href="http://www.goumbook.com/wp-

height="164" />

At the Taste3 conference, chef Dan

Barber tells the story of a small farm in Spain that has found

a humane way to produce foie gras. Raising his geese in a

natural environment, farmer Eduardo Sousa embodies the kind of

food production Barber believes in.

Eduardo Sousa, a

farmer in the Extremadura region of Spain is, according to

chef Dan Barber, raising geese that bear the best foie gras

the chef’s tasted.

The critical part of the story,

though, is that Sousa does not force feed the geese.  He

apparently lets their inclination to gorge themselves, once

required for migration, take care of the fattening and simply

makes sure they have all they want—nuts, olives, etc., but no

corn.

This suggests of course that farmers who force

feed their geese and ducks are simply controlling what the

ducks would do naturally and that the folks who want to

prohibit the production and sale of foie gras on the grounds

of animal cruelty have one less leg to stand on.

Dan Barber is a

chef and a scholar — relentlessly pursuing the stories and

reasons behind the foods we grow and eat.

Dan Barber is

the chef at New York’s Blue Hill restaurant, and Blue Hill

at Stone Barns in Westchester, where he practices a kind of

close-to-the-land cooking married to agriculture and

stewardship of the earth. As described on Chez Pim: “Stone

Barns is only 45 minutes from Manhattan, but it might as well

be a whole different universe. A model of self-sufficiency

and environmental responsibility, Stone Barns is a working

farm, ranch, and a three-Michelin-star-worthy restaurant.”

It’s a vision of a new kind of food chain.

href="http://www.ted.com">TED

href="http://www.goumbook.com/5663/dan-barber-how-i-fell-in-

farming”