Foie Gras Has Egyptian Tomb Drawings Showing the Force-Feeding 4,500 Years Ago

On a wall of the mastaba tomb of Mereruka, the Egyptian vizier under Pharaoh Teti around 2500 BCE, a relief shows servants holding geese around the neck and forcing pellets of grain down their throats. The depiction is the earliest known evidence for gavage — deliberate force-feeding to enlarge the liver. The Egyptians were not the only ancient people to figure out that fattening waterfowl this way produced a noticeably richer organ; analogous practices appear later across the Mediterranean.

The Romans adopted the technique with their usual completeness. Pliny the Elder credited the gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius, the Apicius of the Roman cookbook, with the discovery that geese fattened on dried figs produced an exceptionally enlarged and sweet liver. The Latin term for fig-stuffed liver, iecur ficatum, literally "liver fattened on figs," is the etymological root for the word liver in essentially every Romance language: French foie, Italian fegato, Spanish hígado, Romanian ficat. The fig has dropped out, but its grammatical fingerprint remains.

The modern French dish was effectively invented in 1779 by Jean-Joseph Clause, a chef in Strasbourg, who patented his pâté de foie gras in 1784 and made the city the goose-liver capital of Europe. By the early 21st century, France was producing about 19,000 tonnes of foie gras a year, requiring the gavage of roughly 38 million ducks and geese; the process enlarges the liver to roughly ten times its normal size in two to three weeks. Animal-welfare bans began arriving in the 2000s. California's took effect in 2004 and survived multiple court challenges. New York City passed one in 2019; the law was struck down, reinstated, struck down again, and is, at last check, still in litigation.