Has anyone heard of the dish named Foie Gras? It’s a French delicacy made of duck or goose liver that people say is absolutely delicious. I haven’t tried it myself. If you look at what the dish looks like, you’ll see that the liver is yellowish. This is unusual, as the liver is one of the more vascularized organs, filled with blood vessels, therefore it normally should be dark red. And this is where the problem lies.

The liver used to make foie gras is made of 90% fat because the ducks and geese are purposefully made sick during their lifetime. You see, in order for their liver to be fat, they need to be force fed large quantities of food, usually corn boiled with fat, much too much than what they normally eat. In other words, before these animals are killed, they are intentionally made sick in order for the liver to be as fat as possible, thus producing the desired outcome of foie gras. In short, it hurts them during a large portion of their lives, as I do not want to go into detail about how exactly they suffer during this process.

Therefore, the topic of this blog entry is: should we not care about what an animal goes through in order for us to obtain food? Everyone who had this dish is saying that it’s amazingly delicate, but should we not be concerned? Is it right for us to go to any means in order to get a particular type of dish?

Update: Thankfully, I came across an article showing that the US, some countries in Europe and some in Latin America have banned the forceful feeding of animals, thus banned the production of this dish and other similar dishes that involve animal abuse.