Swill Feeding Pigs In Las Vegas

BBC’s Ethical Man visits a pig farm in Las Vegas, where pigs are raised on the scraps from restaurants, to supply pork products back to the restaurants. It’s a disgusting job (they also visited this farm on World’s Dirtiest Jobs), and I think it’s safe to say that the Ethical Man won’t be invited back!

Check out the video here:

Feeding Swill To Pigs in Las Vegas

Australians please note that it’s illegal to feed swill to pigs. Many other countries have similar prohibitions (but not the US, evidently).


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4 responses to “Swill Feeding Pigs In Las Vegas”

  1. Anna Avatar

    Feeding food waste to pigs seems to make a lot of sense! Too bad you can’t do it (though Australia’s reasons for keeping out disease make a lot of sense too…)

    1. Darren Avatar

      @Anna: Yeah, but any food waste that’s unfit for feeding to your animals can be hot-composted or fed to worms, so it doesn’t have to be wasted as such.

      It’d be nice if the restaurants and homes could cut down on some of the waste at the source, too. The UK throws out over 30% of all food purchased, and I think that figure is even higher in the US. I’m guessing Australia is up there too. It surprises me when people think we can’t grow enough food to feed the world, when such huge amounts are simply thrown out.

  2. Anna Avatar

    Great points! I think that people would have to start growing a lot more of their own food before they would stop wasting. Who’s going to throw away that half eaten sandwich if they raised and slaughtered the chickens, grew the wheat and ground it into bread, and babied the tomato through blight?

    1. Darren Avatar

      @Anna: I definitely find that I value food I grow myself much more than stuff I buy at the supermarket, even though I hate any kind of waste. If we end up throwing out 1/4 of a chicken that we bought at the supermarket for $10, then that’s $2.50 wasted. Less than a cup of coffee. A handful of change.

      But if I waste 1/4 of a chicken I incubated, hatched, brooded, raised, slaughtered and butchered myself, then that’s a whole lot of my personal time and effort wasted. That chicken isn’t easy to replace, because the whole process takes time and can’t be sped up. That waste bugs me a helluva lot more than $2.50 thrown away.

      And that, in a nutshell, is why our food system is so mucked up :-).