A Use for Ducks

This is the second part of Landon's duck post. Editor's additions are in brackets.

One day last week we went to a museum. It was a foie gras farm. Foie gras is the fattened liver of the duck. Not only ducks but geese also.
[pronounced 'fwah grah', and try to roll that r]
It was very interesting. Mom had forgotten her money belt but we still got to see the museum because she had a credit card.
The early Egyptians found out about duck liver from the migrating birds through their country.
The early Romans gave them figs to fatten the ducks.

We saw the pens that the ducks lived in . There were about 500 or more ducks in it. They are a cross between a Pekin and a Muscovey duck.

Women tend to be better at force feeding them than men.
They start in an open pen for the first 3 months then they move to the gavage pens for 25 days. Gavage is when they're force fed 3 times a day . Someone comes and sits on a chair and uses a long metal tube stuck down their throats to put grain with corn and pebbles into their crop. After the crop it [the food] goes into the gizzard where with the help of the pebbles is ground up and from there into the stomach. It might seem to you that that would be mean to the duck but it really isn't because the ducks don't breath like we do. People breathe and eat through the same tube. But ducks breathe through the tip of their tongue which is not the part that they eat through. The air goes down to the lungs through the trachea but the food goes through a separate tube called the esophagus into the crop.

We watched a movie as part of the museum. It was a true story of the person who owns the farm. They had started out with 40 hectares of stoney soil. They first started planting vegetables to sell. After awhile they got some ducks and started to produce foie gras.

After the movie we got to try some foie gras:

The first taste was of half cooked foie gras. It tasted like regular liver to me.

The second taste tasted good to me, more like pork. It was fully cooked and in jars it would keep up to 2 years.

The third tasted good too. It didn't taste the same, it tasted sort of like eggs.
It was a mix of ingredients [we can't remember what they were]

The fourth taste was [smoked] duck breast. It was slices. It was like a chewy ham. White [fat] and red. It tasted very much like ham. Its texture was very hard to bite into. I loved it.

They all tasted YUMYUM!