Letters to the editor, June 15, 2009

Give food waste to the hogs

I know this is just one man’s opinion — mine — but I listen to everyone talking about going green and being good stewards of the earth as God intended. I watch TV and see ads from cities and the WM, Waste Management company about how green they are and how they recycle almost everything. All of these people talk a lot about what a good job they are doing, even the government gets involved in the PR blitz about how they promote green initiatives. I’ve noted though, that the disposal of food waste is not talked about very much.

Oh sure, they talk about restaurants and grocery stores donating food to the needy. But, the food waste known as garbage, hardly anyone recycles. Yes, some people use it in their compost piles, but that is a small percentage of the total. What about all the food waste from homes, restaurants, hospitals, and other institutional organizations? Where does that waste go to, landfills? That waste, all the way back to the Biblical times used to feed swine. Good, healthy food waste to raise good healthy, chemically free pork. In the 1980s, the government, with the large corporate agriculture apparatus driving the bus, discontinued the practice of garbage feeding swine. Now they feed it with grain products and additives that we are all starting to realize are not necessarily good for the human body.

If we fed the swine with organic food waste, which would dispose of an increasing portion of that waste as more farmers go back to organic farming. The rest of the food waste could be composted and recycled after testing and the removal of any contaminants.

In the 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles shipped their garbage to Fontana for feeding swine on the farms there. Would it not be sweet if we went back to that system and we were able to enjoy pork that was all natural? This would also create jobs in the pork production industry, the trucking industry and other businesses. Not only would we get those benefits, but locally it would have a direct impact upon the amount of waste, waste that includes food waste and fecal matter, they plan to process at the new plant. The plant that they insist on putting in Hinkley, with its inherent problems: Methane out-gassing, pollution of the water table and dry creek bed from long-term seepage, dust pollution, attraction and breeding of flies and the inevitable spread of virus to our local population from the dust and flies.

Manuel Alvarez, Yermo