Foie Gras That Skips the Force-Feeding Is Developed by Physicists

While not sparing the lives of ducks and geese, the technique lets the birds eat and grow normally.

Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has been in love with foie gras for a quarter century. The luxurious delicacy is a pâté or mousse made from the rich, fattened livers of ducks or geese.

“It’s something really extraordinary,” Dr. Vilgis said, recalling his early encounters with high-quality foie gras when he lived and worked in Strasbourg, France. It was soft and buttery and, once the fats began to melt in his mouth, the flavors evolved and exploded. “It is like fireworks. You have suddenly a sensation of the whole liver,” he said.

But such transcendence comes at a price.

To fatten up the liver that’s used to create foie gras, farmers force-feed the fowl more grain than their bodies need. The excess food is stored as fat in the animal’s liver, which balloons in size.

While he’ll eat foie gras produced by local farmers on occasion, Dr. Vilgis finds the force-feeding intolerable at an industrial scale. “It’s terrible to see,” he says.

Dr. Vilgis wondered whether he could somehow “make a similar product but without this torture.”