It is fast becoming seen as the culinary equivalent of a fur coat, but many Israelis rely on foie gras production for a living, writes Nuala Haughey
The world's third-largest producer of fattened goose liver is facing a shutdown of the industry within months after the Israeli Supreme Court agreed with activists that force-feeding methods used to make the prized delicacy break animal cruelty laws. If a last-ditch effort by lawyers for the 600 families who make a living from foie gras production fails, the industry worth €16 million annually will be history by April.
Israel's foie gras woes are part of a gathering global trend against the rich buttery product which 19th-century French gourmand Brillat-Savarin declared as "the essence of fine dining", but which is fast becoming seen as the gastronomic equivalent of a fur coat.
A gaggle of European countries to have banned the production of foie gras includes Ireland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and the UK, while the EU has asked the industry to explore more humane methods. In the US, California has banned the production and sale of foie gras after 2012, while legislation regulating it has been introduced in four other states, including New York. France, the world's largest producer, has felt its industry sufficiently threatened for the National Assembly to declare last year that foie gras is part of the nation's protected "cultural and gastronomic patrimony".
Foie gras - literally fat liver - is made by force-feeding corn to ducks or geese several times a day through pipes inserted down their throats, causing their livers to grow to many times their normal size within weeks. Animal rights campaigners maintain that the feeding process is a form of torture.
Silver Geese Farms in northern Israel is the largest of the country's two foie gras producers which churn out 450 tonnes of kosher liver annually, some 60 per cent of which is exported to the Far East and Europe. At a hatchery producing fowls for Silver Geese Farms, hundreds of honking birds dart around in open-air pens. The beaks of the female birds are snipped, to prevent them nipping other mating females, explains Zweeka Shalev (49), a partner in the company.
Shalev admits his industry has an image problem - literally in the case of photographs of geese being restrained while feeding tubes are rammed down their throats. "It's true we take a goose and give him the food and it looks like we force him, but after a day or two when we do this to him, and we put the feeding machine near him, he goes to it voluntarily. Of course, it doesn't look good and they [ animal rights activists] win because who cares about a few farmers? It's not like we're farming chickens the public buy daily."
Foie gras producers say that over-feeding merely exploits the evolved features of migratory birds which are adapted to storing large amounts of food. At a family-run force-feeding farm supplying fattened geese to Shalev's company, owner Sufia Ugbarya displays the thumb-width metal tube through which the feed of corn meal mixed with water is pumped into the birds' stomachs. A new batch of geese is being prepared for the start of the three-week fattening period, when they will be fed four to five times a day prior to slaughter. A shutdown of Israel's foie gras industry would mean financial ruin for this family from the Arab-Israeli city of Um al-Fahm. "It's like somebody in the family has got cancer. Everybody prays to his God to have another year or maybe two or three to cancel this bad news," says Shalev.
The landmark court ruling outlawing current force-feeding methods in Israel dates back to August 2003 and followed a hard- hitting campaigning by animal protection organisations. Subsequent efforts by the agriculture ministry to obtain a three-year stay to allow state scientists to devise more humane feeding methods failed at cabinet level last October, paving the way for the feeding ban to take effect in April. However, the producers have returned to court in a bid to compel the authorities to test gentler feeding methods involving shorter tubes made of silicone instead of metal, as well as briefer fattening periods involving a third less food.
Yosef Leza, of Foie Gras Export, says pilots of these methods have already shown positive results, with fowl mortality levels reduced from 6 per cent to between 1 and 2 per cent. "We push them much less but we get better results because the liver is a little bit smaller but the expense to us is reduced, so we can live with that," he says. "We did tests of this method and we found the geese were in a better physical condition. You can see it from their eyes and we are sure that blood tests will show they have less stress [ hormones]." A second system Israel's industry has developed involves massaging the geese's necks while feeding a liquid concentration of food using a short pipe which does not enter the oesophagus at all.
Leza, whose father-in-law, a Hungarian Jew, established his business in Israel 50 years ago, insists the industry will not become extinct. His company is already exploring moving its fattening farms to Jordan, or Cyprus or Bulgaria, where animal rights campaigners have not spread their wings, yet.
