By Mark Caro
For a culinary delicacy, foie gras raises an awful stink. “The rub with foie gras,” writes Mark Caro in this even-keeled, brightly observed exploration of the foodstuff, “is that the qualities that people find irresistible are inescapably linked to the way it is produced,” which some people find akin to the doings at Abu Ghraib.
Five thousand years ago, someone figured out that if you force-fed a goose or duck, its enlarged liver would yield an incomparably tasty, unctuous, gamey flan. The process can be traced back to the Egyptians, then to the Greeks and Romans, then to France. Animal fat, with its calories and nutrients and cooking applications, was a valuable commodity. Yet even then, Caro discovered, long before Jeremy Bentham brought the utilitarian notion of suffering to the table, the force-feeding of birds spurred ethical arguments: Was foie gras God’s gift, or was it the very taste of damnation?
“The root of the tension here is the never-ending dispute over nonhuman animals’ place in our world,” writes Caro. “Most people occupy the slippery middle ground, opposing the mistreatment of animals but not the eating of them — all while declining to look critically at food production.” But more and more, consumers are asking about the journey food makes to the plate, just as they are increasing their sense of food as pleasure, not simply fuel.
Foie gras carries the additional baggage of being a rarefied, expensive food — yet another ruinous indulgence of the rich, it might be argued — which makes it a handsome target for animal-rights activists. Factory farms are unquestionably vile; they also produce affordable, if not particularly savory food — fuel, in other words, for the masses. Better to zero in on a controversial niche item like foie gras to bring attention to the inhumane treatment of animals than find yourself on the wrong side of a class war.
What concerns the anti-foie gras contingent is not only the force of the feeding — the insertion of a pneumatic feeding tube down the throats of the birds to make them consume more than they’d rather — but the physiological consequences of the practice for the birds and the conditions they are held in during the gavage (force-feeding) period. Are they, in a word, suffering?
Caro, the entertainment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, comes to the foie gras issue with an open mind. He likes foie gras — and will eat an ungodly amount during his investigation — but he also appreciates that force-feeding a goose or duck to unnaturally enlarge its liver is, at least, a questionable way to treat an animal. So he goes to the source, visiting producers in New York, California and France, operations that range from artisanal to industrial. He uses his eyes and his common sense, for contention is rife; no matter where you stand regarding foie gras, there is a published report or video or expert testimony that can buttress your position.
Caro is a chummy, breezy writer, a skeptic and nobody’s fool. He listens to the arguments pro and con, and presents them for the reader to mull over. He is no fan of hyperbole, yet he is available to the passions aroused by the debate. When he witnesses an ill-informed or sly-handed rush to judgment — such as the bans invoked by the Israeli court and the city of Chicago — he calls them out. When there are conflicting medical opinions — are the birds panting from respiratory compromise or thermal regulation, do hormonal measurements truly reflect stress, does the invasiveness of gavage provoke disease? — he probes and considers.
Still, the thoroughness of Caro’s presentation is far from humorless or antiseptic. He has a touch for storytelling and characterization. His visits to the small French farms are transporting and his profiles of producers, purveyors, chefs and anti-foie partisans are gratifyingly complex and foible-ridden.
As for suffering, Caro tells it as he sees it. “They weren’t rushing, beaks open, toward the feeding machine, but they weren’t resisting either,” he writes of one skillful farmstead; “his distress level didn’t increase over time. … He didn’t appear to be having the time of his life either,” he says of a less gentle operation. “It gave me pause,” though not enough to put down his fork.
So, then, a question of conscience, and Caro makes it an informed conscience, here on the slippery middle ground, home to the equivocal, well oiled with goose fat.
(from the San Francisco Chronicle)