I'm going to tell you the story about the geese which fly 5,000 miles from Canada to France. They fly in V-formation but the second ones don't fly. They're the subs for the first ones. And then the second ones take over - so it's teamwork.
I'm crazy about ducks and swans and geese, so I don't eat foie gras. I try to eat organic.
Fifteen years ago, my wife and I purchased an authentic log cabin in Maryland. Painstakingly restored since, the cabin sits on a forested bluff high above a wide river frequented by ospreys, eagles, geese, herons, and other water fowl.
Wild geese have so much less fat than their domestic brethren that, as far as the kitchen is concerned, the two birds should be considered different species altogether - so much so that they require opposite roasting methods.
Foie gras is sold as an expensive delicacy in some restaurants and shops. But no one pays a higher price for foie gras than the ducks and geese who are abused and killed to make it.
To produce foie gras, ducks and geese are force-fed enormous amounts of grain and fat, which causes their livers to swell to many times the normal size.
I love the water. Everything about it. Smelling the humidity in the air, seeing the mist rise in the morning, feeling the dew-wet grass on my bare feet. I love watching the fish jump and the geese land. We even have an eagle here that circles every so often.
Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.
Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.
It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
