No foie gras was served at the banquet for Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy at Windsor Castle last week, which was hardly surprising, since the Prince of Wales, who was very much in evidence, had recently joined the swelling ranks of those who regard the force-feeding of ducks and geese as a barbaric practice.
In February it was revealed that Prince Charles had banned foie gras from his table and had even decided to review the royal warrant given to his local delicatessen, the House of Cheese at Tetbury near Highgrove, because it offered it for sale.
Perhaps the French President hadn’t been told about this; but if he had, he might well have regarded the Prince’s stand as a provocation, given France’s fierce pride in its incomparable national delicacy.
France not only produces about 75 per cent of all the foie gras eaten in the world, it has also, in a motion passed by the National Assembly, declared it to be a ‘cultural and gastronomic patrimony protected in France’ — warning everyone that no amount of pressure will stop it producing it.
The pressure has been intensifying in recent years, and not only from predictable sources such as Brigitte Bardot and other animal rights activists. New laws banning the production of foie gras have been sweeping the world.
It is now illegal in 16 countries, including Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Israel and the Netherlands (where the Dutch royal family had stopped eating it before Prince Charles got the idea). The European Union, too, is calling for less cruelty in its production.
In the United States, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (reportedly after being lobbied by Sir Paul McCartney) has banned the sale or production of foie gras in California, as have the city authorities in Chicago. Even Pope Benedict XVI has said that the force-feeding of geese ‘in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible’ is ‘degrading’ and ‘seems to me to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible’.
Nevertheless, I was surprised by Prince Charles’s decision, for in some respects foie gras is the sort of foodstuff of which he might be expected to approve. There is nothing genetically modified about it. There are no chemicals or growth hormones involved in its production. And the best of it is made on small family farms by stout French peasants, whose way of life he so admires.
The Prince, being a traditionalist, might also be impressed by the antiquity of the process. The force-feeding of geese was practised by the ancient Egyptians, though according to Jeffrey Steingarten, the learned American food writer, ‘their purpose was most likely to obtain nice fat geese for the table, not fat livers’.
It was, says Steingarten, the Romans who first got excited about the goose’s liver: Pliny the Elder, writing at about the time of Christ, referred in his Natural History to its ‘excellence’, writing that ‘stuffing the bird with food makes the liver grow to a great size, and also when it has been removed, it is made larger by being soaked in milk sweetened with honey’. The Romans entrusted the task of force-feeding geese to their Jewish slaves; and it was the Jews who kept the practice alive during the Dark and Middle Ages and brought it with them when they migrated to France and Germany.
As Steingarten points out, it is perfectly possible that Jesus Christ may have eaten foie gras. But there is no evidence in the Bible that he did, and so lacking any divine approval of the practice, we must decide for ourselves whether it is acceptable.
The central question is, of course, how much suffering is caused to the birds by the business of force-feeding — or gavage, as the French call it. This involves pushing corn through a tube down their throats, and doing this four times a day during the last few weeks of their lives.
This can increase the size of their livers by up to ten times and leave them waddling about, with their bellies touching the ground. I have never witnessed the procedure, but it is hardly an attractive idea, and it isn’t surprising that many people should find it revolting and inhumane.
It is, however, curious that it should concern them so much more than other forms of animal ill-treatment that are crueller and carried out on a far larger scale. The producers of foie gras will tell you that their ducks and geese are contented, that they queue up eagerly to be force-fed and that, because their throats are flexible and have no gag reflex, they suffer no pain.
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Even so, none of the scientific or medical studies carried out so far has found much evidence of distress among the birds that have been force-fed — certainly nothing compared to the distress suffered by, say, battery chickens.
And even if the force-feeding of geese is cruel, it is not at least gratuitously cruel. It is carried out with reluctance as the only sure way to produce one of the world’s greatest gastronomic delights.
Compare it, for example, with hunting with hounds or pheasant-shooting, two sports in which Prince Charles in his time has enthusiastically indulged. You can’t eat a fox, and while pheasants are, of course, edible, that’s not why people shoot them: it is for the fun of the kill. Of the 15 million pheasants bred for shooting last year, only a small proportion will have been eaten, and many will have died slowly after being wounded. The same sort of thing applies to fishing.
According to scientific studies, fish are just as capable of feeling pain as any hot-blooded creature, for their mouths are full of nerve ends. Yet fish, although also edible, are hooked only for the fun of it, and in most cases are returned alive to the water with mutilated mouths.
But it’s foie gras that generates all the passion. When once, in another magazine, I congratulated Mohammed Al Fayed for refusing to bow to pressure and stop selling foie gras at Harrods, I received the biggest haul of hate mail of my life. ‘Personally, I would disembowel Mr Chancellor and make him eat his own liver,’ wrote one typical correspondent.
People who object in principle to the killing or hurting of any creature for either food or sport deserve respect. But to pick on the force-feeding of geese as the greatest of man’s crimes against the animal kingdom is irrational and absurd.
Foie gras is an easy target, because it is enjoyed by a tiny minority and smacks of privilege and self-indulgence. No wonder the animal rights militants have chosen it as their casus belli. But I’m a little disappointed in Prince Charles.