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There is one way for chefs and foie gras purveyors to get around the ban: develop a different method of making the delicacy. The California statute doesn’t outlaw foie gras per se—just livers that are the product of force-feeding. The law’s supporters hoped the threat of a ban would encourage producers to come up with a less invasive way to plump up the organ. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2004 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, was postponed for eight years to give foie gras makers time to adapt.
They didn’t, in part because there is no obvious other way to make foie gras, and in part because producers insist that force-feeding ducks and geese does not harm them. Emily Patterson-Kane, an animal welfare scientist at the American Veterinary Medical Assn. in Schaumburg, Ill., says it’s not clear how stressful it is for the birds. Ducks don’t have a gag reflex, “So they can gulp down relatively large things,” she says. “It’s still probably unpleasant to some extent.” Patterson-Kane parts ways with foie gras producers when they say they’re merely reproducing what wild ducks and geese do naturally. In the wild, a duck might double the size of its liver, she says. “With a foie gras duck, we’re looking at an eight- to tenfold increase. We’ve taken that natural tendency to store fat in the liver and we’ve pushed that a lot further.”
The bottom line: California outlawed foie gras, which sells for about $50 a pound, in part to spur less invasive methods of producing the delicacy.
Vekshin is a reporter for Bloomberg News.
