Word: wildes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Extremadura, the 1,000 or so geese Sousa raises each year roam freely, eating their fill of acorns and olives, on a farm that replicates the wild as closely as possible. "If you convince them that they're not domesticated, their natural instinct takes over," he explains. "When it turns cold and it's time for them to migrate, they start gorging to prepare for the long flight." The result is a fattened liver that, while smaller than conventional foie, is delicious enough to have won France's prestigious Coup de Coeur award. "That," Sousa likes to say, "really pissed...
...also a working farm, and that means limited resources. After last year's debacle, Haney is letting the geese forage on grass but worries about the lack of acorns. "It doesn't matter," Sousa reassures him. "They'll eat anything if they think that they're wild. But that's the key: they have to think, from the moment they're born, that they're just passing through, that they're not part of this movie," he says, gesturing at the admittedly cinematic fields...
...considerably less sanguine, however, about the incubator in which Stone Barns hatches its chicks. In Extremadura, Sousa's geese build nests and hatch their own eggs; incubators, in his opinion, not only result in weaker birds, but also make it impossible to "convince" the geese that they're wild. Presented with a still wet Stone Barns chick, pulled from its heating tray, he shakes his head sadly. "If you wanted to raise a baby Rambo, would you want him living rough out in the country or coddled in an intensive-care unit...
Although Haney is intrigued by the idea of raising animals in conditions that replicate the wild, he's not sure he can make the economics work. Natural nesting means that the birds lay only one set of eggs per year, and for a diversified farm where each animal has to earn its keep, that's nowhere near enough eggs. Also, he prefers to be scientific in his experimentation, altering only one variable at a time. "Farms change in years," he says. "Not months." For now, Stone Barns' geese will be hatched in incubators...
Tell that to Turning Leaf wine. The company's new ad campaign, complete with minisite HowDoYouBreathe.com, features smiling mothers - among them the parenting blogger Rebecca Woolf, author of Rockabye: From Wild to Child - and implies that wine is as necessary as oxygen to parents of small children...