The doctrinal debates that occur on websites that divide meat eaters and vegetarians are mostly intractable. Comments on a website tend not to be the best forum in which to debate them, as they tend to attract the extremes at both ends of the dispute whom also tend to yell the loudest. There is not much room for nuance on the Internet. Which is what attracts me to the debates that divide groups from within, like whether it is ethical for vegans to eat honey and the monster amongst meat-lovin' haute gastronomists, whether to eat foie gras.

Foie gras is the liver of a duck or goose that has been fattened by gavage, force feeding the particular bird in question with a mash of grain to plump their livers. This process has been practiced since around 2500BC and is one of the first examples of the real industrialisation of farming: feeding an animal with a foodstuff that could be otherwise eaten by people. It is viscerally unattractive to watch a goose being force fed with a long tube even if you are armed with the knowledge that geese don't have a gag reflex. Look it up on YouTube. You'll be appalled.

It is not legal to produce in Australia but is legal to import, in a nice little display of us off-shoring our morals. Foie gras is the culinary Guantanamo Bay. Very few nations have banned foie gras outright - in the US, the city of Chicago banned it altogether for two years, but this was repealed earlier this year.

The issue is the degree to which gavage is painful; geese and ducks being kept in inhumane cages; and poor bird slaughtering practices. Even when the last two issues are well regulated, there seems to be little escaping the gavage. The targets are easy: rich people eat foie gras.

A few days ago, I saw this video which shifts the agenda of the debate. Dan Barber is a chef who runs Stone Barns, a restaurant/farm that seems designed with the purpose of assuaging the luxury guilt of rich New Yorkers whom drive out to the countryside for real organic food.

He has uncovered a lower maintenance and less cruel path to fattening geese for foie gras. In Extremadura, Spain, he visits Eduardo Sousa, whose goose farm does not rely on gavage but the goose's instinct to fatten itself up for the coming winter. The geese roam around outside, picking amongst the olive groves and are the living the embodiment of slow food until they're cut up for their livers. They're so happy they attract wild geese into the flock to stuff themselves silly. The best foie gras is often judged on its yellowness, which tends to come from corn but in Sousa's farm, he grows a local variety of lupin bush, whose seeds yellow up the liver.

As for the taste, Barber comments that other foie gras is "an insult to history".