And—they butcher ducks.

One of the most important parts of France’s national culinary heritage is the production of foie gras, the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose. It has long been prized as one of the greatest and most traditional delicacies of French cuisine. In 2005, it was even enshrined in law as part of the country’s “officially-protected cultural and gastronomic patrimony.” This protection was more than symbolic—it was also economic.

Foie gras belongs to the “terroir,” or taste of place, of Southwest France. According to French folklore, this localized practice is centuries old, and knowledge of it dates back even further to ancient Egypt and Rome. Today, about 80 percent of the world’s foie gras production occurs in the Southwest, which uses a European Union food labeling program to claim a “protected geographical indication” for foie gras. When I first traveled there nearly a decade ago, I observed professionally designed billboards for large foie gras companies lining the main highways. Signs inviting travelers to visit small foie gras farms—often hand-drawn to evoke rustic charm or showing cartoon ducks wearing bowties or playing musical instruments—peppered the countryside’s narrow, winding roads and picturesque rolling hills. Tourism information offices in historic town centers distributed fliers from nearby artisanal foie gras farms, entreating visitors to stop by and enjoy a tasting.

Fattening of ducks for the production of foie gras in France in 2012.

Since the early 2000s, however, the production of foie gras has become hotly contested on moral grounds and has even been outlawed in other European Union countries. The fattening process, called gavage, involves force-feeding the duck or goose with a tube (typically made of metal). This rapidly enlarges the liver six to 10 times in size and increases its fat content to 80 percent over the two-to-three week gavage period. Today, there are two types of gavage used in France: artisanal and industrial. The first method allows farmers to hand feed the birds, while the latter uses a feeding machine. The industrial method is usually contracted by large companies that distribute their brands around the country and world.

Opponents to gavage say it is cruel and inhumane because it causes the birds immense pain and suffering and inflicts disease upon their bodies. Foie gras producers and enthusiasts, on the other hand, argue that gavage takes advantage of specific biological features of ducks and geese, which overeat and store fat in their livers prior to long journeys and whose tough esophagi lack nerve endings and gag reflexes that would cause pain.

What does it mean for a food to be celebrated and marketed as part of national heritage when it is also morally polarizing worldwide?

Many French citizens told me they perceived attacks, symbolic or otherwise, against their nation’s celebrated food practices as assaults on its heritage, culture, and identity. When I asked about bans and critiques of foie gras outside of the country, almost everyone—from everyday consumers to the president of the national industry group—responded doggedly by calling it traditional, authentic, and a part of French heritage.

But it’s not quite that simple. How foie gras is marketed to the French public today conveniently obscures the industry’s expansion from a seasonal specialty item into a year-round, multi-billion euro industry. It ignores the fact that the industrial model, spurred by capital and state investment, now accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s total foie gras production. And it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, when France was growing into a larger role in European integration politics and markets, that the country’s southwestern regions also began establishing extensive agri-tourism activities celebrating “fat ducks” and decisively working to craft foie gras as a national treasure—one that needs state protection in the face of outsiders’ vociferous opposition—using the framework of terroir tourism.

Municipalities throughout the Southwest have created activities to encourage people not just to visit, but to also partake in the artisanal foie gras experience. If timed right, visitors to these foie gras farms are welcome to watch gavage and butchery. Visitors can also stroll through amateur-designed foie gras museums, shop at newly-created “fat markets” to purchase whole carcasses and livers, and attend “foie gras weekends,” staying in farm guest rooms where the main activity is butchering your own duck or goose to take home. Local officials use these campaigns to acquaint the French and foreigners alike with the production and the producers of foie gras, to increase consumption, and to prove foie gras’s national cultural value. But what is crucial to recognize is that this public face of foie gras—the picturesque, romanticized farms that are conspicuous and welcoming—only accounts for about 10 percent of total national production.

Interestingly, local histories and residents reveal that while tensions between artisanal and industrial foie gras producers were common in the past, both kinds of producers are now, for the large part, mutually supportive. Many are neighbors, some even friends, and see themselves as targeting discrete consumer markets. And each benefits from ongoing demand for the other.

Despite global opposition to foie gras, French producers of all sizes seem aware of needing to feed a “heritage mentality”—to safeguard this food as an endangered symbol of French national identity and cultural wealth, whether or not traditional production methods are used. French people become complicit through active participation as well as consumption. The work of preserving and promoting foie gras—by artisanal and industrial producers, consumers, and the French state—has become a small but significant way to defend the taste and place of “Frenchness” in the 21st century.

The post Why France Continues to Bitterly Defend Fatty Goose Livers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By joining the 116th Audubon Christmas Bird Count, I became one of more than 70,000 volunteers from Canada to South America who counted perhaps 70 million birds in the days between December 14 and January 5. (This year’s count isn’t tallied yet.) While most of the world’s important data is gathered by computers, governments, and corporations, the annual bird count—which started in 1900—is artisanal, a labor of love and feathery obsession. As old and personalized as it is, the bird count is a powerful way to collect data and a future model for understanding and responding to environmental issues on Earth—not to mention other planets.

I’m not a bird person. I like bugs, trees, and sheep. But finding the scoters in the waves excited me in a way that looking at GPS blips on a screen never could, and I stayed focused through the cold winds over the next five hours as our party of five moved around Maine’s Mere Point, surveying more ducks. We counted 150 common eider, big gorgeous sea ducks whose males have a graphic Z of white feathers. There were also 150 long-tailed ducks, 300 scoters, 40 goldeneye, 15 buffleheads, nine mallards, one red-breasted merganser, two kinds of gulls, 20 Canada geese, and a raft of maybe 900 scaups. We moved around the point trying to get better views of the galaxies of ducks as some dabbled and others dove. This wasn’t just a count of birds, we were mapping the geography of ducks on the water—a duckography of Mere Point.

We were guided by Don Hudson, a botanist who has been compiling this area’s count for 35 years, and Ralph, a high school science teacher, who’s been doing it almost as long, or maybe longer, he couldn’t remember. They had worked with people who’d done the count for 40 years before them and so they were part of a chain of relationships stretching back to a famous ornithologist who did the count here in 1905. Though the count is typically done by volunteer amateurs, not professional scientists, it has developed levels of expertise and checks and balances that keep it stable over generations. As we spotted more ducks, I realized that despite its age—or maybe because of it—the bird count database ties birds and people and places together across great distances and more than a century.

The bird count has, at its core, concern about birds going extinct, but over the years that’s morphed into surprising political power to stop those extinctions. Passenger pigeons once traveled in flocks so large they clouded out the sun, but by the mid 1890s the flocks were merely hundreds or dozens of birds. The very last passenger pigeon died in 1914. The Audubon society introduced the count in 1900 as a way to induce people to appreciate birds rather than shoot them on Christmas day, as was the custom. The count has created a database that has allowed scientists to continue to watch for signs of coming extinctions. A recent report used bird count data to anticipate how climate change might affect 588 species of birds in North America and found that 314 species are at risk.

The count also has a secret weapon: It simultaneously gathers needed data and mobilizes concerned citizens to advocate on behalf of endangered birds. Among the birds that have been counted and saved from extinction are bald eagles, California condors, peregrine falcons and brown pelicans. Preserving millions of acres of wetlands has doubled populations of wetland birds since the 1960s.

Even though we were shivering in Maine, we were watching birds that fly from the tropics to the Arctic. A few miles away, snowy owls have taken up residence on the unused runway of an old naval air station. The bird count database has long shown that owl numbers rise and fall in cycles of four years—depending on how many lemmings they eat during breeding season in the Arctic. But over the last few years their numbers in the Northeast have risen dramatically, and researchers are trying to figure out whether that’s the result of a lemming glut or some other change in the Arctic that only the owls know. (Researchers recently gave one of these owls a 3G tracker and you can view her movements.)

We stood in a wooded area on the point counting songbirds like blue jays, red-breasted nuthatches, goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds—all expected. Then a retiree in a voluminous red coat waved us over to see a real find: a hermit thrush. I had heard its haunting trill over the years, but it takes patience to see its brown plumage among the leaves. Such persistence is surprisingly valuable. University of Washington researchers analyzed more than 300 citizen science projects on biodiversity (like our bird-counting expedition) and found that the work of as many as 2.3 million volunteers amounts to a contribution of about $2.5 billion to biodiversity research every year. This fall the White House Office of Science and Technology began a push to formalize and expand more such citizen science projects. If you wanted to build a system that can evaluate changes in the climate, and respond to them, you couldn’t design a better system than the Christmas bird count with its mixture of birds, data, and gentle fanatics.

Oddly enough, it’s not that big of a jump from counting ducks to counting galaxies, and this is where humans outstrip computers. Tens of thousands of citizens have combed through space photos at sites like Galaxy Zoo, making significant discoveries that computers and experts have missed. In 2007 a Dutch schoolteacher discovered Hanny’s Voorwerp, a galaxy-sized gas cloud that looks like Kermit the frog. When Caltech scientists recently announced that there is likely an additional ninth planet out there in our solar system, but they haven’t yet found it, they even invited backyard telescope enthusiasts to try to speed up the discovery process. Obsession is what makes humans better than computers at finding things. Humans get distracted by anomalies and their fervor is driven by their emotions. In a panel on citizen astronomy at the Kavli Foundation, Oxford astrophysicist Aprajita Verma observed: “It’s very difficult to program diversity and adaptability into any computer algorithm, whereas we kind of get it for free from the citizen scientists!”

Computers, you know, don’t have eureka moments.

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