Love 'er or Liver-Foie Gras
An Unlikely Delicacy Gains F(l)avor in America

By Mitchell Davis

Americans are arguably the most squeamish eaters in the world, particularly
when it comes to meat, offal, and other animal-derived products. Even
though most of our ancestors came from places known for delicacies made
with myriad animal parts, as a nation we have grown to revile any overt
suggestion that what we eat ever lived, let alone that it had a heart,
kidneys, or any other organ. In response, modern food producers have all
but removed any supporting evidence to the contrary. Contrast the
shrink-wrapped Styrofoam packages of skinless and boneless chicken breasts
common in the meat departments of American supermarkets to the feathered
game birds hanging in French butcher shops or the colorful displays of
animal brains, hearts, and heads in open-air Mexican markets.
        A growing aversion to fat has made a larger number of
animal-derived foods unpalatable. Not even the market for America's
favorite meat, beef, has been able to escape this trend. Although from a
quality standpoint U.S. Prime grades of beef are considered superior
because they have a higher proportion of intramuscular fat-called
"marbling" in the industry-according to the National Association of Meat
Purveyors' Meat Buyers Guide, U.S. Select grades have become more expensive
precisely because they have less visible fat (XIV). Moreover, nutritionists
and the media have turned the consumption of excessive fat into a sign of
personal weakness (Visser 99).
        Lately, American meat eating patterns have also been sensitive to
trends in popular ethics and morality. According to statistics from the
American Meat Institute, the vivid image of anemic calves chained to fences
in order to produce tender, snow-white veal has caused a serious decline in
per capita veal consumption over the last ten years (47). Buzz words such
as "organic" and "free-range," though lacking meaningful official
definitions, enable purveyors to charge inflated prices for otherwise
ordinary cuts of meat because people view them as being not only more
flavorful, but more humane. Ethical vegetarianism is on the rise (Madison
2).
        Given this finicky, meat-hostile environment, how odd that a
nascent foie gras industry should take hold in the United States. Foie gras
is the extraordinarily fattened liver of a force-fed duck or goose-a
combination of characteristics that would make any American marketer
cringe. But in just ten years since serious foie gras production began in
the United States, the delicacy has found its way onto almost every fine
restaurant menu across the country. In a recent "Critic's Notebook" in the
New York Times, restaurant critic Ruth Reichl noted, "the 90s are the time
of foie gras" (F1). The newly revised Joy of Cooking, perhaps the
quintessential American cookbook, includes a section on cleaning and
preparing this once-obscure, French delicacy (730-1). Production at Hudson
Valley Foie Gras, the largest producer in the world, consistently falls
short of demand (Ginor). Even though in aggregate numbers, the amount of
foie gras produced and consumed in the United States compared to countries
with a tradition of foie gras production and consumption is very small,
there is no question that American diners are hungry for fat liver.
        The ready acceptance of foie gras into the American restaurant-for
it is still far from common in the American home-is the result of a
combination of inherent qualities and implied meanings associated with the
production and consumption of the unnaturally fattened liver. Surely
keeping the French name and obscuring the method of production eliminate
some of the stigma and actual disgust that would be associated with eating
it. But the inherent qualities of the delicacy itself keep people coming
back for more. They include an unparalleled richness and subtlety of flavor
that is reminiscent of butter and custard and an impressive adaptability
and ease of preparation that encourage chefs to use it in everything from
the pizza pictured in Reichl's New York Times article, to the pot-sticker
dumplings served at Philadelphia's Susanna Foo restaurant. Rare is the
person who tries foie gras and doesn't like it.
        Moreover, the implied meanings associated with the production and
consumption of foie gras are what motivate people to ignore societal
pressure and actually put the cholesterol-rich liver in their mouths. These
implied meanings include all of those associated with the consumption of
expensive luxury foods in general, such as positive reflections on status,
class, and refinement. But like the livers themselves, the meanings
associated with foie gras consumption are richer than those of foods such
as truffles and Champagne, which are expensive, acquired tastes, but the
consumption of which has little or no element of morality or disgust. Liver
aside, fat is the very essence of foie gras: how it gets there, how it
tastes, and what it means to eat it. Reichl calls foie gras "the ultimate
guilty pleasure," noting that "each bite is a little bit of sin." Her
observations suggest the real reason foie gras has been able to gain favor
in a country positioned to reject it: by eating foie gras, people are in
effect saying that the time has come to indulge.
Liver Lore

The history of foie gras begins in ancient Egypt, where 2500 years before
Christ, slaves force-fed figs to geese to fatten them for roasting. In
fact, scenes depicted on the walls of the tomb of Ti, a first counselor to
the pharaoh from Saqqarah, show the force-feeding process in detail
(Serventi 66). Although the livers of these birds must have swelled with
fat, there is no proof that the fattened livers were prized until the
arduous process was practiced by the ancient Greeks (Serventi 69). In turn,
the Greeks are thought to have taught the Romans to appreciate foie gras,
who considered the delicacy a necessity at almost every extravagant banquet
(Serventi 69). In what is generally considered to be history's first
cookbook, Apicii decem libri cui dicuntur de re coquinaria from the fifth
century, the roman gourmet Apicius included a recipe for roasted foie gras,
ficatum jecur (Peterson 105). Though sketchy, evidence exists that foie
gras production and consumption continued around the Mediterranean
throughout the Middle Ages (Serventi 71).
        The birth of the modern foie gras industry dates back to the
Renaissance, when written accounts of the Ancients' love of the rich
delicacy were enough to convince Renaissance humanists to experiment with
foie gras production and preparation (Peterson 94). Renaissance thinkers,
such as Jean-Baptiste Bruyerin in France and Francis Bacon in England,
referred scholars and culinarians to techniques for making and cooking foie
gras that appeared in the texts of Pliny, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Galen,
Palladius, and Porta (Peterson 94-5). In Bartolomeo Scappi's seminal
culinary text, Opera, from 1570, the Italian cookbook author gives an
impressive amount of detail on how to prepare fattened goose livers
(Serventi 75). Recipes such as the one in François Pierre de La Varenne's
Cuisinier François, written in 1651, demonstrate that the fattened liver
was prized, if only because of the suggestion that it be served with other
rarities, such as truffles and asparagus (Peterson 106). According to
Andrew Coe, a historian currently working on an article about the role Jews
played French foie gras history, foie gras production took hold in France,
particularly in Alsace and Gascony, and Hungary, because the technique of
obtaining beautifully fattened goose livers was perfected by Jewish farmers
who, limited by their religious aversion to pork, raised geese and other
kosher game.
        By the time Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote his Physiology of
Taste in 1826, foie gras had already earned its place in that exclusive
category of French culinary treasures. One of the "Gastronomical Tests" to
"awaken, in a well-balanced man, all his gustatory powers" recounted by
Brillat-Savarin involves the presentation of "a veritable Gibraltar of
Strasbourg [foie gras] pâté" (177).

Duck, Duck, Goose

Until recently, most foie gras was produced in a traditional manner, not
much different from the technique used in Apicius's day. According to Izzy
Yanay, vice president of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, geese or ducks-the
preferred Moulard cross of a Pekin female with a Barbary male has been the
standard for 30 years-are raised to about 12 weeks, when they begin the
force-feeding process or gavage. Since the mid-19th century the birds are
fed a diet of corn (cheaper and more effective than figs, anywhere from two
to four times a day for 15 to 30 days. At the end of the feeding process,
determined when the birds cannot digest anymore corn, the birds are
slaughtered. The liver, which normally weighs anywhere from two to four
ounces, swells with fat up to two pounds by the time the birds arrive at
the abattoir. Almost every part of the animal is used: the legs are sold
for the production of confit, the breast or magret is sold for grilling or
roasting, the fat is rendered and clarified, the tongue, feet, and
testicles are popular in Asian cooking. The feathers are used for down. The
entrails are turned into fertilizer.
        France is by far the largest producer and consumer of foie gras,
with thousands of farmers producing some 14,000 tons per year, a number
that Yanay believes may be even twice that high when all of the foie gras
that never makes it to an official commercial market is taken into account.
Although historically goose foie gras was preferred, the switch to the
moulard duck cross and new feeding technologies have caused the industry to
shift (Villemur). About 80 percent of French foie gras production is now
duck. In addition, France imports almost all of the other foie gras
produced in the world-in Hungary, Bulgaria, Israel, and Poland-roughly
2,500 tons (Serventi 171). Most foie gras in France is processed into
either mi-cuit terrines (semicooked), or canned products (bloc, pâté, or
entier). Some French prefer to eat it raw. By contrast, the two producers
in the United States produce approximately 120 tons per year, almost all of
which is consumed fresh, but cooked (usually pan-seared) in American
restaurants.

Fat Chance

Although the charming postcards of elderly Gascon women sitting on stools
surrounded by geese awaiting their morning feeding have been favorite
mementos for Americans who have traveled to France, in theory, everything
about foie gras, from what it is to how it is produced to how it is eaten,
should disgust Americans. Paul Rozin and April Fallon consider disgust a
food-related emotion, defining it as "revulsion at the prospect of oral
incorporation of offensive objects" (23). Of all foods American children
find disgusting in this visceral way, liver probably rates highest among
them. Calling liver "the nadir of home cooking, the worst dish any mother
ever made," GQ restaurant critic Alan Richman declared, "no other food has
so often made kids cry" (146). Though chicken livers are generally
considered less revolting than beef and pork liver, Calvin Schwabe notes
that "the same prejudices against eating any liver generally apply to fowl
livers, namely the very idea of eating the innards of an animal or the
'different' taste" (225).
        In part, foie gras, "fat liver," has been able to overcome the
general American population's aversion to fat and to liver because the term
invariably remains untranslated into English. Although the word for any
liver in French actually derives from the Latin phrase for foie gras, jecur
ficatum (Schindler 12), any relationship between foie gras and liver in
English is obscured by the use of the French terminology. In other
cultures, which do not have such a strong aversion to eating animal organs,
foie gras is readily translated. Fegato grasso incites no evidence of
disgust in Italians who enjoy foie gras even though they know what it
means.
        The use of the French words also adds an allure to foie gras, a
literal je ne sais quois, that entices people to try it. The French have
long been considered the "supreme arbiters of Western cooking" (Peterson
xiii). With some coercion it is possible to get Americans who have had
experience eating in France to admit that in the hands of French cooks,
some "disgusting" foods can even be made to taste good. This
linguistic-culinary switcheroo is not unique to luxury foods. As Jack Goody
notes, the roots of the English words for barnyard animals-cow and pig, for
example-are generally Anglo-Saxon, while the corresponding words for the
meat they produce derive from French-beef and pork (Goody 135).
        The taste of foie gras is perhaps the single most important factor
that helps overcome what should be the general population's aversion to it.
Foie gras has none of the gamy, "different" taste associated with liver
that Schwabe says makes people prefer eating more innocuous things, such as
white-meat chicken. Reichl describes watching a friend eat foie gras for
the first time: "We were in a fancy restaurant, but she was in another
world. 'Oooh,' she began to moan. 'This is so good!' Her face went pink
with pleasure. 'Oh, oh, oh, it feels fabulous. Why have I spent my whole
life without this?'"(F1). My personal experience watching my sister,
Carrie, who is known to wretch just at the thought of anything with an
aggressive flavor or smell, eat foie gras for the first time in a
restaurant in France was virtually the same.
        The elevated price of foie gras also surely entices some people to
try it by making foie gras consumption a symbol of class. Getting so much
fat into a liver is an arduous, costly process. By the time the foie gras
reaches its full size, the prize has climbed from $0.99 per pound to
upwards of $80 per pound. As Roland Barthes explains, the only foods that
signify something in themselves are "deluxe items such as salmon, caviar,
truffles, whose preparation is less important than their absolute cost"
(22). By extension foie gras eaters are rich and sophisticated, worldly and
daring. Even if they can't pronounce it, they know about France and French
food. And although one of the goals of the American producers has been to
try to change the popular belief that foie gras is only appropriate for the
most expensive French restaurants, people eating foie gras pizza are in
effect practicing a kind of reverse snobbism. Drinking Champagne everyday
with orange juice for breakfast doesn't make the costly sparkling wine any
less extravagant, it only raises the stakes.
        Still, there are other expensive, seemingly "disgusting" French
delicacies that have never caught on in America, despite untranslated names
and more humane methods of production-boudin noir (blood sausage) and pied
de porc (pigs' feet) for example. With a nod to Claude Levi-Strauss, what
makes foie gras both good to eat and good to think is fat.

Fat Ideas

Fat gives foie gras its great taste, and it also gives foie gras much of
its meaning. At the end of the force-feeding process, the duck or goose
liver is approximately 85 percent fat (Yanay). Even though foie gras is
just the liver of a bird that would otherwise be reviled and/or discarded,
the fat is what causes it to transcend the category of organ meats and
enter the realm of delicacies. Fat is also what makes the consumption of
foie gras a social statement. Visser notes that "our sedentary lives and
access to various alternative sources of calories have induced in us a
shudder at the thought of the unctuous and quivery lumps of fat for which
Homer's gods lusted" (99). But when it comes to foie gras, nobody seems to
mind. Eating foie gras takes us back to the prenutritionist days of Homer
and enables us in a small way to commune with his gods.
        The fat in foie gras is largely what makes eating it a sin. "Foods
known to be fattening tend to be widely liked, not disliked," notes Stephen
Mennell in All Manners of Food (301). But in the midst of societal pressure
to exercise self-control over the consumption of empty or extraneous
calories, the eater of foie gras is giving Julia Child's famous "food
police" their ultimate high-speed chase. Fat is forbidden, fat is
indulgent. According to Warren Belasco, "Fat [is] itself a long-standing
metaphor for bourgeois affluence, softness, and corruption" (34).
        An inherent contradiction is that fat also makes foie gras creamy
white, elevating the ordinary liver from the dirty cavity of guts to a
higher moral culinary ground. White is good, pure, sacred, especially in
the realm of food, where, by the process of ingestion, what we eat is what
we become (Mintz 86). Butter poses the same dilemma: the color, the taste,
everything about it makes consuming it appealing, except that these days to
eat so much blatant fat is considered a immoral (Visser 99). But as we
continue to eat sinful but pure seeming butter, so those who know about
foie gras continue to eat it. In fact, they crave more.
        The way that fat gets into the foie gras only contributes to the
blasphemy of ingesting it. Despite Abraham Hayward's absolution, "A true
gastronome is as insensitive to suffering as is a conqueror" (qtd. in
Mennell: 306),  these days the supposed inhumane treatment of animals is
known to cause serious indigestion. True, the process of storing excess fat
in the liver occurs naturally in migratory waterfowl, who use the reserves
of energy for their long flights. But watching a gaveur force-feed a duck
until it can't hold any more with a plastic funnel and a plunger or a tube
attached to a computerized tank doesn't seem the way Mother Nature intended
things to be. For the record, after several in-depth investigations, the
gavage process has been deemed humane both by the United States Department
of Agriculture and the European Economic Community, whose inquiries were in
reaction to pressure from ecologists and animal rights groups such as
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) (Ginor; Villemur).
Regardless, knowing that someone went to such pains to get all of that
taboo fat into foie gras makes eating it even more alluring and symbolic.

Fat of the Land

According to Michael Ginor, vice president of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the
future of foie gras production in the United States is not certain. The
number of people who have ever heard of foie gras, let alone eat it
regularly, though growing consistently, remains almost negligible. Pressure
from ecologists and animal rights groups will likely increase as more
people become familiar with the delicacy. Unlike in France, where a long
tradition of foie gras has bread a substantial industry that comprises
thousands of farmers, distributors, retailers, and consumers, not many
people would miss foie gras in the United States if production were
suddenly stopped.
        Still, Americans are slowly discovering a taste they didn't know
they had. Pierre Bourdieu asserts that "the tastes actually realized depend
on the state of the system of goods offered; every change in the system of
goods induces a change in taste" (231). Fischler holds that the formation
of taste is a convergence of many factors, including, but not limited to
the myriad elements of flavor, preferences, and aversions (89). In the case
of foie gras, a food rich in both flavor and meaning that was hardly
available even ten years ago, the speed with which that change has taken
place has been has been phenomenal, if only among a select few.
        But that select few may be the single most important assurance that
American foie gras is here to stay. The way Sidney Mintz explains that the
king's ability to consume sugar was one way he reinforced his power (12),
the people who regularly dine in the restaurants where foie gras is served
will likely want to preserve as much evidence of their power as they can.
That evidence is getting harder to come by in this post-modern world, where
everything means so much and consequently so little. More than almost any
other luxury food-Mintz submits, caviar, fresh abalone, or fine wine-foie
gras has the ability to beg current cultural trends that many find somewhat
unsettling and even unappetizing. Take a slice of brioche, grab a glass of
Sauternes, and let the indulgence begin.


Works Cited

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19 Nov. 1997 and 11 Dec. 1997.

Mitchell Davis
Director of Publications
The James Beard Foundation