Short Stuff: Foie Gras

Foie gras means “fatty liver” in French, which makes sense because it’s made from the overripe livers of force-fed ducks and geese. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's wandering around the halls somewhere stuff
to the gill like a fattened goose with mis gross.
Oh yeah, sorry, like she she eats balls of me
so doesn't even choose them, just swallows them like a duck,

(00:24):
and they get stored in her liver and eventually we
will kill Jerry and eat that liver and it's going
to be delicious. I'm surprised that a Miso uh manufacturer
and distributor hasn't I guess you don't manufacture it, but
packager has not tried to custom brand a Miso Jerry brand.
M it's a it's a I think maybe we should

(00:48):
do that. Maybe not my best idea. It's not a
bad idea, though, you know what I'm saying, Like, it's
not one that just makes you go like, let's just
keep talking and pretend you didn't say that. I appreciate that.
Like there's a few bucks in it for us, I
think on the road, right, Okay, So we're talking about
fattened liver because if you um translate the word fatty
liver into the franche, it comes out to be fois gras.

(01:11):
But you may have heard of before, you may have
even eaten before, you may detest. But it's like one
of the most um controversial foods ever. And I mean like, seriously,
you could have never even seen this stuff and have
just heard those words, and you probably are aware that
it is an extremely controversial food. Yeah, and this is

(01:32):
something I've never tried in Ah, certainly because of the practice.
But even before I knew how it happened, I just
don't eat organ meats, and fattened goose liver just would
not appeal to me anyway. I don't like Pett's and
stuff like that, so it never would have been on
my culinary radar anyway. I have to admit that on

(01:53):
a visit to Italy, I ate any kind of organ
meat literally morning, noon and night for days on end,
and it was just a dream. The thing is is,
there's a lot of people out there say, hey, fat boy,
why don't you quit eating that stuff, because there's a

(02:14):
lot of animals that suffered to make that and they
have a really good case, so much so that there
have been bands specifically on fla gras. In fact, in
New York in two thousand nineteen, they passed a band
bill that prohibits get this storing, maintaining, selling, or offering

(02:35):
to sell force fed products or food containing force fed products,
which is basically targeting flall gra because fall grass a
force fed product, hence the controversy associated with it. That's right, India, Australia, California,
other places that have banned uh fla graw from being
I guess at least sold and served in restaurants. And

(02:58):
the practice you're talking about, this force feeding is it?
Is it called gavage? I believe so. Yeah, that's that's
how I would say g A V A g E.
And this goes way way back to Um Jesus, at
least Egypt when they were forced feeding these geese when
they saw that quote developed, uh, the waterfowl developed large

(03:20):
fatty livers after eating large amounts in preparation for migration.
And then this goes to the Mediterranean and then into France,
where a lot of our culinary traditions were born. And
there was a chef there named Jean Joseph Klaus or
Klaussa that'll probably German Klaus, and he is credited with

(03:40):
creating the first fua gra in seventeen seventy nine and
patenting it in Yeah, and he got twenty pistols from
King Louis the sixteenth saying thanks a lot, pal for
creating fois gras. I love it. I slather it on
my naked body every night. Go shoot some geese. So um. Yeah,
they're like this. This is based on this idea that

(04:03):
that ducks and geese naturally fatten up storing fat on
the liver they stored on their under their skin too,
like we do. We also store fat on our liver,
but geese and and ducks are just evolutionary aces that
storing fat in their liver. And it just so happens
that somebody said, I wonder what that tastes like they
tried it, and we're like, this is astounding. And most

(04:26):
of the time when you have pette, it's um or
full graw. It isn't a patte form, which is to say,
it looks a lot like cat food inconsistency, very similar color,
maybe even a similar smell. It's the taste that really
differentiates it. Not just the taste but also the price.
They can get up to like eighty bucks a pound,
usually forty to eighty dollars a pound for full graw,

(04:49):
which is a lot of money for a pound of
any kind of food. But one of the reasons why
is the production is so food is so labor intensive, right,
and then also the stuff that goes in along with it,
like very fine brandies, truffles. Um, it's a it's about
as decade in a food as as you can find. Yeah,

(05:10):
just really reeks of uh well, I guess it reeks
of of Henry the Eighth or King Louis, the people
like that who got gouted when they were in their
twenties and just surrounded themselves with fats and meats and
liver organ meats and things like that. I'm sure I'm
making you hungry. I'm about to vomit. But if you're

(05:36):
on the other side of the coin and you are
into animal rights and stuff like that, you might say, hey, um,
ducks hyperventilate sometimes, sometimes they bleed, sometimes they are shackled
when you were forced feeding them. Uh. They rallied for
that bill, the seventy eight bill that you were talking about,
And you can be fined anywhere from five hundred to

(05:58):
two thousand dollars starting in New York City. Yeah, when
it takes effect, I guess all of New York or
maybe just New York City. So you would think, like,
you know, what's controversial about this, It's just rotten, it's wrong,
it's mean, um all to produce like one of the
most decadent foods around. Like, there's really nothing ConTroll controversial

(06:21):
about that. It's it sounds pretty one sided, and a
lot of people feel that way. There is, however, another
side that argue against it, and we will visit them
right after this, all right. So there's a lot of

(06:53):
people out there, chuck that say, well, we hear what
you're saying, but you're all dumb and you're wrong, and
they actually say it like that. A lot um A
lot of like chefs, especially celebrity chefs, have actually taken
a stand in favor of FOA Graw, saying that it's
unfairly targeted. Um. One of the reasons I saw. I
read a couple of posts on Serious Eats in defense

(07:15):
of it, and they said, you know, this is a
um a type of food that's associated with the very rich. Uh.
It's really easy to get people riled up because you
hear things like force feeding and jamming tubes down animals
necks and making their liver ten times their normal size.
You put all that together, and you know, fo graw

(07:35):
becomes unfairly targeted and it's kind of hard to swallow
at first. I'm very sorry about that one. The idea
that anybody would defend force feeding an animal to fatten
its liver to ten times its size so that um
gout ridden old ritchies can eat a little bit of
this stuff. Um. But if something is unfairly demonized, it

(08:00):
is worth looking into an unpacking. And they do make
a couple of good points here there. Yeah. There's a
group called the Catskill fwag Rock Collective, worst band name ever,
and they produced most of the flag raw that you
would get in New York City. You could still get
I guess once restaurants are open for the next couple
of years. Yeah. And they they have challenged the band
and they say it's unconstitutional. Um, you don't have jurisdiction

(08:23):
over what we do to blastio and these are our
businesses and you can't shut us down. Um. And the
I guess the leader of the president, Marcus Henley of
the Catskill Flag Rock Collective says, you know what, this
this little tube is really not causing any discomfort. Ducks.
Ducks aren't like us. They're built different this uh than

(08:45):
than us, and this tube is they they love this thing,
trust me basically. Um. In that serious Seats article, they
went to like the greatest flag graw farm on the
planet and the ducks like came over to get their
garvage um feeding. But the that's definitely not par for
the course. There's a lot of videos out there of

(09:05):
some really abusive duck and geese farms where they're stuck
in cages and their beaks are broken and they're bleeding
out of their noses and they're lost feathers and they
have like vomit around their mouth and they're still being
force fed. Um. There's some really awful operations out there.
But um, the apparently, if you're getting good fall raw,
you're getting it from somebody who's treating their animals very well.

(09:27):
And the case they're making about ducks and geese being
built differently than us is that their esophagus, their esopha
guy I guess, are not connected to their trach yet
they're two separate ones rather than shared like in in humans,
and their esophagus is allowed to stretch like they can
eat fish that are many times over the size of
their actual esopha guy, so they can stretch pretty easily.

(09:50):
So that's where they say it doesn't really give them
much discomfort if any um and that their their liver
fattening to like huge like sy is that it's actually
kind of built to do that. This is just human
speeding up this process or kind of making it in
like a simulated way like the ducks. The ducks and
the geese aren't doing this to migrate, but they are

(10:12):
responding naturally to this kind of simulated packing on the weight,
and that if you kind of start to understand it,
you will probably change your mind about fall graw. I
don't know if that's a foregone conclusion, but from what
I read, it isn't as quite as as bad as
I presumed. The one that got me, though, Chuck, is

(10:32):
that if you they say, if you are fine with
eating eggs, you don't really think about where your chicken
eggs are coming from, You've got no leg to stand
on going after fla graw because the chickens that are
producing those eggs that you're eating are being treated just
as bad, if not worse than the worst cases of
the ducks and the geese that are being fattened up

(10:52):
for patte. That is the one point that I find
difficult to challenge. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, very
famously worked in the chicken farming industry, unfortunately as a
marketing person, and it's terrible. Um, but these days you
can get chickens from one of your neighbors, most likely,
and that's what we do. It does smell like a
what about is? Um? You know, I think it smells

(11:14):
like it because it very much is exactly that. Yeah. Yeah,
so I I moren flall gry. I don't think I
can really eat it anymore. I haven't eaten in a
very long time. But um, I do have my memories
with it, the livers of dead abused ducks that I've eaten.
So I'm sorry ducks. I'm sorry, quack. That's okay, quack.

(11:36):
I wonder if you know you said that they were
meant or not meant to, but their livers would fatten
up anyway for migration. I guess they are meant to.
I wonder if these ducks run over there to get
this force feeding, because they're like this is gonna get
me out of here. Man, You're gonna fly, fly fly
pretty soon. I got to get out of here. This
is the worst. Oh goodness. Um and the unconstitutional thing,

(11:58):
I'm like, what are they talking about? Suppose the state wise,
it's unconstitutional because they're trying to regulate interstate commerce. But
I don't know that that necessarily holds up mm hmm. Interesting.
So there you go, flag everybody. Uh, go make up
your own mind about it. Go do you a little
research and see what you think. And in the meantime,

(12:18):
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