FOIS GRAS IS ABUSE

China's rising foie gras industry has France looking over its shoulder

China has risen rapidly to become the world's second-largest producer of foie gras, but producers in France say they are not yet worried about losing their long-held dominance of one of the country's best-known delicacies.


Issued on: 12/07/2026 - RFI

Geese are raised at a farm for foie gras production, in Huoqiu county, Anhui province, China. © Reuters/Tingshu Wang

By: Zeenat Hansrod


"At the moment, we are not worried that China is going to topple France as the world's leading foie gras producer," said Fabien Chevalier, chairman of the French foie gras industry group CIFOG.

Chevalier told RFI he was nevertheless surprised by the speed of China's expansion over the last two years.

"We think the Chinese produced around 12,000 tonnes of foie gras in 2024 and it increased in 2025. Knowing that the French production was around 15,000 tonnes in 2025, the Chinese output is quite significant," he said.

A mix of government subsidies and large-scale farming has helped fuel that growth. But China's foie gras industry has developed very differently from France's, from the birds it raises to the products it sells.

Foie gras alternatives on the rise in France for those fed up with force-feeding

Different products

Unlike producers in France and the rest of Europe, who mostly use ducks, Chinese producers mainly breed geese.

"That's really surprising because it is much more difficult to make foie gras from geese than from ducks," Chevalier told RFI.

Chinese producers mostly use Landes geese, native to southwestern France, which were introduced to Linqu county in 1988. The birds have adapted well to the local climate, which shares the same latitude as the Landes.

Most Chinese foie gras is produced for the domestic market of more than a billion potential consumers, with very little exported.

Restaurant owner Song Huailan eats foie gras hotpot in Huoqiu county, Anhui province, China. © Reuters/Tingshu Wang

Chinese producers have also developed a wide range of foie gras products, Chevalier said.

"You can find products made from foie gras which are destined for students, sold as a boost for brain power, or marketed to elderly people as a way to enhance cognitive performance," he added.

Goose livers in China can weigh up to two kilos. In France, where most foie gras comes from ducks, goose livers usually weigh around 700 grams and duck livers around 500 grams.

"We recently saw pictures of a Chinese foie gras producer holding a liver, nearly three kilos.

Such big size suits the end products they make from foie gras which uses emulsion, that is the foie gras is beaten up like a mayonnaise and is the basis for mousses, creams and other products.

"In France, we do not work like this at all. The French foie gras is best consumed whole, what we call 'foie gras entier'. That requires much smaller duck and goose livers," Chevalier said.

French farmer battles to market 'natural' foie gras made without force-feeding

Exports

France exports 20 percent of its foie gras production, including to other European countries. Japan was its biggest export market before Tokyo imposed an embargo in 2023 because of avian flu vaccination.

France exported around 10 tonnes of foie gras to China in 2025. After a pause since 2021 because of bird flu, exports resumed last year. Before 2021, exports to China were three to four times higher.

Only two French producers – Lafitte and Rougié – are authorised to export foie gras to China. Chevalier, who also heads Lafitte, said it took eight years to meet China's legal requirements. "It was a very difficult process before France obtained authorisation to export foie gras in 2019."

Rougié invested in duck farms in China and began producing foie gras there in 2007 because it was unable to export to the country at the time. Its China-made foie gras is mainly supplied to restaurants. Chevalier said around 66 million people in China are able to eat in a good restaurant every day.

France is the country of foie gras. It is a hallmark of French cuisine and strongly associated with its image. © CIFOG/Megalowfood/Adocom-RP

Looking ahead

A recent Reuters report said less than five percent of Chinese foie gras production was exported in 2025, based on customs data and analysts' estimates.

Reuters said exports to Southeast Asia and Europe are expected this year. It quoted Min Wei, general manager of Jilin Zhengfang Agriculture & Animal Husbandry, China's biggest producer of duck foie gras, which makes 1,500 tonnes a year.

A 2024 report by People’s Daily Online, China's state-controlled media, quoted Gao Yuanliang, head of Shandong Zunrun Shengluoje Food, as saying the company invested 210 million yuan in production facilities built to European standards.

Chevalier said he does not believe exports are China's main priority.

"For the time being, they sell extensively locally. Furthermore, the protocol they use for bird flu vaccination does not meet international standards that would allow exports."

He said he was not worried but remained watchful.

"From what I know of the Chinese, as I work with them, they could perfectly start focusing on exporting foie gras should they want to do so. After all, this is a major global powerhouse."

Wu Deli from Changhao Biotechnology company, holding a frozen goose liver weighing 2.9 kg, at their farm in Huoqiu county, Anhui province, China. © Reuters/Tingshu Wang

Even so, Chevalier believes China's rise could benefit the industry.

"I am quite happy that such a big country like China is involved in making foie gras. There will be more of us to defend that product – bearing in mind that China and France make different end products out of foie gras, ours being destined for gastronomy," he said.

France has strict rules governing the quality of foie gras produced and sold in the country, including imports.

"France is the country of foie gras and this is not likely to change soon. It is a hallmark of French cuisine and strongly associated with our image. An American or an Asian tourist visiting Paris will want to visit the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées and eat foie gras," Chevalier said.

Congressional MKUltra Hearings as MAGA PSYOP

David Price

 July 1, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida) kicks off the MKUltra hearing. Image courtesy House.gov.

As a scholar who spent decades using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and archives studying Cold War CIA operations, it was with great interest that I watched yesterday’s US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” Because my academic research focuses on the CIA’s use of funding fronts and various specific CIA operations, including its MKUltra program, I was surprised to learn of congressional interest in a program that was terminated over half a century ago.

UKUltra was the code name of a secret CIA program launched after US prisoners of war during the Korean War appeared to be brainwashed, leading the CIA to begin researching the possibilities of “mind control” and a variety of interrogation techniques. Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA used hundreds of witting and unwitting scientists to conduct at least 149 MKUltra subprojects at over 80 institutions, employing hundreds of researchers. Most of this research was unethical, with hideous abuses of research subjects who were often unaware of what was happening to them. This included dosing unsuspecting people with powerful drugs like LSD or potent concentrations of liquefied THC. Other MKUltra-funded research studies followed more conventional protocols, and researchers funded to do the research were often unaware they were conducting research for the CIA. I studied one of these programs, run through a research facility located at the Cornell University Medical School, the Human Ecology Fund, which during the 1950s and 60s funded a variety of seemingly mundane social science research, conducted by unwitting scholars. Some of these research projects studied topics, like cross-cultural stress indicators, that supplied information that would be reused in writing the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, and other horrible CIA projects that MKUltra informed.

While there’s lots of wild speculation about MKUltra in popular culture, most of what is known about the program comes from revelations made during the Church Committee Senate Hearings in the mid-1970s, during that brief post-Watergate moment when the dam holding back so many state secrets broke. Most of the CIA’s records on the program were destroyed, though a small cache listing names of MKUltra research projects was later released in response to a FOIA request made by John Marks, a former State Department employee, which provided us with the precious little documentation we now have on the program.

There is scarce new information on MKUltra, so it is surprising to see congressional inquiry over half a century after the program terminated. But as is often the case, these questions about the past have less to do with this horrible past than they do with the horrible present.

In her opening statement, the chair of the Taskforce on Declassification of Federal Secrets, Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida), made a surprisingly decent statement,

“MKUltra was not a policy failure or an overzealous program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, and ordinary people to LSD electroshock hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture without their knowledge or consent. This went on for 20 years on American soil, funded by American taxpayer dollars and authorized by the very top US intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence.”

Luna explained that as Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms was preparing to leave office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of all CIA MKUltra records. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who directed MKUltra, also destroyed all his records. Luna correctly identified these acts as illegal and as the CIA’s obstruction of justice. Luna stressed that Helms and Gottlieb were never meaningfully pushing for their crimes.

Luna made a special point of stressing that for some projects, regular civilian hospitals were used as research sites, with some experimenting on unsuspecting, unconsenting patients. In a revealing moment, her voice slipped into a eye-rolling-sarcastic-tone as she states “…the program ran for a decade, that we know of…” Her focus on government funded hospital based research did not seem accidental, and the task force’s later clash with one of the three witnesses, seems to indicate there is more to this.

The three witnesses delivering sworn testimony before the committee were Dr. Stephen Kinzer, author of the 2019 book, Poisoner In Chief, which tells the story of Sidney Gottleib, the CIA mad scientist director of MKUltra. Tom O’Neill author of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former senior program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As she introduced the witnesses, Luna called all three witnesses “patriots” for their years of research into these CIA crimes.

Dr. Stephen Kinzer testified first. He spoke about the damages of the culture of secrecy and overclassification of documents, explained the details of how MKUltra secretly tried to discover methods of brainwashing and improved interrogation through torturous research, and described Gottlieb as having an unsupervised “license to kill.” Kinzer stressed that it may still be possible to find and release other MKUltra documents that still exist, to unredact existing documents, and to investigate whether some extension of MKUltra exists today using techniques of neuroscience or Artificial Intelligence.

Next, Tom O’Neill testified that CIA officials lied to Congress when they testified in the mid-70s to the Church Committee that MKUltra had been a failure (this is a controversial claim among MKUltra academic scholars, and his single source for this claim is suspect). He recounted his years of research he claims uncovered MKUltra links to Charles Mason and the Manson killings; which remains among MKUltra scholars one of the more controversial claims about the program. O’Neill described documents he discovered claiming MKUltra researchers had discovered methods, using hypnosis and drugs, to implant false memories in subjects, which he described as a “means of gaining the ability to seize control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.”

The final witness was Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, whose statement completely went off script as she slammed the Trump administration and Congress’s defunding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research. She had nothing to say about MKUltra. Going rogue, she testified that what is:

“happening to NIH right now is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment with political control. For eighty years, US federal investment in biomedical research produced outcomes that no private market would have funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. NIH-funded research on blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56% decline in heart disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed. Treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers, along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions, are traced directly to NIH research.”

Dr Ginexi described the National Institute of Health’s history of sponsoring lifesaving research that no private profit-driven pharmaceutical company would fund. She called out the administration for its role in killing programs that would have helped manage the bird flu outbreak, Ebola, and hantavirus. She made zero mention of MKUltra. While she was still reading her testimony, Chairwoman Luna interrupted her and told her she had used her allotted time.

Congresswoman Luna’s questions cast a broad fishing net. She asked questions about Operation Naomi, Operation Paperclip–the US operation that brought over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, most of whom had worked under the Nazis during the war, many of whom were Nazi party members. Luna asked if any Nazis were used in MKUltra. Dr Kinzer confirmed they were, and he described how some of MKUltra researchers extended Nazi experiments. Luna asked questions about the MKUltra personnel’s contacts with individuals reportedly involved in the assassination of JFK. O’Neill’s testimony suggested Jack Ruby could have been subjected to MKUltra.

Representative Eric Burlison (R. Missouri) asked if the CIA was involved in a famous 1951 incident in France (known as the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning) where 200 people in a village were simultaneously dosed with a powerful hallucinogen by eating bread from a local bakery. Dr Kinzer did not know, but he said he had suspicions and wanted more investigation. Burlison asked about Operation Midnight Climax’s interrogation studies, where unsuspecting US citizens were lured into safehouses by sex workers, where they were dosed with LSD, filmed, and interrogated. When Burlison asked O’Neill if he thought that MKUltra secretly continued after 1973, he replied: “I don’t know. I can’t imagine it didn’t though…I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence of it being used.”

For the record, as someone who distrusts the CIA and who spent years studying MKUltra. I believe MKUltra died within the agency in the 1960s. It died because it didn’t work. The types of mind control they wanted do not exist. The most effective forms of mind control aren’t found in the science fiction tropes these 1950s and 60s CIA operations experimented with, they’re found in the pages of New York Times, broadcasts of Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, and the hundreds of thousands of human and circuit-boarded bots incessantly posting on social media. Certainly, the CIA continued to do all sorts of horrible things, but beyond generating some “useful” interrogation techniques, MKUltra mostly didn’t pan out because a lot of its ideas were unsound.

Representative Eli Crane (R Arizona) asked Dr. Ginexi if her statements were referring to the administration’s efforts to “reform and rein in the NIH.” But Ginexi corrected Crane, saying her remarks were “about the destruction of the NIH, the cancelation of grants, and the political control of the NIH.” Crane ignored her reply and asked her about the NIH funding of the Wuhan laboratory, a topic about which Dr Ginexi replied she knew nothing. But Crane spotted a soapbox opportunity to speechify about how, for years, we were all told to trust science, then “most of what we were told during COVID was a complete lie, and it wasn’t scientific at all.” Unfazed, Dr. Ginexi replied that,

“the number one thing that I think that we’re doing to destroy trust in American science right now is cancelling clinical trial in the middle of those clinical trials. This does incredible harm to the patients who are receiving experimental treatments and it really destroys the trust that we have in how do we recruit patients for future trials if they are knowing that their trials could just simply be canceled for political reasons.”

Crane did not address her points. He instead tripped down an anti-vaccine rabbit hole. But his rant got audience applause which he took as proof that the American people distrusted the NIH. Which increasingly seemed to be the point of this hearing. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R. Colorado) also made a short speech claiming that COVID was propaganda, and in comments apparently directed at Dr. Ginexi, she blamed America’s response to COVID on governmental agencies that are not responsive to Congress’s questions.

These moments of COVID science bashing and anti-government-funded science grandstanding appear to have revealed why the task force seemed interested in MKUltra a half a century after the fact.

Chairwoman Luna asked Dr Kinzer about the role of USAID in MKUltra projects; speculating that since we know that USAID has been used as CIA cover in the past and ”since part of USAID mission was to administer drugs to the poor and needy populations, would the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign populations or creating dissociative states for interrogation or torture?” Kizner replied that he had no direct knowledge of this, but that during the Cold War, many government agencies conducted covert operations.

Representative Timothy Floyd Burchett (R-Tennessee) asked what the chances are that, with recent technological advances, more advanced MKUltra-like techniques could cause a “loner” to take shots at a president? O’Neill referenced the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on candidate Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk and said:

“I just hate to speculate, because I don’t know, I have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programed through radio waves or through their computer activity. So I would never hazard a guess except to say what I’ve already said that they developed means that we’ve never been told about many, many, years ago and I imagine they’ve evolved to much more effective now.”

Which is an awful lot of speculation for someone who, with zero evidence, hates to speculate.

Not to be outdone in describing a conspiracy theory without any concrete evidence, Representative Burchet interrupted O’Neill to say:

“Don’t you think that they could cast this broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe they don’t know the exact person it’s going to affect, but they know what type of person its to affect, and they know it’s going happen. And that way they can…they can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but they think it will happen. And that they can sort of wash their hands of this whole thing and say, well, we didn’t have anything to do with it. But in effect. They really did because they put this out there and they continue to put it out there.”

Dr. Kinzer replied that what Congressman Burchet described sounded like the MLK assassination and the government’s role in creating a climate where he was considered “the most dangerous man in America.” Which might conceivably be generally a reasonable thing to say in a normal discussion, but in a room where people have been freely speculating about mind controlling radio waves, I wouldn’t be confident that they understand that Hoover’s FBI was spreading leaflets and hate mail about MLK that fed a climate of violence.

Finally, at the conclusion of the hearing, when asked if he had anything to add, Dr. Kinzer explained that:

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do, and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US, and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all, but there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere. And that’s what makes people realize that things that used to seem really farfetched, and not so farfetched after all.”

But this was almost an afterthought to an over hour and a half session, where nothing new about MKUltra was learned, and whose purpose for being held over a half century after the program’s demise was never stated, but the attacks on publicly funded research seemed to clarify.

But stated or not, the reasons for this showboating stunt seemed clear. Kinzer, O’Neill, and Ginexi were props in a broader campaign attacking government spending on research; and while Kinzer and O’Neill appeared unconcerned that their hosts were using their testimony to spread their own conspiracy theories about covid, mind control, a certain type of deep state, along with general attacks on publicly funded science; while Dr. Ginexi did not go along with the sham. Dr. Ginexi’s testimony shed more light on what this hearing was about than what her fellow witnesses did, even though she said nothing about MKUltra.

With all the talk from the congressional task force about their concern about MKUltra’s abuse of research subjects (and it there were horrible abuses), they had no answers to Dr. Ginexi’s questions about the harm being done today to members of medical research studies whose treatments were suddenly cancelled due to the federal research cuts they had approved. Never mind that I find it difficult to believe these congressional representatives would oppose using the torture and interrogation techniques developed by MKUltra-sponsored research against enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cleaning house at the CIA. If my regime was in power, I would hold hearings on these and many other CIA crimes. I might even ask some of these same questions to these and other witnesses. I’m all for dismantling the CIA as a covert arm of government; for ending the CIA’s decades of covert actions and ending their role (as Philip Agee put it) as the secret police of American capitalism. But these members of Congress and Trump obviously don’t want any of this. They want as many excuses as possible for Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to shake things up with agency purges, routing out the old deep state so he can implant the new one, and this hearing was just one more stunt in support of this campaign.

I am thankful that Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi had the courage of her convictions and the presence of mind to appear and give the sworn testimony she did. Her calm and lucid performance helped clarify why this particular committee would choose to delve into this dark chapter of ancient history, and her decision not to harmonize with this thinly veiled attack on the public funding of research was heroic.

David Price is an anthropologist living in Olympia, Washington. His latest book is Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and CIA, published by University of Washington Press.

 

How H5N1 bird flu hid unrecognized for weeks in dairy cattle

Study reveals the biology of why the disease looked so different when it made the leap to cows, and offers a framework for spotting its next new guise more quickly

University of Pittsburgh

Facebook

XMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Microscopic image of bovine mammary gland tissue showing influenza virus receptors (yellow) on mammary epithelial cells. The study identified receptor patterns that may help explain the susceptibility of the bovine mammary gland to H5N1 infection and its ability to support viral replication.

view more 

Credit: Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh.

PITTSBURGH— When H5N1 bird flu first began infecting U.S. cattle in early 2024, diagnosis was elusive, because in cows, the disease looked completely different. Instead of affecting the lungs, as H5N1 does in other mammalian species, it caused severe infection in the cows' udders, largely sparing the lungs.  

A study by University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health researchers published today in Science Advances provides the first mechanistic explanation for this peculiar new guise for H5N1, which now affects more than 100 bird and mammal species globally. The study also establishes a new way to help scientists spot bird flu’s next surprise move more quickly, saving precious time in mounting public-health measures to stem the spread. 

The disease first appeared in dairy cattle along the Texas Panhandle as stubborn cases of severe, necrotizing mastitis, a painful inflammatory condition that damages tissues in the mammary glands.  

"Mastitis is a classic disease in milk-production animals, and veterinarians were dutifully looking to all the usual suspects for the source, like bacterial pathogens," said senior author Suresh Kuchipudi, Ph.D., chair of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Pitt Public Health. "When the real culprit turned out to be bird flu, everyone in the field was caught completely by surprise. We hadn't even remotely considered that cattle could be a host for H5N1.”  

In the weeks before the virus was identified, it moved from herd to herd, sickening the cattle—and contaminating their environments.  

"If a cow is infected, it sheds a lot of virus into the milk," said Kuchipudi. "This raised concerns about occupational risk for farm workers. Also, there is a habit of feeding raw milk to domestic pets, like cats, and there have been instances of cats dying, which we studied previously." He stressed that fortunately, pasteurization is effective at killing the virus, underlining the importance of avoiding raw milk. 

Kuchipudi has been studying influenza viruses for his entire career, with a particular focus on how receptor biology determines which species—and which tissues—can be infected. Typically, such studies involve staining cells for the presence of receptors that are known to work in a lock-and-key relationship with influenza, a subset of sugar-based molecules known as glycans.  

In initial studies by other groups, such experiments suggested that flu‑related glycan receptors were present in the noses, tracheas and lungs of cows. The fact that the animals were nonetheless not developing respiratory infections told the team there was more to the story.  

"Glycan biology is very complex," said Kuchipudi. "We realized that, to understand what was really going on, we would need to use more innovative technologies and map out the fine‑detailed architecture that enables the virus to bind to cells." Kuchipudi collaborated on the study with Harvard Medical School's Lauren E. Pepi, Ph.D., an expert in the methodology for comprehensively cataloging the entirety of glycan structures, dubbed glycomics.   

Using a multimodal approach that combined binding experiments, staining methods and ultra‑high‑resolution imaging, the team revealed that not all glycan receptors were functioning the same in animals infected with bird flu. Only a particular subtype, known as N‑linked sialic acid receptors, could bind to H5N1. These receptors were virtually absent in cow airway tissue, but pervasive in udders, making them a "perfect breeding ground for the virus," Kuchipudi said. 

The research provides a framework other scientists can use to potentially predict not just whether H5N1 can jump to new hosts, but also how.  

"We can preemptively screen different species and different tissues within them for susceptibility," said Kuchipudi. "For example, would they exhibit respiratory symptoms? Would they show only mastitis, as in cows? Or would they show neurological disease, as our team has shown in cats? The lessons learned could potentially help prevent us from being caught by surprise again."  

Other authors on the study were Surabhi Srinivas, M.S., Shubhada K. Chothe, Ph.D., Santhamani Ramasamy, Ph.D., Sougat Misra, Ph.D., Noel Chandan Nallipogu, M.D., MPH, and Lindsey LaBella, all of Pitt; Yin-Ting Yeh, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University; May Wang, B.S., of Harvard University; and Heidi L. Pecoraro, Ph.D., and Brett T. Webb Ph.D., of North Dakota State University. 

This research was supported by Pitt Public Health, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (FP00039373/AWD00010780). 

#  #  # 

About the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health  

Founded in 1948, the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health is a top-ranked institution of seven academic departments partnering with stakeholders locally and globally to create, implement and disseminate innovative public health research and practice. With hands-on and high-tech instruction, Pitt Public Health trains a diverse community of students to become public health leaders who counter persistent population health problems and inequities.   

 

www.upmc.com/media 

---

Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aea2068 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Receptor Basis of Unusual Tissue Tropism of Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b Virus in Cattle

Article Publication Date

19-Jun-2026

COI Statement

NA

Related News Releases

• How H5N1 bird flu hid unrecognized for weeks in dairy cattle
  (University of Pittsburgh)