I’ve never had foie gras but if it tastes like tofu misozuke, no wonder people go crazy for it! That stuff is incredible.
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The… “Intentionally causing disease” part?
Is that really that strange of a thought to have?
Fatty liver is not a disease. I had a post about this as well.
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‘Force feeding’ geese is not at all the horror it seems to be. Birds, in general, don’t swallow like we do. In fact, if you took a bird to space, it would die of starvation because they depend on gravity to get their food down. Geese actually seem to enjoy being ‘force fed’. Then again, I despise liver and will never exactly miss this delicacy.
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Humans also don’t store fat in their livers in the way and to the extent that migratory birds do. These animals are supposed to go through a cycle of bulking up their liver to a level that would be dangerous in other critters, then burning off all that stored energy on thousand mile migrations.
Basically what we do with foie gras is push this process to an extreme. Then eat the birds before they can work off the extra weight. But importantly if you push the process too far. To the point where it really does harm to the duck and cause problems. It vastly lowers the quality of the end product, making it less profitable.
Most of the horror stories you hear about foie gras come out of factory farms in Europe, Israel and Canada. These places produce cheap, low grade commodity foie for the packaged goods industry. You can pick up low cost tins of pate de foie gra or confit in gas stations in France. And the highest consumption of foie gras globally is in Hungary where some of the worst farms are. A Hungarian friend described picking up prepared foie as a cheap treat when she was a broke college student.
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crate-veal is an abomination, however “red” veal that comes from male calves from dairy stock are not only raised similarly to all cattle, but also an important way to avoid killing male cattle when born for dairy farmers. Most Canadian veal is red veal from farmers who don’t crate or individually shelter cattle for veal, and many have the calves pasture with their mothers in the summer months. The problem, of course, is how difficult this is to find (or even identify) in a grocery store, so unless you have a local, knowledgable butcher who understands this stuff, your only real option is to avoid veal.
(Random plug for Toronto folk: The Healthy Butcher specifically sells only pasture-raised, dairy red veal. Highly recommended.)
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It’s fucking delicious!
If we’re going to crack out the scales,
factory chicken is both more cruel and,
done to way more animals.
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No need to convince me. I am always all for treating the food we eat with more respect…but ultimately it is food.
A part of me asks the obv question “Let’s start worrying about how we treat our own species before we worry about others”.
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I wouldn’t go that far. Birds aren’t exactly the “ooo fun play with me” type.
When its done right they don’t seem to notice. They’ll gather up with the same level of enthusiasm and reactions as they would were you tossing food out to for them to peck at.
And crates have long been banned in the EU. The US veal industry association finished their voluntary abandonment two years ago. Though there are apparently non-members still doing it. Its been kinda hard to find crate veal without looking at imports from specific places (like Latin America apparently) for a while.
Most veal in the US, and even in Europe, though crate free is still “milk fed”. Younger animals that haven’t been weaned.
Pink/rose/red veal comes from older animals that are currently weaning. So they’re still eating milk but also grazing. Crateless milk fed isn’t neccisarily any less humane than pink veal. But the older ones produce much tastier veal. And as currently pitched it basically requires pasturing to some extent.
Pretty much all veal comes from male dairy calves, even the crate stuff. It’s just the most readily available, cheapest source of appropriate animals. It’s just that not many of them get used for veal in the US because there isn’t much market for veal thanks to the reputation the crates created.
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That’s really the problem IMHO - as a consumer, actually finding veal that was pastured humanely is nigh-on impossible unless you’re lucky enough to shop somewhere that single-sources their veal directly from a supplier that reports that information.
It’s just that not many of them get used for veal in the US because there isn’t much market for veal thanks to the reputation the crates created.
Which is doubly an issue for the folks trying to change anything about that market. If consumers can’t easily tell what they are buying/supporting in terms of animal welfare, that reputation isn’t going to change, either. (Unlike foie-gras, where there probably isn’t an option that isn’t cruel).
ETA: now with less horse!
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It is not a disease, it is how ducks and geese naturally store energy from food.
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They actually like it. I have seen ducks being force fed in a small farm in south west France. Ducks were running towards the farmer to be fed. They didn’t express any fear and didn’t show any obvious pain. They even looked really healthy. So force feeding is a misleading term. It is probably very different in industrial settings but it is not a question of being force fed or not. It’s the same for chicken.
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Good. That’s more to eat for the rest of us.
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No, that’s horses. 
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That’s not exactly unique. Labeling is not great on anything. Even “pastured” and “grass fed”. All cows, whatever their purpose, are pastured and fed mostly grass for the bulk of their lives. Its just not an
animal you can raise entirely in confinement Even what they’re finished on isn’t the question. Cause you can grain finish with access to open pasture. The question is if they ended up in a feed lot, what kind, and for how long. And even then. Many 100% grass fed cows in the US aren’t neccisarily well off. Cause most breeds of cow require some supplimentation. Not much of the US has enough grass year round. And American farmers don’t seem to understand silage. That’s why American grass fed beef is noticably poorer quality than Irish beef, almost all of which is fed exclusively grass and silage. Cause the Americans try to go without supplimentation and the cows end up malnourished.
Without standards and regulations you have no way of really knowing what a given label neccisarily means. Which exact format, or which portion of the process it’s based on. Is the grass fed beef 100% grass fed, was the pastured meat never in a CAFO? We just assume it accords with the common understanding of the term. And even when it does, we have no way of knowing if it was done well or properly.
Veal wise if it has an American Veal Association logo its not crate veal. If it was produced in an EU member state its not crate veal. Milk fed veal will almost always have been raised in pens, and bottle fed for a portion of their lives. This is not neccisarily a bad thing in terms of humane treatment, it depends on how its conducted. AVA and EU standards on it aren’t bad. And almost all calves will be confined for a period and bottle fed to some extent. It increases survival rates and helps ensure the animals get enough nutrition, so you aren’t avoiding it entirely. Pink veal is potentially better, since as currently understood it involves nursing the calf on its own mother for an extended period, after initial confinement. But that basically requires the dairy itself to raise the animal. And pink veal is almost unavailable in the US as a result. Our veal farms are mostly dedicated operations, buying animals off dairies.
Short of that, which are pretty much rules of thumb. You have to go direct to a farm to find out how things are really done. But that kinda goes for any meat.
Well that’s sort of why veal is a great example for this subject. The approach was not to change the market. The approach was to remove it. The initial veal bad campaign smeared veal in general, cause baby cows are cute. Though the crates and other practices were the detail being pointed to. It was veal is bad, and crates are why. Not crates are bad and why use them. As a result people didn’t start looking for better veal, they stopped eating it entirely. Until fairly recently regulatory pushes weren’t to ban crates, it was to ban veal. And most Americans commonly assume all veal is crate veal and veal and crates are inseparable.
As a result we still have veal crates in a few parts of the US today. We took 25 years longer than Europe to move off the fucking things. And we started feeding instantly slaughtered veal calves to cows in pellet form. Bringing mad cow to the party. We’ve even apparently started exporting male dairy calves to Mexico. Where they will be raised in crates.
In all likelihood as a result of the veal campaign, no animal was actually treated any better. Many of them were treated worse then they could have been. And no fewer animals passed through industrial farms.
Where as in Europe the push was to regulate for more humane treatment. And they dealt with crates a long while back. And have gotten better veal out of it. Both better quality and more humane. And you don’t need to parse a label to figure it out.
The foie bans are mostly targeted at shutting down our few foie gras farms the same way. Activists even explicitly point at veal as a success. But we have among the most humanely run foie gras farms in the world. If we instead ensconced their standards in the law. We could improve the treatment of many, many more birds than the few raised for foie gras. And prevent industrial farms from setting up shop here. By blocking foie that doesn’t meet the standard from import you could even potentially impact practices elsewhere.
But that requires acknowledging that it is possible to do this properly.
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Those are both articles about humans. A mammal.
People who work with ducks do not refer to this as a disease of ducks.
Humans are not migratory water fowl.
The other foie gras article by J Kenji Lopez-Alt gives a nice summary of why this is mostly not an issue for ducks. But its a summary. For a deep dive I’ll recommend Caro’s book again.
You see, migration depends upon gorging: the rapid intake and metabolism of large quantities of food in order to store enough energy to fly south for the winter. So, while during the warm summer months a duck may be content paddling around eating weeds, bugs, and the occasional minnow, when the weather starts getting colder, it begins to eat in earnest, stuffing itself more frequently, and with larger prey. Unlike in humans, where excess fat builds up mostly in large deposits just under the skin, with migratory birds, this excess fat builds up both under the skin and in the liver.
The fattened condition of the birds liver is quite unlike fatty liver disease in other animals, as the animals adapted to store mass amounts of fat in their livers. And to burn off that fat during migration. And do it over and over again. Every year. This isn’t something that a human or a cat is capable of.
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Just sayin’ that Wikipedia links one box nicely in Discourse.
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So New Yorkers can ride their reliable public transportation, drive their well paved streets, and walk their garbage free sidewalks, safely content that they will not pass the doorway of any establishment that serves foie gras.
It must be wonderful to live in a place where the local government has its priorities so well in hand.
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I’ll happily take long posts from someone who knows what they’re talking about, over pithy outrage. 
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I don’t know, blaming activists for the actions of farmers seems specious.
And there’s a lot of “The animals are okay because they’re not humans, and humans would have a harder time with the same treatment. Also other animals have worse things done to them, don’t forget.”-type hand-wavey what-abouty arguments. Or don’t ban this because a certain fraction of the farms do it to less abusive standards.
It boils down to, “A famous chef wants you to know you can eat this without guilt, because it’s not as bad as it could be.” If you already wanted to believe that, this thread maybe provides some helpful rationalisations.
My “favorite” part of that article was where he started making the argument that ducks probably don’t mind force-feeding that much because cormorants are also birds and they eat big fish all the time. Super-science.
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