.

In his office, he seemed comfortable, almost eager to get started, to show us what his farm did. We wasted no time in getting down to the fabrication room, where teams of workers were just beginning to pull ducks out of a walk-in cooler. Freshly killed and plucked the day before, they were now ready to be eviscerated and broken down into their various parts.

The stunning makes for a quick, painless death, while air-chilling and drying prevents them from taking on any extra water weight, which would dilute the flavor of their relatively lean meat.

The animals are unloaded one at a time onto a conveyer belt, where the skilled workers go at them, each one making a few vital cuts, assembly line—style. As the first liver was removed, Robyn , our intrepid photographer, gave an audible gasp. Indeed, if you've never seen a whole lobe of foie gras before, the size of it can be a bit shocking.

Weighing in at around a pound, each liver is roughly the size of a small football. The livers are passed to a woman who sorts them into two different grades, depending on the amount of bruises and blemishes they have. Large, clean livers get the "A" designation, while the rest are sorted into "B" and "Petite" trays.

Bob was quick to point out that "any mishandling of the ducks—rough treatment, that kind of thing—will cause bruising, reducing its price," he explained. It's the first time I've heard of a farm that offers workers a monetary incentive to be gentler with the animals. The breasts, known as magret , are removed and individually packaged to be sold fresh to chefs and gourmet butchers.

Some of them are cured and dried into duck prosciutto, or smoked to a sweet, ham-like flavor. The excess fat of which there is plenty gets rendered down and sold to restaurants. The legs are cooked in the traditional French confit style, while the wings are smoked and slow-cooked. The entire processing room gets sprayed down and disinfected every day. The room was absolutely spotless, the countertops and conveyor belts a gleaming stainless steel. So far, so good.

It was about as clean and organized an operation as I've ever seen in a farm. We put on full-length disposable jumpsuits to protect our street clothes, along with face masks, hairnets, and rubber boots to protect the ducks from outside germs, and headed toward the sheds where the ducks spend the bulk of their three-and-a-half-month lives.

The real questions would be answered within the walls of these long, corrugated aluminum boxes. I'd consulted with a veterinarian and done some reading on the subject of illnesses in waterfowl, so, even before we entered the shed, I had a good idea of what to look for to recognize sick or distressed birds. 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. This statistic is not included in your account.

Skip to main content Try our corporate solution for free! Single Accounts Corporate Solutions Universities. Premium statistics. Read more. Foie gras , the fattened liver of a duck or goose, is part of the cultural and gastronomical heritage of France and has even been protected by law since While French people enjoy eating this product plain 67 percent , their favorite way to eat it is on a slice of bread or toast 98 percent.

Production and consumption: instability prevails Foie gras is a very French product. Indeed, France is the first producer and distributor of foie gras worldwide, as well as the first consumer. National consumption has evolved and fluctuated since the s impacted by habits but also external factors.

In , an avian flu epidemic H5N1 spread across France, and in , the H5N8 virus, another variant, hit the country once again. As a result, millions of ducks had to be euthanized, which prompted a sizeable reduction of the production : from 19, tons produced in to 13, tons in Consequently, the virus also caused fear among the population and lead consumption to fall to its lowest point since the beginning of the century. Nonetheless, this did not entirely discourage French people from consuming foie gras, and since , the production has been slowly increasing once more.

On the other hand, more than 70 percent of French people consider Foie gras to be an essential food item for the end of the year festivities and use words such as " festive," "enjoyable", and "tasty " to describe it. Incidentally, Christmas time is when the percentage of purchasing households in France increases the most, with sales picking up steam in November. December sees the penetration rate of foie gras reaching its highest point: The importance of the French origin French people are relying on foie gras for its reliable quality, food safety, and its traceability.

They also see in Foie gras a traditional meal and therefore French heritage. In , more than 6 million French people bought their Foie gras from independent producers , whereas about 2 million people favored supermarket brands, followed by one million in hard discount.

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