A PHYSICIST'S FEAST : RESEARCH GLOBAL ESSAY

FOIE GRAS made with birds in mind : Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has long been in love with foie gras.

The delicacy is a pate or mousse made from the rich fattened livers of ducks or geese.

Dr. Vilgis recalled his early encounters with foie gras when he lived and worked in Strasbourg, France. It was soft buttery and, once the fats began to melt in his mouth, the flavors evolved and exploded.

'' It is like fireworks,'' he said. ''You have suddenly a sensation of the whole liver.''

But such transcendence comes at a price. To fatten up the liver that used to create foie gras, farmers force feed the fowl more grain than their bodies need. The excess food is stored as fat in the animal's liver, which balloons in size.

While he'll eat foie gras produced by local farmers on occasion, Dr. Vilgis finds the force-feeding intolerable at an industrial scale.

Dr. Vilgis wondered whether he could somehow '' make a similar product but without this torture.''

IN a paper in the Journal Physics of Fluids, he and his colleagues say they believe they have devised a technique that allows ducks and geese to eat and grow normally.

To be clear, though, this is not a foie gras substitute that spares the lives of the birds.

The lab's approach uses enzymes to break down duck fat. Then the mixture of normal duck liver and treated fat is finished the same way as traditional foie gras - pureed in a blender and heated slightly.

It's not '' a 100 percent agreement ,'' but very close, Dr. Vilgis said - so close that he can't taste the difference.

'' It's much better than many other products which try to simulate foie gras,'' he said. That includes processes that use plant's fats [ '' it has not the same flavor, it has not the same melting, nothing,'' he said] or collagen [ '' This makes it like a rubber,'' he observed].

The World Students Society thanks Ari Daniel.