NYC NOW - The Duck Stops Here: The Long Fight Over Foie Gras in New York

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Upstate New York is home to the country's last two foie gras (fatty duck liver) farms, even though New York City banned the sale of foie gras back in 2019. The ban's never actually been enforced, and now it's headed to the state's highest court. WNYC's Walter Wuthmann drove up to the Hudson Valley to see the force feeding process for himself, and talked us through the perspective of the farmers who say they've been unfairly targeted, as well as the animal rights advocates who've spent decades trying to shut them down.Photo: Walter WuthmannGot any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] York bodegas join grocery giants' push to sell wine, liquorMamdani says NYC will investigate every tenant heat complaint starting this October Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm NYC Now producer Eurek Panobi in Fricenei Pier. Even people who have no problem ordering chicken or bacon or, you know, steak off a menu, they get a little squeamish about the thought of force-fed ducks. The sale of foie gras was banned in New York City in 2019. But now some farmers are arguing that that ban violates state agricultural policy in a lawsuit that may be headed to the state's highest court. On today's episode, we take a look at one of those farms.

But first, here's what's going on in the city. New York Governor Kathy Hockel says she wants the federal government to step up and regulate AI companies. The Democratic governor says New York is implementing a law that requires AI companies to quickly disclose any safety breaches committed by their models. New York and California both passed laws requiring AI companies to disclose their safety procedures. But Hockel says more needs to be done. Because it can't just be New York, can't just be California. It can't just be a handful of governors. We need a national and global strategy.

The governor is calling for action as world leaders and President Trump gather in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. President Trump says he'll appoint a task force and an AI czar to monitor the industry without imposing new regulations. The Republican president says existing laws are adequate to address any misconduct by AI companies. Could Wegman's Walmart or Target start selling you a bottle of wine with your groceries? A coalition of grocers, retailers, and now bodegas is pushing Governor Kathy Hokel in Albany to make that happen. Right now, state law says liquor can only be sold at New York's roughly 4,000 licensed

liquor stores. This isn't the group's first attempt to changing this law. Past efforts have stalled due to pushback from liquor store owners, who say, allowing grocery stores to sell wine and now hard liquor, could put them out of business. Starting on October 1st, the city says it'll investigate every single heat complaint. Up until now, officials could close out multiple complaints from the same building without looking into each one. Mayor Mamdani says he came up again and again at this year's rental rip-off hearings. And that is a result of tenants coming forward at these hearings and saying, for me, one of the quickest ways to feel relief, if that is what you're interested in, is to ensure that I have heat. You can read more about these stories and more on our news site, gothamist.com.

Up next, Jenae speaks with WNYC reporter Walter Withman, about what he saw at a foie gras farm in upstate New York. Warning, this episode contains descriptions of ducks being force-fed, which some listeners may find disturbing. The New York City Council banned the sale of foie gras in 2019. That's the fatty liver produced by force-feeding geese and ducks. It's a staple of fine dining and French cuisine. But the ban's been tied up in litigation ever since and has never actually been enforced. The New York Court of Appeals is now considering taking up the case. That's the state's highest court.

And they'll have the final say. Just two and a half hours north of the city are the country's last two remaining Fogra farms. The Hudson Valley farms say that if the ban goes through, losing access to the New York City market will decimate their business and cause them to close. They say they've been unfairly maligned while factory farms continue feeding hundreds of millions of Americans. WMYC's Walter Woodman took a trip to the Hudson Valley earlier this summer to meet some of the Fagra farmers. Hey, Walter. Hey, Jena. Tell us what Fagra is and how we got here in the first place. Yeah, it is the fatty liver of ducks. and geese that have been force-fed by hand. People have actually been eating foie gras for centuries. I'm Marcus Henley. Marcus Henley, who's the manager of that Hudson Valley foie gras farm, he told me that it goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.

Hunters would find waterfowl during migration, and they would have a liver that was three times the normal size, and it was delicious. And the reason it's three times the normal size, size is because these waterfowl naturally gorge before a long migration to store up energy. But the Egyptians wanted to learn to, you know, create this delicious liver in their domestic geese. And they started forcefeeding them with stuffed figs. Over the centuries, the practice evolved.

French farmers started using these big metal funnels. And you might have seen pictures of this, but it's big metal funnels that go down the goose's throat that they would pour grain, you know, down into their throat. stomach. They called this process gavage, which means to stuff or to fill. But the practice looks very different now on a modern farm. I hope so. I mean, that sounds really inhumane. How does the farm in Hudson Valley do it? Well, to show me, I met this farmer, Marcus Freeman. Hello. And we started in this room full of ducklings. These are ducklings. These are ducklings. These are ducklings. So that's where we start. It was pretty striking to see these 6,000 little

yellow ducklings scattered across this sawdust floor. Did you pet some of them? I didn't pet them. Seems like it would be hard not to. I was outside of their pen. And I mean, they're very cute. And the ducklings live here for four weeks until they're about three pounds. Then they move next door to another barn, which is larger.

It's about the size of a football field. They live in this barn for about two months. They free roam and eat and drink freely. They're not being forced fed at this point. But they grow really, really. really fast. Once they get to be about nine pounds, that's when they move to the last barn for gavage. Okay, so that's when the force feeding starts. Yes, and I did observe this process. This is finely ground corn mixed with water. The ducks are kept in groups of ten and open-topped

pens. They're fed by hand through these big metal machines that shoot a slurry of ground corn and water through a tube. So start one, two, three, four. So we do that three times a day. So the feeding process takes 12 seconds. The worker sits in the pen with the ducks on a low stool. He's got the hose tube in one hand, and then he grabs the ducks by the other, pulls him over, sticks the tube down the bird's throat.

Do the ducks look like they're in paint? You know, it's, I don't want to anthropoporpe. morphifies, but just my kind of common sense observation, it does not look natural. I was expecting it to look worse. Like I was expecting flapping and honking and squawking and a lot of resistance. And it's not that. It's a more clinical efficient process. But they do struggle when they're being held.

You know, the worker does have to grab them by the neck, pull them in, put the tube down their throat. Once the tube is in their throat, they kind of freeze in place. And as you could hear Henley describing it, it's like a one, two, three, done. But, you know, this is more than they would normally eat. They are not choosing to participate in this process. It is unnatural and uncomfortable to watch. I found it hard to watch.

Doesn't sound like it's better than gavage, but I've never seen or heard that either. Well, Henley maintains that this is not cruel. I'm not trying to justify the feeding process because it's short. I justify it by watching the behavior of the birds. If it were 12 seconds of torture, it's not okay. But it's not. He also says he thinks it's unfair that foie gras farms get all this attention compared to factory farm, chicken, beef, and pork.

We've got about a billion chickens a week each week in the United States, and you've got maybe 7,000 Fagra ducks across the whole country. It's ludicrous. So you feel that this, it's a small industry, a bit of an artisan industry, that's a target, a political target because it's easy to shut down. That's your thesis. That is absolutely correct. And he thinks it's because there's only two of these farms left in the entire United States. They don't have a lot of resources. They definitely don't have a powerful lobby in Congress protecting them. They sort of see themselves

as an easy target for these animal rights campaigns, you know, that these bans are something they can actually legislate and pass. And they think that these animal rights groups are being hypocritical by, you know, spending so much time and attention on these small farms rather than the larger issue. I think it's no surprise, though, Walter, that animal rights groups aren't a fan of this. What's their argument against foie gras? Well, they say that it is just cruel and inhumane on its face. You only need to see videos or pictures of the process to kind of arrive at that conclusion. It is cruelty at its absolute finest.

I spoke to Julie Capiello, who's the president of voters for animal rights, and her organization was really influential in pushing the city council to pass this ban back in 2019. And now we're waiting on the decision of, you know, can Hudson Valley Fla Gra and Ken LaBelle Farm actually appeal this. And she pushes back on that point the farmers made to me about factory farming. It's not picking on a small industry. It's fighting the cruelest of forms. of animal exploitation. The point is cruelty is cruelty, and it should be opposed wherever it is.

She was very clear they opposed factory farming as well, but they've had a lot more success with these smaller targeted foie gras campaigns. Since the New York City ban passed in 2019, Pittsburgh has passed one, Portland, Oregon has passed one, Brookline, Massachusetts, among others. Coming up, whether foie gras stays banned in New York City might not come down to cruelty at all. It could come down to a fight between New York City and New York State. That's up next. Welcome back to NYC now.

Before the break, Walter went up to the last two foie gras farms in the country, watched force-feeding firsthand, and heard both sides, the farmers who say they're being unfairly singled out, and animal rights groups who say it's just cruelty, plain and simple. Now, here's where it actually gets decided, the courts. So let's go to the Court of Appeals. They'll have the final say in this. What's their case?

Where do they stand? So the duck farms have asked this high court to take up the ban for final appeal. And they have allies with the New York Commissioner of Agriculture and State Attorney General Letitia James. Back in 2022, right when this ban was actually going to be enforced, the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets came out with as ruling saying that the local ban violated state law. So basically the city can't say what someone else outside of the city can do. Right. There's a provision in state farm law that says local cities and towns can't make a policy that's going to have a negative economic impact on certain agricultural zones unless it's for public health or safety. And the foie gras ban is not about public health or

safety. It's about animal welfare. So just super plain terms, New York City cannot make a law that's going to upstate farms. So New York City said, yes, we can. They sued in court, a lower court, the Albany County court, they sided with the state and the duck farms saying, no, the state law protects them from this ban. That went up to a middle appellate court. They sided with the city. So these are the arguments they're going to be up against each other at the court of appeals. They haven't officially taken it up yet. Again, it's a bit of, you know, a legal process. But given that there's a split decision at the lower courts and given the really high amount of attention on this issue, it really seems that they're going to take this up, probably within the year.

But why has this taken so long? I mean, the city council voted on this in 2019. Courts, Janay. Courts this long? Oh, yeah. All right. So which way is the court going in this city versus state legal fight? Both sides feel really confident in their arguments. Here's Julie cap yellow from voters for animal rights. We have every hope that the appellate court ruling from March will stand, and we will continue fighting for an end of the sale of Fla Gras in New York City. And on the other side, here's Marcus Henley, the manager of Hudson Valley FlaGra. The ability of a group of people to make these kinds of decisions without due process that

affect hundreds of jobs and an entire community in a rural area that needs those jobs is very disappointing, in my opinion, wrong. And I think the important thing to remember here is, you know, this case, although it's about foie gras and all of these questions that come up, it's not actually about cruelty or welfare at all. It's about this very specific provision of state law and farms and economic impact. You know, Walter, all this time. there's been one industry we haven't mentioned yet, and that's the restaurant industry.

I'm just wondering, like, where do things go from here and if you've talked to any chefs out there? I did. When the band first passed, there was a lot of resistance from French and fine dining chefs, and so I wanted to kind of check the temperature, you know, a few years later. And what I found kind of surprised me that it's actually disappearing from a lot of local menus already, despite the band not having even been enforced. I don't have foie gras on my menus currently because it doesn't sell as well. I talked to chef David Burke, who runs fine dining restaurants in Midtown and the Upper East Side,

and I called him because he'd actually hosted this four-course foie gras dinner right after the band passed, and he called it foie gone. We did a foie, patte, tuna, compancho, fraggra, truffle, ravioli with duck hunts me, and a foie gras, Wagyu, F1, Wagyu. It's a great menu. People like it. But what he's saying is, you know, these old classics like foie gras and veal and caviar, they're falling out of style. Come on now. Everybody loves a little caviar still. People like caviar, but it's expensive and people's tastes are changing and people's appetite for spending a lot of money on one meal is changing.

So he says when it comes to luxury products now and what people actually want to drop a lot of money on are things like Wagyu beef and Toro tuna. And I think there's no doubt that these. animal rights campaigns have had a lot of success. Even people who have no problem ordering chicken or bacon or, you know, steak off a menu, they get a little squeamish about the thought of force-fed ducks or baby cows that have been kept in restrictive veal crates. So even as these two sides continue to duke it out in court, as they certainly will, I think it looks like the anti-fouagra crusaders are really winning in the court of public opinion. And honestly, Walter, I mean,

which one matters the most. I'll leave that to the listeners. That's WNYC's Walter Whitman. Thanks a lot. Thank you. And thank you for listening to NYC now. I'm Jene Pierre. See you next time.