The agriculture industry hopes you won't notice their battle to keep torturing ducks.
Even by the abysmally low standards of animal agriculture, duck foie gras is a gruesome business. The French delicacy literally translates to fatty liver in English, and a single-organ portion of the meat product can cost upwards of $100. The reason it’s so expensive (besides the fact that Parisians are snobs) is that force-feeding animals is pretty labor-intensive. Two to three times per day, a tube is shoved 8-12 inches down a young duck’s throat and up to a kilogram of food is injected into the bird’s stomach in the span of about two seconds. A single worker may be responsible for force-feeding hundreds of ducks per day. The brutality and rapid pace of the process frequently leads to injuries and death for the ducks; one farm allegedly began awarding a bonus to workers who accidentally killed fewer than 50 birds per month.
The goal of this process is to cause the duck’s liver to swell to six to ten times its normal size. To paraphrase a 2015 report published by researchers at the University of Cambridge, this amounts to deliberately inducing liver disease. The massively enlarged liver presses on the duck’s other internal organs, making it difficult for them to walk or breathe. It’s been estimated that about 5 percent of ducks don’t survive this process and die before they can make it to slaughter. That means the mortality rate for force-fed ducks is 50 times higher than the mortality rate for normal ducks.
Industry advocates will be quick to tell you a different (and utterly psychotic) story. As one foie gras seller’s cheery blog post explains:
We support the humane treatment of all animals, even when they are raised for human consumption. There is no evidence that the tube feeding method used to produce foie gras is inhumane. Being fed through a tube may sound unappealing to humans; however, it is important to remember that the esophagus of a duck or goose is very different from ours. In nature, these birds are accustomed to storing fish and other foods in their esophagus, sometimes for long periods of time.
The aforementioned researchers at Cambridge and a comprehensive review published by the European Commission would beg to differ that there is “no evidence” force-feeding harms ducks.
The foie gras industry has funded research to justify its barbarism, but attempts at academic rigor don’t fare much better. A 2011 study published in a peer-reviewed journal found that force-feeding only resulted in a “relative mildness of the irritant” when compared to inflaming a duck’s throat with hydrochloric acid. No, you didn’t misread that. This study tried to make the claim that force feeding is only a mild irritant for ducks. That claim is so far from true that the best you can get past peer review is saying that force-feeding is mild compared to pouring acid down a duck’s throat. (Unsurprisingly, the acknowledgements section of that research paper thanks the Interprofessional Committee for Fattened Poultry and Foie Gras for their financial contribution.)
My favorite industry defense is the argument that foie gras can be traced back to ancient Egypt. This theory is surprisingly plausible, but as a Jew, you’ll still have to forgive me for finding “the ancient Egyptians did it” to be a fairly unpersuasive argument.
In November 2019, the New York City Council decided that it wanted no part in this senseless brutality and voted to ban the sale of foie gras at restaurants and retail food establishments. A poll from earlier that year showed that 81 percent of New York City residents supported the ban. The ban would have made New York City the second jurisdiction in the United States to ban the sale of foie gras, following the state of California in 2004 (Chicago banned foie gras in 2006, but repealed the policy in 2008 in the face of legal challenges).
The animal agriculture industry has always been quick to fight back against local democracy. This case was no exception. Perceiving a threat to their business, the two major foie gras producers in upstate New York acted quickly. Shortly after the city-wide ban was passed, the farms asked the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Agriculture to review the law under an obscure provision of the state’s Agriculture and Markets Law. This law, known as Section 305-a, prevents local governments in New York from enacting laws and regulations that “unreasonably interfere” with the activities of certain farms in the state. Although the Commissioner noted that nearly all past cases under Section 305-a dealt with local laws affecting farms within their own towns or counties, he still found that New York City violated the statute by stopping restaurants and retailers from selling foie gras in the city. Last summer, a trial court in Albany upheld the Commissioner’s ruling and blocked the foie gras ban from going into effect. The city is now appealing the decision, but foie gras will continue to be sold as the appeals process takes place over months or even years.
New York City’s foie gras ban is part of a wave of state and local farm animal protection measures enacted in the last 25 years. Faced with the practical impossibility of passing a national farm animal protection bill, animal advocates began to look for ways to leverage local democratic processes to protect animals. Many of these successes came through ballot initiatives, which allow voters to bypass the legislature. In 1990, animal activists successfully passed a ballot initiative in California banning the trophy hunting of mountain lions, followed by a 1992 Colorado initiative to limit black bear hunting.
While protecting large animals from trophy hunting is undoubtedly important, the harm inflicted by hunting pales in comparison to factory farming. Over 7 billion land animals are raised and slaughtered for food each year in the United States. In the early 2000s, advocates looking to build on the success of the hunting initiatives turned their efforts towards improving the welfare of farmed animals. In 2002, voters in Florida approved a constitutional amendment banning the use of gestation crates on factory farms. Gestation crates give mother pigs (referred to as “breeding sows” in the industry) so little space that they are unable to turn around or lie down comfortably. Advocates scored another large victory in California in 2008 when Prop 2 passed with over 63 percent of the vote, banning the use of gestation crates in the state, while extending similar protections to veal calves and egg-laying hens.
The animal agriculture industry adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to these early efforts. Rather than simply improve factory standards, they’ve worked tirelessly to crush attempts to change the law. In 2006, an alliance of special interests in Florida spent big to back a constitutional amendment that raised the threshold for future amendments from 50 percent to 60 percent. Supporters of the amendment (which passed with less than 60 percent of the vote) were open about the fact that this was a direct response to the ban on gestation crates. And after Prop 2 was passed in California, a coalition of six states led by Missouri sued to block the law.
The reach of these early initiatives was somewhat limited because they only applied to farms located within the states. Even after Prop 2 passed, there was nothing to prevent farmers in Iowa from using gestation crates and selling their pork to Californians. That changed in 2018 when California voters passed Prop 12. The most ambitious farm animal welfare law in the country, Prop 12 banned the sale of pork from farms raising pigs in gestation crates. This would force pork producers to shift away from the most heinously cruel production practices in order to access the massive California market.
The industry freaked out. The National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation filed a lawsuit alleging that the new law violated a provision of the Commerce Clause that prevents states from passing laws that discriminate against or unduly burden interstate commerce. This is a strange argument to make. California banned gestation crates for its own pork producers an entire decade before Prop 12 was passed, so the out-of-state producers couldn’t reasonably say that it was favoring in-state farmers over them. The industry could perhaps make a stronger argument that requiring farmers to move away from gestation crates “unduly burdened” them, since that’s a vague and subjective term. Still, Prop 12 was by no means existential for the pork industry. It’s entirely possible, albeit slightly less profitable, to produce pork while allowing mother pigs to turn around.
The Supreme Court shocked advocates and industry hacks alike when it upheld Prop 12 in a 5-4 decision that split party lines. The Court rejected the notion that California voters’ moral interest in protecting pigs could be weighed against economic harms, finding that the people, through their elected representatives, were better equipped to weigh the competing concerns. However, Justice Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion that if “as [pork producers] insist, California’s law really does threaten a ‘massive’ disruption of the pork industry, they are free to petition Congress to intervene.”
The industry got the message. A month after the decision came down, in June 2023, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall introduced the Exposing Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act. The EATS Act bans states from imposing animal welfare standards on products produced in other states. It is hard to overstate how devastating this would be for farmed animals. Prop 12 would be nullified, as would every other meaningful state-level sales ban that targets inhumanely produced animal products.
It’s not the first time politicians and factory farmers have pushed this type of legislation. The proposed EATS Act has its origins in the King Amendment, a 2013 amendment to the Farm Bill, an omnibus giveaway to the agricultural industry that Congress passes every five years. Introduced by Iowa Representative Steve King (better known for his long history of racist remarks,) the amendment would have protected agricultural companies from having to follow animal welfare laws in the states where they sell their products.
After King lost his seat in 2020, Senator Marshall revived the idea as a standalone bill the following year. The bill received little attention at the time and died quietly in committee. But after the Supreme Court upheld California's animal welfare law, the industry panicked. Marshall again introduced the EATS Act in 2023, this time with a new provision that would allow businesses impacted by state or local regulations to sue for monetary damages. In late 2023, the House released a draft of the 2023 Farm Bill that included language from the EATS Act.
A massive coalition mobilized to defeat this iteration of the EATS Act. More than 200 members of Congress ultimately came out against it. While the advocates who fought the barbaric legislation deserve credit for their valiant efforts, the main reason that the EATS Act was not included in the 2023 Farm Bill is that there was no 2023 Farm Bill. Unable to reach a compromise, Congress voted to extend the old Farm bill in 2024 and again in 2025.
Undeterred by issues of basic decency, Republican senators introduced the EATS Act yet again as a standalone bill in April, this time under the title of the Food Security and Farm Protection Act. We shouldn’t be surprised that this bill won’t die—the agricultural industry spent $500 million on lobbying from 2018 to 2023 and expects to get what it paid for.
There is still time to fight back. The industry hopes to slip the bill through as either part of a much larger piece of legislation or as a minor, misleadingly-titled piece of legislation—relying on our representatives' tendency to not read what they sign. So call and email your representatives to let them know exactly what it is they might be voting for. Spread the word by submitting letters to the editor of local publications and phone bank with ASPCA to raise awareness. Animals get the short end of the stick because they cannot do any of these things, so it’s up to us to fight for them.
Because the only foie gras producers left in the U.S. are in New York, and the EATS Act is focused on bans of out-of-state products, it’s not clear if the retooled EATS Act would actually apply to New York City’s foie gras ban. That’s cold comfort for the ducks of New York, as the City’s ban languishes in court. The agricultural industry has been ruthless in stopping animal welfare policies enacted at every level of government. Although most people eat meat, clear majorities support farmed animal welfare legislation. This is why even voters in states like Florida have supported farmed animal legislation when given the chance. The industry knows that many of its common practices are completely indefensible. Blocking state and local laws that protect animals means they will never have to.
It’s easy to lose hope when thinking about the obvious power of the industry and the unfathomable cruelties it inflicts on animals. But remember: the EATS Act isn’t law yet. New York City may still win its appeal. Voters in states around the country have consistently stood up for animals. There is hope, as long as we don’t let the animal agriculture industry wear us down.
