The tide is turning in the war on foie gras (Paris)

From Hugh Schofield in Paris


It is holiday time in France, and in supermarkets across the country the hottest selling item is a smooth slab of pale-brown marbled material that comes in fancy wrapping, costs an arm and a leg and spreads well on toast.

Foie gras – the fattened liver of ducks or geese – is the preferred festive fare in France, and no Christmas would be the same without a block of best Comtesse du Barry or Labeyrie sliced on a chilled plate and accompanied by a light Sauternes or maybe a Vouvray from the southwest.

But every December another gastronomic ritual is also played out in France – a propaganda battle over the rights and wrongs of “gavage”, the force-feeding of millions of domestic birds for the delectation of suburban consumers.

The arguments are well-worn, but this year they have a particular virulence – because opponents of the trade are increasingly convinced the wind is moving their way.

“The vice is tightening on France,” says Dominic Hofbauer, spokesman for the pressure group Stopgavage. “Around the world pressure is mounting as values change. More and more countries are saying this cannot go on.

“It is a great shame that our government is as obstinate as ever in its determination to protect the industry.”

Opponents of foie gras won a huge symbolic victory in September when – after a campaign led by celebrities such as Martin Sheen and Paul McCartney – the governor of California, Arnold Schwarz enegger, signed a law that will make it an offence in the state to sell any product “which is the result of force-feeding intended to increase the size of the liver”.

To the disappointment of the more hardline activists, the law and accompanying $1000 fine do not come into force until 2012, and the amount of French foie gras that will be affected is relatively small. But even so, a powerful signal has been made that the market may not last for ever.

A month earlier, the supreme court in Israel, along with Hungary – France’s main competitor in the production of foie gras – banned the use of force-feeding from 2005, on the grounds that it causes unnecessary suffering.

In the EU, several countries, including Germany and Italy, have also banned the practice, and the official view in Brussels also appears to be hardening.

In 1998 the EU commission adopted the conclusions of a scientific study which said that gavage is “detrimental to the welfare of the animals” and recommended important changes in the way the ducks and geese are reared.

So from next week all new production sites must have large, shared accommodation rather than the cramped individual cages which have been the norm till now.

For French opponents of foie gras, these reforms are welcome but little more than cosmetic , so for this year’s propaganda wars, they unveiled a new weapon: an underground film purporting to show the grim reality from inside the mass-production facilities of the southwest.

Made by a group of activists posing as veterinary students, the film shows some of the 30 million female ducklings that they say are crushed or gassed to death every year (only males are kept for rearing); the use of machine pumps to force up to a kilogram of maize down a duck’s throat inside three seconds; and the high mortality rate before slaughter among animals whose livers can swell up to 10 times their normal size, causing breathing difficulties, immobility and diarrhoea.

“It is a picture a million miles from what the industry wants to put out,” said Hofbauer.

Grouped in the elaborately named Interprofessional Committee of Web-Footed Birds for Foie Gras (CIFOG), the industry is used to fielding attacks such as this from the animal rights camp.

According to spokeswoman Marie-Pierre Pe: “Ducks and geese are migratory birds whose bodies quite naturally stock food for long periods of scarcity or travel. A fatted liver is not a diseased liver.”

While accepting some of the EU recommendations on improving conditions for the birds, CIFOG argues that foie gras is an ancient food stuff that is now part of French culture, and that no way of making it has ever been discovered other than gavage.

An Egyptian tomb drawing dating from 4500BC is believed to be the first evidence of force-feeding, and the practice was adopted by the Jews.

The poet Horace wrote of the delicacy in 1BC, and it was the Romans who introduced it to France.

“We have got to defend foie gras because our compatriots would never understand it if they were suddenly deprived of one of the nuggets of our national gastronomy,” said CIFOG’s president Alain Labarthe. One million French consumers, in other words, can’t be wrong.

26 December 2004