Buying Luxury Goose Fat for Christmas Roast Potatoes?

Luxury delis and supermarkets around the UK are stocking up on goose and duck fat for making crispy roast potatoes over Christmas. Did you know that ALL French fat from geese or ducks is from foie gras birds? And unless you buy it directly from an artisan farmer who has hand-fed their birds, it will be from intensive farming, using cages for the two weeks of force feeding at the end of the birds' lives.

Shops that have banned foie gras under pressure from activists, media and customers - rather than trying to offer ethically produced foie gras - still sell goose and duck fat from foie gras birds. Places like Harvey Nichols. And the same goes for 'posh-rustic' foods like cassoulet, duck confit and pâtés are included in this by the way - they all contain birds that have been force-fed. Because one great thing about foie gras is that none of the animal is wasted.

In France, even foie gras birds reared in an intensive farming system were free-range in spacious fields for most of their lives. They have much nicer lives than most pigs and chickens. So, foie gras and other products made from foie gras birds are more ethically sound than the vast majority of chicken or pork. But if you're against force-feeding, don't buy French goose or duck fat for your roast spuds! And if you're against foie gras in principle, you cannot justify buying intensively farmed chicken or pork. It is worse than foie gras.

Merry Christmas.

Beak to Tail & Fat Hypocrites

As described in this interview with me, none of a foie gras duck or goose goes to waste: "The legs go into cassoulet, the neck is stuffed like a sausage, breasts are the famous magret steaks, there’s a prized strip of fillet, other meat scraps go into tasty rillettes (potted meat), and the carcass is sold for soups and stock. You can even buy the tongues and blood cakes at the market." And I forgot to mention that gizzards are stewed until tender and used on luscious salads, while other innards go into the stuffed neck and pâtés. Down feathers are also sold for stuffing duvets and pillows. Beaks and tail feathers are probably chucked away, along with feet, so it's actually 'everything between beak and tail'.

You might not be able to get hold of all the body parts of a foie gras bird in the UK, but if you buy duck or goose fat for roasting potatoes, or French confit duck legs or cassoulet in a jar or tin, they will come from foie gras birds.

Beware that if you search out British duck fat, it will not be free-range unless it says so. And factory farmed duck is far more cruel than any French foie gras. This is because even the cheapest factory farmed French foie gras birds are completely free-range in fields until the last two weeks of their life. The best duck foie gras and all goose foie gras comes from birds that are never caged, and are kept in a straw-lined pen for the two weeks of fattening.

I have tried contacting suppliers of duck and goose products (e.g. Le Canard Et La Lune) to shops like Harvey Nichols who have banned the sale of foie gras, but when I ask if they supply any products that do not come from foie gras birds they don't respond. This is probably because they assume I am against foie gras and want to expose their customers' hypocrisy and ultimately lose them that customer. Well, I do want to expose the hypocrisy, but not because I want the sale of their reasonably high welfare products to stop. Harvey Nics shouldn't have banned foie gras in the first place. Are all their posh dried sausages from free-range pigs? If not, they are lower welfare than foie gras. 'Outdoor bred' pork is also lower welfare and less free-range than foie gras, in terms of the proportion of livestock's time spent actually free-range.

Home-preserved goose foie gras