Wyatt Williams’ recent piece in Eater centers on a south Georgia farmer’s ethically fraught decision to raise foie gras. Williams—who told me in a phone conversation that “we can best understand farming on a farm-to-farm basis”—spends a lot of his piece describing the physical texture of Grassroots Farms: an operation hewn of “scrap wood and sweat.” But he also explores the emotional texture of its owner, Brandon Chonko, a newbie farmer who wears Crocs and, it turns out, isn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of force feeding geese—gavage, as it’s called. “Why am I doing what I’m doing?,” asks Chonko, who has never even eaten foie gras. As a rule, articles on non-industrial animal farming typically don’t foreground such a question. The suffering endemic to animal abuse in general—as well as the ethical implications of that suffering— are normally shunted aside by journalists preoccupied with agricultural economics, sustainability or regulation. But Williams’s article is different. His choice to center his piece on Chonko’s anxiety over what most observers consider to be a special form of animal abuse distinguishes it from the jumble of similarly-themed pieces intent on celebrating do-it-yourself slaughter with rhetorical coronations such as “now I know where my food comes from.” … Continue reading Eater Magazine Leaves Gavage Ethics Out of Foie Gras Discussion