Force Feeding

Information and facts about Nutrition.

Force-feeding is the practice of feeding someone against his or her will, for example a prisoner, to prevent them dying as part of a hunger strike. This happened in the case of the suffragettes and "Special Category Status" (paramilitary) prisoners in Northern Ireland. Force-feeding is often categorised as torture.

The term may also be used to refer to enteric feeding generally, where a patient is intubated through the nose or mouth and fed because he or she is incapable of swallowing due to some medical condition, rather than because he or she refuses to eat.

Force-feeding is also practised as a sexual fetish, where the participants are in fact only pretending that it happens against the will of the one being fed.

Force-feeding is also known as gavage, from a French word meaning "to gorge". This term specifically refers to force-feeding of fowl and cattle in order to fatten their livers in the production of foie gras and veal, respectively. Gavage can also refer to the practice of administering liquids (such as medicines) to laboratory animals via a tube.

Gavage is also used to refer to a practice common in some Middle Eastern and North African countries where fatness is considered a marriage asset in women. In this case, girls are forced to overeat and painfully gorge on huge quantities of food, often accompanied by harsh physical punishment to prevent noncooperation. The intended result is a rapid onset of obesity, and the practice may start at a young age and continue over a period of years.

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