“Every food system ends with a pig farmer”. I’m sure we have all heard this refrain more than once. If not, then you heard it here first! Here in the Urban Gleaners’ offices we have nearly a century of food justice experience between us. The longer and more deeply our staff as individuals and Urban Gleaners as an organization become immersed in the food system, the more we realize that this is true.

We’ll start off with our personal organizational story. Urban Gleaners rescues an average of 40,000 pounds of edible food from the waste stream every month. Most of the food we see is in stellar condition. Invariably however, some of the food is closer to garbage than it is to gourmet. When dealing with “recycled” food, compost is a natural byproduct. Our compost stream however is only about 5% of our entire food revenue. During the summer months, our weekly compost output peaks at 1,000 pounds, but dips to around 150 during the winter. We don’t go the most obvious route; using compost as a soil additive, nor do we throw away the food. Firm believers in second-chances, we donate this compost to two local pig farmers who use the re-recycled food as pig feed.

And we love our pig farmers. They drive in from Dundee and Hillsboro each once a week to pick up a load of our compost. We’re incredibly happy to see it go, they’re incredibly happy to receive it. What we see as foul-smelling sludge is treasured gold to them; a free source of pig feed. We feel quite radical and quite alternative reaching out to our local pig farmers. We are however, tapping into an American heritage of garbage disposal.

Pigs used to be the most popular rural sanitary waste solution. In smaller neighborhoods and towns surrounding larger cities, all the waste was turned into manure through a bevvy of local pig farms. 75 pigs can consume about one ton (2000 pounds) of food waste each day! Once we turned towards incinerators, we took a sharp turn away from pigs. Despite our heavy dependence on incineration, we are starting to see a renaissance of the pig-as-waste-solution movement.

At Urban Gleaners we do an endless amount of upcycling. Retired grocery store food is upcycled into fresh ingredients for low-income families. Some of our recycled food is upcycled into compost. Some of our compost is upcycled into pig-feed. These compost fed pigs are often upcycled into pork! Which it’s not a stretch to believe are purchased by big stores like Trader Joes and Whole Foods. And if this pork can’t be sold by it’s “sell-by date”? It’s gleaned! Everyone is very familiar with the sustainability movements’ love affair with a close-looped circle. And we have created our very own closed-loop here at Urban Gleaners.

So we want to give a big thanks to our pig farmers and urge any similarly scaled business to reach out to their local pig farmer as well.