Christmas Stuffing

It’s been a while…I think excessive eating over the Christmas holidays has had a negative effect on my writing skills. As usual, we celebrated in typical French style: non-stop eating between Christmas and New Years. In France, this means pulling out all the stops. Forget roast turkey. Baked ham? Please. Here, Christmas means oysters, lobster, caviar, and foie gras—and that might all be part of the same meal. Chocolates and champagne are de rigeur—vintage cognac and eau-de-vie soaked sour cherries are normal finishing touches. It’s enough to send one’s soul—and one’s cholesterol levels—soaring aloft. But then, as everyone keeps reminding themselves, it only happens once a year. What’s a few thousand calories between friends?

The French Christmas menu item that is probably the most typical is also the most difficult for Americans to swallow, namely foie gras. The reasons for the current foie gras uproar in the US remain mysterious to me: after all, we are talking about a country where the delicacy is virtually non-existent. I would be willing to bet that a vast majority Americans have never even heard of foie gras (at least until the uproar) and that the percentage of people who have actually tasted it is infinitesimal. I know, I know, it sounds gross. Ducks and geese are force-fed until their liver becomes enlarged, and then once they are killed, the over-sized organ is sold at a high price to slavering food fiends. But let’s take a step back for a minute. Foie gras is an artisanal product: the good stuff is always made on a small scale, on farms where the ducks and geese live healthy lives running around real barnyards and eating real grains and greens. Can we say the same about that flaccid supermarket chicken that is sold all over the US? Is there anything even vaguely humane about poultry farming on an industrial scale? Or for that matter, about any industrial meat or fish farming? Hmm, if I was a farm animal that was eventually going to be slaughtered one way or another, would I rather spend my days outdoors on a small farm in the country, or penned up with hundreds, if not thousands of other miserable animals in an closed factory farm? If it meant my last days would include force-feeding, I think I’d still opt for the small farm.

I admit I have a certain bias in all this. My husband’s family comes from southwest France, which is arguably the foie gras capital of the world. While there are certain food historians who insist that the idea was first dreamed up in Alsace and then drifted southward, any true south-westerner will swear that foie gras emerged fully formed—like Venus on the half shell—from the dark waters of the Dordogne River. At our family gatherings the buttery substance is reverently served as a first course with a glass of silky Sauternes and some fresh bread. Being from the area, my in-laws have the inside scoop on where to get the goods. In a tiny town lost in the forest of the Landes, there is a foie gras maker who knows how to turn chopped liver into gold. It’s a word of mouth sort of thing, and believe me, they do a land-office business.

I’ve also met people who raise their own ducks and do their own force-feeding. When you mention that the city of Chicago and the state of California have outlawed foie-gras due to cruelty to animals (and now it looks like New York may do the same), they just look at you with incomprehension as if you are too stupid to realize that farm animals eventually die so we can eat them. While it is true that thousands, perhaps millions of ducks and geese sacrifice their livers every year at Christmas time, it’s also true that you can’t claim that you are being kind to animals when you bite into a Big Mac.

I think a lot of French people think that the foie gras bans are just another version of the Roquefort boycott or Freedom Fries, i.e., another case of Americans taking pot-shots at the French. I don’t know if this is really true; I’d wager foie gras bans have more to do with vote-getting and moral grandstanding. In any case, foie gras is prohibitively expensive in the US, so the price will keep more people away then the ban. C’est la vie.