Except for the cooling fans, which blow a steady six-kilometre wind through the barn, it’s eerily quiet in here. Even as the gaveur turns on a bank of fluorescent lights, 2,000 ducks rise to their feet without a quack, each stretching its neck out the top of its eight-inch-wide wire cage. Some of the moulards are pale white, others have patches of black. Most are male—male ducks are especially prized at the table—and mute through an accident of breeding.

The gaveur, André Couture, is a kindly looking white-haired man in large square glasses and clean white cotton gloves. He acts like a visiting chaplain or nurse, patting the birds’ stomachs gently to check that their last meal was properly digested, and handling them with careful dispatch. Then he looks to his boss, Élisé François, for the go-ahead. What comes next is shocking, at least to a city slicker: Couture quickly pulls the first bird’s head toward him, extending its neck from the cage. He drags a shiny metal pipe across the bird’s open beak before thrusting it into the animal’s mouth and pushing it six inches down the duck’s slender neck, into its esophagus. Stabilizing the bird’s neck with one hand, he uses the other to pull the trigger on the pneumatic pump, injecting a warm, sticky mass of cornmeal (a few cups’ s wings (with indignation?) before quickly settling into its cage, and Couture moves on to the next in line.

François and his team of nine gaveurs have been force-feeding ducks for more than a decade at Aux Champs d’Élisé. The farm, in Marieville, Quebec, produces foie gras for some of the best chefs in North America, from Marc Thuet of Bistro & Bakery Thuet and Keith Froggett of Scaramouche to Gray Kunz of Café Gray in New York. Force-feeding ducks and geese is the only way to produce foie gras (translation: fatty liver), the delicate, butter-smooth lux­ury so beloved by chefs and gourmands. Though there have been considerable advances over the past few millenniums, the basic principles of gavage still hold: ducks and geese are stuffed with an energy-rich diet two or three times a day for the last two weeks before slaughter, so that their livers swell, on average, to more than half a kilogram, or 10 to 12 times their normal size.

Until quite recently, foie gras was a rare treat, even in France, where 80 per cent of the world’s supply is produced and consumed. It was the sort of thing a family ate just once a year, for réveillon, Christmas Eve. But its popularity has ballooned over the past decade, and now, in Toronto—as in most cosmopolitan North American cities—just about any restaurant with an ambitious menu offers foie gras, pan-seared and melting or as pâté, throughout the year.

Lately, though, the delicacy has drawn nearly as much controversy as it has culinary acclaim. Whole countries, from Italy to Israel, have banned the stuff, and debate is heating up south of the border. Paul Shapiro is the director of the campaign against factory farming at the Humane Society of the United States. He calls force-feeding “one of the most egregious practices used by factory farmers,” and contends foie gras should be seen for what it is: an organ that is grossly swollen and diseased. Superstar American chefs such as Charlie Trotter have renounced fatty livers, and last summer Chicago banned its sale and production. California also passed a ban, which takes effect in 2012—enough time, one presumes, for overindulged Beverly Hills gourmands to be weaned. New Jersey, home to the largest foie gras wholesaler, and New York state, from which most of the U.S. supply originates, are considering similar legislation. A ban could force U.S. producers north. Quebec, the centre of Canadian foie gras production, might soon be the last bastion in North America.

But is force-feeding wrong? Does the practice cause pain or suffering in the birds? And if it does—to take a utilitarian tack—is the suffering any worse than what factory farming routinely inflicts on most of the livestock raised in North America? My annual Christmas terrine was starting to prick my conscience. Which is how I wound up standing in a barn full of ducks, waiting my turn to try my hand at gavage.