The Village Voice looks into the process in which ducks are prepared and force-fed to increase the fattiness of their livers at the time of slaughter. It is vehemently opposed by PETA, but also raises the question of ethics amongst a highly requested luxury food item.
Why are activists so devoted to this issue? Most of the organizations against foie gras also advocate vegetarianism or veganism. If you generally oppose the manipulation of animals for food, you’re going to oppose foie gras all the more, because the production does manipulate the animal more than usual. Manipulation does not necessarily equal abuse, though. But it’s manipulation of a different sort that is at work in the videos I watched before my Hudson Valley visit. Those images are not representative of the reality at the nation’s largest foie gras farm.
I’m surprised to read how systematically sound the farms are, especially with free-range storage with window light for the first 12 weeks.
We met up with Henley and started to look around. The first thing I noticed was the lack of tiny cages. Hudson Valley raises its ducks in free-feeding barns until they’re 12 weeks old. After that, the birds are moved to the force-feeding barns, but instead of being put into individual cages, they’re housed in relatively spacious, open-topped group pens about the size of an office cubicle. In fact, none of the four foie gras farms in the United States currently uses the individual cages that have shown up in industrial farms in Canada and France. Hudson Valley’s products are certified “cage-free.”
Despite the bans and outcries against foie gras, places such as Chicago have recently rescinded the ban on foie gras. I’m still looking forward to trying out that Humphrey Slocombe foie gras ice cream sandwich.
Superfuture portrait of the week: Servo2000
A weekly Wednesday series over at flickr.