Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Foie Gras

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Foie gras means “fatty liver” in French, which makes sense because it’s made from the overripe livers of force-fed ducks and geese.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's wandering around the halls somewhere, stuffed to the gill

like a fatten goose with miso. Gross, oh yeah, that makes a fattening sound. I saw it, like she eats balls of miso, doesn't even chew them, just swallows them like a duck, and they get stored in her liver, and eventually we will kill Jerry and eat that liver, and it's gonna be delicious. I'm surprised that a miso manufacturer and distributor

hasn't, I guess they don't manufacture it, but Packager has not tried to custom brand a miso Jerry brand. It's a, I think maybe we should do that. Maybe not my best idea. It's not a bad idea though, you know what I'm saying? Like it's not one that just makes you go like, let's just keep talking and continue to say that.

I appreciate that. Like there's a few bucks in it for us, I think down the road. No, right. Okay, so we're talking about fatten liver because if you translate the word fatty liver into the French, it comes out to be foie gras, but you may have heard of before, you may have even eaten before.

Nope. You may detest. Yes. But it's like one of the most controversial foods ever and I mean like seriously, you could have never even seen this stuff and have just heard those words and you probably are aware that it is an extremely controversial food.

Yeah, and this is something I've never tried and certainly because of the practice, but even before I knew how it happened, I just don't eat organ meats and fattened goose liver just would not appeal to me anyway. I don't like patties and stuff like that. So it never would have been on my culinary radar anyway. I have to admit that on a visit to Italy,

I ate any kind of organ meat. I'm sure. Literally morning, noon and night for days on end and it was just a dream. Oh God. The thing is, is there's a lot of people out there who say, hey fat boy, why don't you quit eating that stuff because there's a lot of animals that suffered to make that.

And they have a really good case so much so that there have been bans specifically on foie gras. In fact, in New York, in 2019, they passed a ban, Bill 1378, that prohibits, get this, storing, maintaining, selling, or offering to sell force fed products or food containing force fed products,

which is basically targeting foie gras because foie gras is a force fed product, hence the controversy associated with it. That's right, India, Australia, California, other places that have banned foie gras from being, I guess, at least sold and served in restaurants. In the practice you're talking about this force feeding, is it called gavage?

I believe so, yeah, that's how I would say it. G-A-V-A-G-E. And this goes way, way back to, geez, at least Egypt, when they were force feeding these geese, when they saw that it, quote, developed, that waterfowl developed large fatty livers after eating large amounts in preparation for migration, and then this goes to the Mediterranean,

and then into France, where a lot of our culinary traditions were born, and there was a chef there named Jean-Joseph Klaus, or Klauser, well, that'd probably be German, Klaus. And he is credited with creating the first foie gras in 1779 and patenting it in 1784. Yeah, and he got 20 pistols from King Louis XVI, saying, thanks a lot, pal, for creating foie gras,

I love it, I slather it on my naked body every night. Go shoot some geese. So yeah, this is based on this idea that ducks and geese naturally fatten up, storing fat on the liver, they store it under their skin too, like we do, we also store fat on our liver, but geese and ducks are just evolutionary aces that storing fat in their liver.

And it just so happens that somebody said, I wonder what that tastes like? And they tried it, and we're like, this is astounding. And most of the time when you have paté, or foie gras, it isn't a paté form, which is to say, it looks a lot like cat food, same consistency, very similar color, maybe even a similar smell,

it's the taste that really differentiates it, not just the taste, but also the price. They can get up to like 80 bucks a pound, usually 40 to $80 a pound for foie gras, which is a lot of money for a pound of any kind of food. But one of the reasons why is the production is so food, is so labor intensive, right? Yeah, big time.

And then also the stuff that goes in along with it, like the very fine brandies, truffles, it's about as decadent a food as you can find. Yeah, it just really reeks of, well, I guess it reeks of Henry VIII, or King Louis XVI, and people like that who got gout when they were in their 20s and just surrounded themselves with fats and meats

and liver organ meats and things like that. I'm sure I'm making you hungry. I'm about to vomit. I'm just remembering all the terrines. But if you're on the other side of the coin and you are into animal rights and stuff like that, you might say, hey, ducks hyperventilate sometimes. Sometimes they bleed.

Sometimes they are shackled when you are force feeding them. They rallied for that bill, the 1378 bill that you were talking about, and you can be fined anywhere from $500 to $2,000 starting in 2022 in New York City. Yeah, when it takes effect. I guess all of New York, or maybe just New York City. So you would think like, you know,

what's controversial about this? It's just rotten. It's wrong. It's mean. All the produce, like one of the most decadent foods around. Like there's really nothing controversial about that. It sounds pretty one-sided. And a lot of people feel that way.

There is, however, another side that argue against it. And we will visit them right after this. Music Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

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Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

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what you're saying, but you're all dumb and you're wrong. And they actually say it like that a lot. A lot of like chefs, especially celebrity chefs have actually taken a stand in favor of foie gras, saying that it's unfairly targeted. One of the reasons I saw I read a couple of posts on serious eats in defense of it. And they said, you know, this is a type of food that's associated

with the very rich. It's really easy to get people riled up because you hear things like force feeding and jamming tubes down animals next, making their liver 10 times their normal size. You put all that together and, you know, foie gras becomes unfairly targeted. And it's kind of hard to swallow at first. I'm very sorry about that one.

The idea that anybody would defend force feeding an animal to fatten its liver to 10 times its size so that gout-ridden old riches can eat a little bit of this stuff. But if something is unfairly demonized, it is worth looking into and unpacking and they do make a couple of good points here or there. Yeah, there's a group called the Catskill foie gras collective, Worst Band Name Ever.

And they produce most of the foie gras that you would get in New York City. You could still get, I guess, once restaurants are open. For the next couple of years. Yeah, and they have challenged the band and they say it's unconstitutional. You don't have jurisdiction over what we do, de Blasio. And these are our businesses and you can't shut us down.

And the, I guess, the leader, the president, Marcus Henley of the Catskill foie gras collective says, you know what? This little tube is really not causing any discomfort. Ducks aren't like us. They're built different than us. And this tube is, they love this thing, trust me. Basically in that serious seeds article, they went to like the greatest foie gras farm on the planet and the ducks like

came over to get their gavage feeding. But the, that's definitely not par for the course. There's a lot of videos out there of some really abusive duck and geese farms where they're stuck in cages and their beaks are broken and they're bleeding out of their noses and their lost feathers and they have like vomit around their mouth and they're still being force fed. There's some really awful operations out there, but the

apparently if you're getting good foie gras, you're getting it from somebody who's treating their animals very well. And the case they're making about ducks and geese being built differently than us is that their esophagus, their esophagi, I guess, are not connected to their trachea. They're two separate ones rather than shared like in humans and their esophagus is allowed to stretch like they can eat fish that are many times over the size of their actual

esophagi. So they can stretch pretty easily. So that's where they say it doesn't really give them much discomfort if any and that their, their liver fattening to like huge like sizes that it's actually kind of built to do that. This is just humans speeding up this process or kind of making it in like a simulated way like the ducks, the ducks

and the geese aren't doing this to migrate, but they are responding naturally to this kind of simulated packing on the weight and that if you kind of start to understand it, you will probably change your mind about foie gras. I don't know if that's a foregone conclusion, but from what I read, it isn't as quite as bad as I had presumed. The one that got me though, Chuck, is that if you, they say if you are fine with eating eggs, you don't really think

about where your chicken eggs are coming from, you've got no leg to stand on going after foie gras because the chickens that are producing those eggs that you're eating are being treated just as bad, if not worse than the worst cases of the ducks and the geese that are being fattened up for paté. That is the one point that I find difficult to challenge. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I very famously worked in the chicken farming industry, unfortunately, as a marketing

person and it's terrible, but these days, you can get chickens from one of your neighbors most likely and that's what we do. Yeah, it does smell like a what aboutism, you know? I think it smells like it because it very much is exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mourn foie gras. I don't think I can really eat it anymore. I haven't eaten in a very long time, but I do have my memories with it of the livers of dead abuse ducks that I've eaten. So, I'm sorry, ducks. I'm sorry, geese.

Quack. That's okay. Quack. Thanks. I wonder if, you know, you said that they were mint or not mint too, but their livers would fatten up anyway for migration. I guess they are mint too. I wonder if these ducks run over there to get this force feeding because they're like, this is gonna get me out of here, man. I'm gonna fly, fly, fly pretty soon. I gotta get out of here. This is the worst. Oh goodness. And the unconstitutional thing, I'm like, what are they talking

about? Supposedly statewide, it's unconstitutional because they're trying to regulate interstate commerce, but I don't know that that necessarily holds up. Interesting. So, there you go. Foie gras, everybody. Go make up your own mind about it. Go do a little research and see what you think. And in the meantime, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,

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