With elbows resting on a rustic windowsill on a farm in France’s Dordogne, I lost track of time watching Denis grab an endless line of geese one at a time in a kind of peaceful, mesmerizing trance, filling them with corn. Like his father and his father and his father, Denis spends five hours a day, every day, all year long sitting in a barn on a rolling stool with a machine that looks like a giant vacuum cleaner filled with corn, surrounded by geese.
He rhythmically grabs a goose by the neck, pulls him under his leg and stretches him up, sliding the tube down to the belly and fills it with corn. He pulls the trigger to squirt the corn, slowly slides the tube up the neck and out, holds the beak shut for a few seconds, lets that goose go and grabs the next.
When I told friends we planned to film geese being force-fed — the traditional way they fatten the livers to make foie gras, the prized delicacy in France’s Dordogne region — many expressed disgust and even thought I was wrong to show it on TV. There are actually people who want to boycott French foie gras for what they consider inhumane treatment of the geese. That’s why I was on Denis’ goose farm…to learn more about le gavage (as the force-feeding process is called).
Elevage du Bouyssou, a big, homey goose farm a short drive from Sarlat, is run by a Denis and Nathalie Mazet. The geese are filled with corn three times a day for the last month of their lives. They have expandable livers and no gag reflex, so the corn stays there, gradually settling as it’s digested, making room for the next visit from Denis and his corn gun.
Watching Denis work, I wondered what a life like that would be…actually knowing an endless cycle of all those geese. Did geese populate his dreams? How did it affect his relations with his wife?
While Denis squirts corn, Nathalie meets tourists — mostly French families — who show up each evening at six to see how their beloved foie gras is made. The groups stroll the idyllic farm as Nathalie explains how they raise a thousand geese a year. She stresses that the key to top-quality foie gras is happy geese raised on quality food in an unstressed environment. They need quality corn and the same feeder.
I join the group as we un-force-feed the baby geese. We stroll into the grassy back lot where the older geese run free — backlit by the low, early-evening sun, they look like a Muesli commercial (perfectly fulfilling my goose dream for the TV show).
Two geese are humping. I can’t help but notice the boy yanking feathers off the back of the girl’s head as he (I suppose) enjoys his orgasm. Nathalie said she can tell which girls are getting any action by the bald spots on the backs of their heads. There’s plenty of action, as about half the birds in the yard sported the souvenir — that fowl equivalent of wife-beating — that comes with a roll in the hay.
The Mazets sell everything but the head and feet. The down feathers only net about 30 cents a goose. The serious money is in the livers. A normal liver weighs a quarter-pound. When done with the force-feeding process, the liver weighs about two pounds. (With a thousand geese, they produce a ton of foie gras annually. Nathalie said, “Barely enough to support one family.”)
These geese actually have a special shape — like they’re waddling around with a full diaper under their feathers. Just the sight of this shape — which is a sales icon in shops throughout the Dordogne — is enough to make visiting English travelers (who come here in droves for the foie gras) salivate.
Why the Dordogne? It’s on the geese migratory path. Ages ago, locals here caught geese on their migration, livers enlarged for the long journey (like traveling with a topped-off gas tank). As French are inclined to do, they ate the innards, found them extra-tasty and decided to produce their own. Those first French foie gras farmers didn’t know it, but the technique of keeping geese and enlarging the livers for human consumption goes back to ancient Egyptian times.
Nathalie, like other French enthusiasts of le gavage, says that while their animals are calm, in no pain and are designed to take in food this manner, American farm animals are typically kept in little boxes and fed chemicals and hormones to get fat. Most battery chickens in the US live less than two months and are plumped with hormones. Her geese are free-range and live six months.
Dordogne geese live lives at least as comfy as other farm animals (that people so upset with the foie gras process have no problem eating) and are slaughtered as humanely as any non-human can expect in this food-chain existence.
Some people raise geese as a hobby. On a different farm I met Cyril, a retired Parisian realtor. His dream: To live his golden years in the Dordogne region with a little barn full of geese to force-feed. He claims to “speak goose” and will feed his geese any time…just drop by, so I added him to our guidebook.
After a few days in the Dordogne, where farmers in the markets are evangelical about their foie gras and constantly passing out little goose-liver sandwiches — and where every meal seems to start with a foie-gras course — I always leave with strong need for foie gras detox.
