> Why single out France or four gras?

Because foie gras is defined as the liver of a duck or goose fattened by force feeding.

If the animal wasn’t force fed, it literally wouldn’t be foie gras.

Most other forms of animal cruelty in food production is because of industrialization. We could clean up many of those and still sell the products without so much mistreatment.

Foie gras can only be made by mistreating the animal. So it’s gonna be specifically called out.

This is a misconception, migrating birds naturally overfeed before taking their long flights [1] and a few farms actually produce natural foie gras [2]. There was also a NYT article about a farm in Spain producing natural goose foie gras by trapping migrating geese. [ref needed]

Obviously this is totally marginal compared to the size of foie gras industry.

See

[1] https://honest-food.net/wild-foie-gras-is-real/

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...

[3] https://modcarn.com/natural-foie-gras-in-the-wild/

Mistreating? They sure like to eat. Mistreatment if you were aiming for a long healthy life but this may not be what you are assuming it to be.

It's certainly mistreatment. They're fed until they can literally hold no more. It's not great.

the "force" in "force-feeding" is a pretty important distinction

The word 'gavage' does not have the same effect. Funny what can turn on a phrase.

It turns out people understand uncommon foreign loanwords less.

> Foie gras can only be made by mistreating the animal.

This is not true.