Can Ethical Foie Gras Happen in America?

Crouching in a verdant pasture in the summer sun, Eduardo Sousa plucks a few blades of grass and extends them toward a flock of geese. “Hello, my darlings,” he coos. “Hello, hello, hello.” It is the Spanish farmer’s first visit to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a farm and education center in Pocantico Hills, some 30 miles (about 50 km) north of New York City, and Sousa is impressed with what he sees. “If I lived here,” he says, reaching affectionately toward the geese, “I could make some amazing foie.”

Foie is short for foie gras, the engorged goose liver the French pioneered by force-fattening the birds with grain. But Sousa is a revolutionary of sorts: he is a producer of what he calls ethical foie gras. In western Spain’s Extremadura region, he raises geese without the force-feeding known as gavage that animal-rights activists equate with torture–and that has gotten the silky delicacy outlawed in some cities. Now he is trying to do the same thing in Westchester County, New York.

In Extremadura, the 1,000 or so geese Sousa raises each year roam freely, eating their fill of acorns and olives, on a farm that replicates the wild as closely as possible. “If you convince them that they’re not domesticated, their natural instinct takes over,” he explains. “When it turns cold and it’s time for them to migrate, they start gorging to prepare for the long flight.” The result is a fattened liver that, while smaller than conventional foie, is delicious enough to have won France’s prestigious Coup de Coeur award for innovation. “That,” Sousa likes to say, “really pissed the French off.”

But could that foie be produced elsewhere? Inspired by a January 2008 visit to Sousa’s farm, chef Dan Barber was determined to find out. Barber, who runs New York City’s Blue Hill restaurant and serves as the center’s creative director, persuaded Stone Barns’ farmers to dedicate part of their pasture to geese and feed them high-quality organic corn. But in his enthusiasm, Barber had missed the importance of letting the birds forage for their food. Accustomed to a steady supply of grain, the geese had no need to gorge when the weather turned chilly. “They were delicious,” recalls Barber. “But their livers were the size of Ping-Pong balls.” It was time to call in the Goose Whisperer.

Sousa’s visit did not begin auspiciously. For one thing, he was nearly arrested trying to clear Portuguese customs with two fresh goose livers in his carry-on (the foie gras, sadly, was confiscated). And his first stop, a duck farm in upstate New York that uses gavage, left him with nightmares featuring hordes of ducks with very long bills.

But Stone Barns, with its pastured livestock and lush vegetable gardens, inspires the Spaniard. Touring the grounds with Barber and Craig Haney, the center’s livestock manager, he repeats his verdict on the farm’s foie-producing potential.

He is considerably less sanguine, however, about the incubator in which Stone Barns hatches its chicks. In Extremadura, Sousa’s geese build nests and hatch their own eggs; incubators, in his opinion, not only result in weaker birds but also make it impossible to fool the geese into behaving as if they’re wild. “If you wanted to raise a baby Rambo, would you want him living rough out in the country or coddled in an intensive-care unit?” he asks.

Haney isn’t so easily convinced. Stone Barns may look like someone’s idyllic paean to sustainable agriculture, but it’s also a working farm, and he’s skeptical about the economics. Natural nesting means that the birds lay only one set of eggs per year–not nearly enough for an operation in which every animal must earn its keep. Also, he prefers to be scientific in his experimentation, altering one variable at a time. “Farms change in years,” he says, “not months.” For now, Stone Barns’ geese will be hatched in incubators.

Does that mean Barber will have to go another year without his own foie gras on the menu? No one will know for sure until the birds are slaughtered in late fall. But Sousa remains hopeful. “Eventually,” he says, “I know they’ll get it right.”

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