One attempt to circumvent the
animal abuse issues surrounding the
force feeding of the geese involves one of the most
ingenious (if
ethically dubious) examples of
applied neuroscience.
The brain controls many aspects of behavior, including eating and drinking behavior. In 1951 an experiment in rats discovered that by selectively destroying a very specific part of the hypothalamus, (the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) if you must know,) you could get an animal to EAT ALL THE TIME. The neuroscientists who discovered this dubbed the VMH the "satiety center" for the brain and gave themselves a hearty pat on the back.
French scientists in the sixties decided that this bit of info could be used to give the foie gras industry what it has been really needing all along: A goose that WANTS to eat all the time. So, they painstakingly developed a highly accurate stereotactic atlas of the goose brain** and developed an amazingly efficient technique to lesion the VMH in butcher-stock geese. The result? Big fat happy geese.
In the end, it was decided that assembly line neurosurgery might also be unethical, and so the method was never put into common use. And it seemed that even when they ate all the time, the geese still didn't get fat enough to produce the best foie gras. (Even the old neuroscientists lose out here too, since it was later discovered that the VMH is not the satiety center after all, but a regulatory center for the autonomic nervous system that messes with sugar and fat metabolism and induces overeating.)
** Lets take a moment to appreciate this: A stereotactic atlas of an animal brain is immensely difficult and time consuming to acquire. It requires many long months or years spent slicing up hundreds of animal brains - in the case of the goose, brains about the size of a garbanzo bean - in an attempt to register, down to the 1/10th of a millimeter, the typical location of brain structures. There are accurate atlases for mice and rats, as they are the most used research animals in neuroscience, and there is a a human stereotactic atlas that isn't that great - but creating an atlas solely for the purpose of a tasty liver pâté is nothing short of fanaticism. The point being: when it comes to food, don't fuck with the french.