Home Depot Rant #476,352,939

[Bird]

I wouldn't want to eat something that had been in the garbage

This reminds me of something my mother told of several times. She was just a child during the great depression, and her family didn't have much, but her dad was always employed so they didn't go hungry. But she said she could remember seeing grown men going through their garbage can looking for scraps to eat, so her mother started carefully wrapping anything that might be edible in clean paper before putting it in the garbage so at least the scraps they ate would be clean.

 

[Tig]

I tend to agree. Though i've got no problem feeding others leftovers to my animals!

soundguy

During high school I worked in a restaurant. We used to put the table scraps in the "pig bucket" and the farmer down the way would pick it up once a week. I also used to dump all the leftover wine in the bucket. I figured it would make the pigs happy and tasty.

 

[Soundguy]

My 2nd job sometimes is in a venue with a dining area, and the 'plate scrapers' frequently pack me about 3 5g buckets of unsorted plate scrapings...

My pigs and chickens love it... If I hit a bit of beef while sorting it all out.. the dogs love it too.

soundguy

 

[Bird]

Of course when I was a kid I raised registered Berkshire hogs for the 4-H Club and shows (still have 16 ribbons ) and for our family's pork. And I remember that there were people back then who regularly picked up the scraps from cafes (I don't think we had "restaurants" back then) for their hogs. In more recent years, I've heard you can't do that if you're going to sell the hogs for meat unless you have the facility to "sterilize" all the scraps by boiling them before giving them to your hogs. So the hog farmers don't pick up the scraps anymore; the scraps just go to the landfill. We never used cafe scraps ourselves, but I bought the so called "day old" bread from the local bakery and we bought 55 gallon barrels of buttermilk from the local creamery for awhile. The hogs liked both.

And the best thing about using the "day old" bread was that it was 3 cents a package; made no difference whether it was a loaf of bread, a package of rolls, a package of cinnamon rolls, a cake, a pie, etc. And I was the guy who got to pick out what I wanted. Needless to say the hogs didn't get all of it.

 

[Soundguy]

Yep.. I know a few hog farmers that still pickup scraps, and then cooks it in a big bolier pot then slops them.

ditto on the day old bread. There are some people that will jog and come up tot he back of our fence, and throw bread tot he pigs and the ducks... sometimes someone will leave a large 35G bag of bread that came from the day old store up the road. Hogs love it.

soundguy

 

[N80]

The issue with pigs is trichinosis, a parasite they get from eating garbage, etc. It is a human pathogen and is the reason that you're not supposed to eat pork rare. If you cook it well done then it kills the trichinosis.

As Bird says, you can't feed commercial pigs uncooked leftovers anymore. I do know that there are places and/or individual farmers with the facilities to recook the stuff, so some restaurants still give it or maybe sell it for pigs.

Now that this is regulated, there is almost zero risk of trichinosis in pork that is raised and processed commercially. This means it can be cooked and eaten rare. The funny thing is that so many people have associated rare pork with disease that very few Americans have a taste for it.

 

[WVBill]

The funny thing is that so many people have associated rare pork with disease that very few Americans have a taste for it.

My wife is one of them - will not touch pork if it is even the slightest bit pink.

There's a pig farmer outside of Las Vegas who feeds his herd on table scraps from the hotels. Saw it on "Dirty Jobs"...

WVBill

 

[Bird]

The funny thing is that so many people have associated rare pork with disease that very few Americans have a taste for it.

I do like pork, but I don't want any rare pork and it's not a fear of illness as much as personal taste. But I really don't care as much for the taste of rare beef, fish, or poultry either. In a restaurant, I always order "medium" and that way they can vary a good bit either direction and I'm OK; just don't want it cooked until it's dried out, and don't want it bleeding. Anything in between is good.

 

[sunspot]

There's a pig farmer outside of Las Vegas who feeds his herd on table scraps from the hotels. Saw it on "Dirty Jobs"...WVBill

I saw that. Real nasty job. The old guy cooked it all before slopping the pigs.

 

[RobJ]

I saw that. Real nasty job. The old guy cooked it all before slopping the pigs.

Yep..