Fun! Food! Facts! Over-Stuffing the Pie Hole

Mauritania, in Northwestern Saharan Africa, is the only place on earth where women are force-fed (it's called gavage there, the same term used in France for producing foie gras by force-feeding geese). Females of all ages, especially children, are pumped full of sweetened milk and millet porridge every two hours because their men appreciate hefty gals as a sign of health and fertility in an otherwise underfed nomadic desert country. Voluptuous women are a sign of a man's wealth, while thin women indicate poverty and hardship. The government outlawed the practice in recent years, but it is still practiced on the sly and out in the boonies. In 2000 the government launched a big radio and TV campaign against the practice but “illiteracy has made progress slow”, according to officials. Since government resistance to the age-old practice, Mauritanian women have resorted to taking animal steroids from Pakistan and Chinese rheumatism tablets in order to gain weight quickly.
MIck Vann ©