Wild Foie Gras
How to make a prized delicacy suffering-free.
Hello from Morningside Heights!
I’m finally finding some time to write again, and it feels great. I’ve got a bunch in the pipeline that I’m excited to share with y’all soon.
I’m also not the only one writing these days — Sasha wrote up her fun adventure making art with Dall-E, full of novel insights into how such systems see and understand the world. Meanwhile, my good friend Emlyn Cameron’s recent essay on volunteering at a revolutionary war site is a touching ode to civic participation — as a way to find meaning, bridge political divides, and bring important help where it’s needed. Please check both out!
The duck is a sweet and gentle creature. Back when I was a child, my parents would sometimes hold onto our stale bread until it filled several brown paper bags. At that point we’d head to Lake Carnegie, usually on an overcast Fall day, and break and toss the bread out to the water fowl. Those outings, marked by grey, brown, and sepia tones, always felt like stepping into an old photograph. The challenge was making sure the bread made it to the ducks, not those damn seagulls, whose loud flapping and cawing would disrupt the lakeside peace, and who often grabbed the bread straight from the ducks’ poor, unsuspecting bills. The seagull is an annoying and cruel creature.
Speaking of cruelty, what the French do to ducks is simply inhumane. If you haven’t heard of it, gavage, the method of feeding ducks raised for foie gras, entails regularly forcing a tube down their throats to feed them until their livers grow fat enough, over a 20-day period. In 2019, when the practice led New York to ban foie gras from its menus, the Frenchman in me felt a pang of shame and wounded pride. My culture’s treatment of animals, and with it, one of my favorite delicacies growing up, had been called out as immoral. To make matters worse, it had been called out as such in my own hometown, one of the world’s greatest culinary cities. At first, I felt wronged, and that an aspect of my culture had been profoundly misunderstood by sanctimonious Americans. But then I thought back to the gentle ducks at Carnegie Lake. Facts are facts: I simply can’t get behind the idea of force-feeding a defenseless animal like that.
It’s a shame that it causes so much suffering, because foie gras is a food worthy of gods. An adequate description I’ve heard is “duck butter,” though that doesn’t capture quite how refined it can be in all of its preparations: served cold with gingerbread and fig jam, sautéed with plum sauce, or shaved into a mound of pink snow. Its texture and richness in flavor set it apart, in my opinion, as the finest meat product there is, although it comes at a terrible ethical cost.
What if there was another way? What if we could produce fat duck livers free of suffering? Well, I’ve thought of something.
I’m not talking about lab-grown foie gras, though I’d definitely eat that. I’m talking about raising the ducks the American way. And I’m not talking about factory farming them either. I’m talking about giving the ducks freedom.
Let them eat whatever they want. Give them abundance: acorns, bread, Doritos. If they want to party and get drunk, give them fermented berries. Hack their reward system! They need not even be captive: sell it as “Wild Foie Gras.” Lure them in with the most mesmerizing of treats so that even the wildest fowl cannot resist flocking to the farm to grow fat — entirely of their own accord.
What happens at the farm, stays at the farm. The ducks eat and pack on pounds until they no longer can move, and when they no longer can move, they receive state-of-the-art end-of-life care. In exchange for all this, they sign a devil’s bargain: a tacit agreement to someday donate their liver to the greater culinary good. Et voilà: one hundred percent suffering-free foie gras.
When I described the above hypothetical to a French friend of mine, he protested: he would much rather endure the savage practice of gavage than this manipulative American-style madness. It didn’t matter how happy it made the ducks, because at least on a French farm he’d have the agency to resist, however futile that resistance came to be. I told him that was perhaps the Frenchest take I’d ever heard.
But I do agree, the scheme is undeniably messed up, and perhaps its evil hints at what’s wrong with the American brand of freedom. Strangely though, the method isn’t far from how they make foie gras in Barcelona, where ducks roam freely and feed themselves by plucking at acorns strewn in the grass. They’re even fed all-American corn to get their livers plump and yellow. Then in their last dying moment, they are transfixed by a glowing light meant to hypnotize them, as the farmers draw them in with spotlights before administering the final blow. They're dead before they know it.
Maybe that sounds nice to you, maybe that sounds kind of dark. In either case, it’s a slow process that might take a while to take over the foie gras industry, even though there’s plenty of demand:
He sells every gram of foie gras he makes — and there's quite a long waiting list. A small jar costs €200 (about $220), because it's produced only once a year — from about 1,600 geese every autumn — which allows for the natural re-population of his flock, and plenty of food for the others. He takes only what nature allows.
With all that said, my money says our best shot at decoupling suffering from foie gras will be growing it in a lab:
I hope you enjoyed this! I’m now planning a series of posts based on an idea I saw on X: “biological accelerationism,” or “bio/acc” for short (inspired by effective accelerationism). It’s quite compelling to me as an ideological brand. Among others, its central goal would be improving carbon-based intelligence like that of humans and dolphins, in order to cement carbon-based intelligence as the dominant form of intelligence on Earth. More generally, it would advocate for helping the natural world compete and contend with a world dominated by man-made technology.
In other words, vaccine research is bio/acc, cetacean bioacoustics is bio/acc, and de-extinction is bio/acc. CRISPR is bio/acc, permaculture is bio/acc, and terraforming is bio/acc. Life extension is bio/acc, xenotransplantation is bio/acc, and brain-computer interfaces are bio/acc. Climate engineering is bio/acc, daisugi is bio/acc, and yes, lab-grown meat is bio/acc.