Ducks and geese

The French love to eat "foie gras" which tastes like liverwurst but much much better. In America, we called this "pate" but here we found out that that is the wrong word for it. In France, pate is a cheap meat, mixed with pork, and only sometimes contains fine liver paste.

"Foie gras" translates directly as "fatty liver" but that gives the wrong idea completely. It is usually served as a circle of very delicate liver paste, so tender it nearly melts in your mouth. It is made of duck's liver or goose liver, but not ordinary ducks or geese. Instead, it comes from ducks or geese that have been "force fed" for the last 20-28 days of their lives.

We visited a farm where they raise ducks and geese for foie gras. The birds get to roam freely in fenced-in grassy areas for most of their lives. Then they go into a barn, where they get fed large amounts of corn, twice a day, right into their mouths. Their liver grows up to four times its normal size! Also, their meat becomes very tender.

A lot of people get very upset when they hear that ducks and geese are force fed. We learned that ducks and geese don't have a "gag reflex" like people do. Also, since they are migratory birds, they are designed to overeat for a while before migrating.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch. This lady has been raising ducks and geese this way since she was twelve, and her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother did the same. That's hard for me to imagine.

What do you think of this?