There is a wonderful Ted Talk by New York-based chef Dan Barbour about a small farm in Spain that produces foie gras humanely (without the horrendous force feeding that the product has rightly been lambasted for). Raising his geese in a natural environment, farmer Eduardo Sousa re-discovered that if geese are allowed to forage at will, they will naturally gorge themselves in the autumn to build up fat for the winter. The result? A ‘natural’ foie gras. The important word there is “re-discovered” because there is nothing new in this. Originally foie gras was invented simply as a timely slaughter of geese to take advantage of their fatty livers post winter gorge. It was in a typically unthinking and cack-handed attempt to be the master or foie gras and have it all year around that mankind invented the ‘gavache’ or force-feeding approach.
Though the talk focuses on foie gras, it’s actually a parable and there’s a broader point in there about commercial food production. Eduardo Sousa calls modern methods of foie gras production ‘an insult to history’, a phrase that could be equally applied to all manner of food production methods – from rearing thousands of chickens in unbearably cramped conditions in sheds to growing tonnes of potatoes in the same field year-on-year using chemicals to ‘cheat’ nature; to strawberries from Israel on the shelves in a Wexford supermarket during strawberry season. So much of modern food production is an insult to life on earth, the planet and to human health. Barbour calls them the “take more, sell more, waste more” approach to food that just won’t serve us in the future.
His advice is something that I think will resonate strongly with anyone that grows some of their own food. Listen to nature instead of imposing things on it. Work with it, rather than against it. Accept that small is beautiful. Barbour sums up by pointing to the happy coincidence that the most ecologically sensitive food production methods are also the most ethical and the most delicious. I would add, that they are almost always the healthier and more nutritious choices too!
