Waste Not, Want Ham: Part I

Adventures in Sustainable Pig Farming; A two-part series on the most popular protein in the world.

My first foray into AI-generated clickbait.

Got on the 15 last Monday. Took the Cajon Pass to Victorville. Passed the beautiful Mojave Narrows watershed—one of the only visible stretches of the illusive Mojave River— which, for the most part flows underground.¹

Then it was on to Barstow home of the Calico Early Man Site, where archaeologists are still fighting about artifacts that predate any known humans in the Americas by 150,000 years. 

Listening to my book on tape, I almost missed the Lake Dolores Waterpark, or what’s left of it. This early 1960s roadside attraction called itself the “fun spot of the desert,” with its waterslides and RV amenities. Now, the graffitied concrete buildings and headless palm trees are more apocalypse than amusement park.  

On to Baker and the tallest thermometer in the world, standing 134 feet to commemorate the 1913 world record temp of 134°F in nearby Death Valley. I once read—118°—on its digital display just after the A/C in my camper van called it quits. 

My wife wouldn’t be smiling for long. The A/C had just given up the ghost.

Further down the Interstate is the offramp for Zyzzx Road, which leads to the once eponymous Zyzzx Mineral Springs and Healing Center, operated by huckster minister Curtis Howe Springer. Dr. Springer was neither a licensed doctor nor a minister, but he did heat up the brackish waters of Soda Spring to claim they were hot springs. Now the place is the much more reputable and intellectual Desert Study Center, a research facility run by Cal State Fullerton. 

Just before the CA/NV border, I am blinded by the Ivanpah Solar Power Plant with its 170,000 mirrors concentrating the sun’s rays at three shipping container-sized boilers glowing white hot some 460 feet above the desert floor. The first time I saw this gargantuan green energy generator, I thought I was witnessing three UFOs flying in formation. Now I know better, and instead avert my eyes by focusing on the rollercoaster-encircled Buffalo Bill’s Casino in the border town of Primm, NV.

Finally, a quick drive-by of Ugo Rondinone's Instagramable art installation, Seven Magic Mountains , and I know I’m almost there; the lights, the vice, the consumption that is Las Vegas. 

But that wasn’t my destination last Monday, thank God! I continued another 24 miles up the 15 until I arrived at the Republic Services Landfill. The front gate resembled a prison more than a dump, with its concertina wire, guard house, and call box. I pushed the button, and a pleasant woman’s voice came on over the squawk box. 

“Can I help you?”

“LVL Farms please? I’ve come to get a tour of the pigs.”

I’m surprised its taken me this long to talk about the world’s #1 protein. The most enlightened omnivore of all has to be Sus Scrofa Domesticus, otherwise known as the domestic pig.

The pig was tamed almost ten thousand years ago. It was such a useful animal that China and present-dayTurkey domesticated it independently. By the time the Pyramids were going up, the entire Eurasian continent was chalk full of penned pigs. A thousand years later, pigs had found their way to North Africa, Micronesia and even the Philippines. It would take another 4,000 years, but pigs would make it to the Caribbean thanks to Columbus in 1493. From there, they would island hop through the Americas. By the 1700s, there were pig populations on every continent but Antarctica. From Australia to Andalucia, pigs are some of the most successful mammals on the planet, and the most consumed protein. And that’s for good reason. Pigs are a delicious miracle.

But wait. Why was I at a pork farm in Nevada? Don’t worry. I’ll get to that.

Pigs are highly adaptable to different climates and different diets. This versatility means they can be raised almost anywhere on Earth, at least anywhere humans want to live. They can be raised in small-scale backyard farms, huge factory-like commercial operations, or just left to their own devices like on the islands of Indonesia and the West Indies. Pigs thrive wherever they’re abandoned. 

It’s no wonder pigs were the third animal to be domesticated, right after dogs and sheep. They are excellent breeders, reproducing frequently, and in large numbers. A sow–that’s a girl pig–can have two litters of piglets a year. The average litter size is seven, although some breeds can have 14 babies at a go. Once born, they grow remarkably fast, and turn feed into meat at low cost. This “efficiency” makes pigs good business. As a result, early agricultural societies, particularly those with limited resources, loved to raise them.

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

There’s a saying, “You can eat everything but the oink” on a pig. And it’s true. Pigs are one of the few 100% edible animals. We eat their meat, their fat, their bones, their offal, their skin, and even their feet. If you ever enjoyed Electric City Butcher’s Coppa di Testa, you also know that pig snout, ears, and tongue taste divine when properly prepared. 

Because of the animal’s high fat content, pork meat is ideal for curing–some might even say the best! This means that Pork can be stored for long periods of time, and in many delicious applications: pancetta, lardo, copa, culattelo, guanciale, lomo, and that’s just the Italian charcuteries. This culinary cornucopia made pork an effective and tasty calorie bank for early humans. Think about it. How much happier would you be if you could chow down on prosciutto through the long cold winters while other folks were eating bread and jerky. 

But what does this have to do with a landfill in Las Vegas? I’m getting there.

But I feel one of the most important functions of the domestic pig has been lost to modern society. Pigs are amazing scavengers, and they can consume enormous amounts of stuff that nothing else would ever consider food. In fact, pigs pretty much eat anything they find, from fruit and nuts, to roots, fungi, larvae, snakes, birds and even rodents. And, of course they’ll eat live things as well as dead. This has meant that the pig is the great garbage disposal of the animal kingdom.

I have to believe that humans got the idea to feed their garbage to pigs pretty quickly.  In traditional agricultural societies there weren’t any sanitation workers or sewer pipes. Folks just threw their waste out the window or down a hole. So when they realized that kitchen scraps, crop leftovers, and spoiled food could be turned into bacon, they probably thought they’d invented alchemy.

The Chinese took this realization a bit further.

The ancient Chinese word for “pig pen” also meant “toilet.” That’s because it was one and the same. Yep, pigs even ate human waste, and continue to do so in rural parts of China and India. These pig privies kept Chinese towns clean, and yes the folks then harvested the meat.

Is this…natural? It appears so, and that it might even be beneficial for these not-so-picky porkers. Recent studies have shown that piglets that practiced coprophagy–or the eating of excrement—had better immune systems and put on weight faster.

Ancient model of a pig privy in First Century C.E. China.

But how does any of these have to do with my trip to Nevada?

Well it turns out that the other week, I was having coffee with a friend who runs a local environmental non-profit. He had recently launched an impressive compost program that turned school cafeteria scraps into soil, thanks to a $50K grant, several intelligent college students, and a professional landscape architect. Although I was happy for him, I couldn’t help but think, man that’s a lot of people power and W-2s just to make some dirt.

“At my house, my chickens eat most of my scraps. Why not just let a bunch of pigs rummage through the trash,” I blurted out. “When they’re full, I could turn them into delicious charcuterie.” 

“You mean like the pork farm out there in Las Vegas that eats all the casino buffet waste,” my buddy smirked.

“Didn’t I see that on TV?” I said.

“Dirty Jobs?”

“Wait, does that place still exist?”

In this day and age of social media, I assumed the buffet-munching Vegas Strip pork farm was another Internet hoax, right up there with Paul from the Wonder Years being Marilyn Manson, or the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. But low and behold, a ten second Google search brought up the surprisingly well designed website for LVL Farms. Not only did the place exist, I could zoom in on it from Google Maps. Hiding in plain sight was quite possibly the golden goose, the philosopher’s stone, the white whale of sustainability. Could it be that simple. Are pigs the ultimate slop machine?

                                ...Check in next week for Part II of Waste Not, Want Ham: 
                                               Adventures in Sustainable Pig Farming

1. Here’s a cool 3D Tour of the whole Mojave River