Piggies

I have no desire to own pigs. Pork is great - I'm all for it - but pigs seem like a ton of work.

Yesterday, however, I was cleaning out our fridge and it made me think of pigs.

Cleaning out the fridge is a depressing task because I am confronted with the large amount of food that we waste. Some of it is just little bits and noshes: the last dregs of mac and cheese that Will always seems to squirrel away back there; a few bites of a sandwich; half an apple that I intended to serve for dinner and then forgot about. Some of it, however, is large: a container of yogurt I forgot, half a pizza that never made it to the table as leftovers, a bag of shredded cabbage that should have become pad thai.

The cabbage and the apples will make their way to our compost pile. They will at least have a second life as nutrients in our garden, feeding the next generation of veggies that will wilt and decay in our fridge.

The pizza, yogurt, and mac and cheese just end up in our garbage. A complete and utter loss.

As I throw these foods away, they remind me of the money we spent (and the time spent earning that money) in order to purchase them; of the time, labor and energy that went into growing them; and of the resources that went into packaging them and delivering them from the field and factory to the grocery store.

If I don't ponder it deeply, the action of throwing away food - taking a piece of Tupperware out of my fridge, peaking timidly inside, wrinkling my nose at the smell of moldy chili or old eggs, and then dumping it in the trashcan - doesn't seem like much more than an unpleasant chore. But when I think of the resources that went into what I have just thrown away... it saddens me.

One answer to this problem is to do a better job of meal planning and eating leftovers. I try. I really do. And if you guys have suggestions on how to make that happen, I'm all ears. Because I suck at it. Somehow, planning meals just results in the production of more formal, well-planned meals, which in turn results in more partial, leftover meal fragments in sadly rotting in their cold Tupperware coffins at the end of the month.

What? Yes. Of course I clean out my fridge monthly. Don't you?

Rick tells me that his mom used to take all the leftovers they produced, whatever they were, and put them in their freezer in a big container. Then, once the container was full, she would take the whole thing and dump it into the crockpot and cook it into a meal that she called "FreezerPot," a meal that reflects her vast and wise sense of thrift.

I believe that this meal worked for them in large part because my mother-in-law's (very fine) cooking tends towards mostly foods of a similar style, so that FreezerPot probably would have contained some veggies, some spaghetti, some ground beef, and maybe a little rice. Things that don't clash when combined.

FreezerPot in my house would likely end up being some unholy combination of enchiladas, pad thai, hummus, tortellini, potato soup, yogurt, and a chunk of bleu cheese. I don't think I could convince myself to eat it, let alone the kids. Dire threats would be involved. It would be the thing that my children would use to underscore the unpleasantness of their childhoods. For them there would be no stories about how hard life was when they had to walk uphill both ways to school. Instead, they would talk about the scars created by being forced to eat barftastic, pan-ethnic FreezerPot.

You know who would probably dig barftastic, pan-ethnic FreezerPot? A pig. A pig would be all over that action.

When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria had two large garbage cans. One was for containers and paper bags: the general trash stuff. The other was for slops. Looking in the slops can always, for me, produced a dire sense of nausea that I am sure is familiar to anyone who has a suggestible stomach. It looked barftastic. But it was all technically edible. I don't know who said it or how this information to me, but I remember at some point being told that these slops were, "for the pigs."

Now, I'm not going to dwell too deeply on the fact that there were probably very few pigs in North Dallas by the time I was in elementary school. When I was younger there were farms within a few miles of us just north of LBJ. My Montessori preschool was nestled amongst them until they were razed to make way for the Galleria shopping mall. After that, it seems like getting slops to the nearest pig would be something of a commute. So I don't know how far these fine food items might have had to travel before they were united with swine who could appreciate them. But the intention was there. And it made sense. Even as a Kindergartener, I could see that one meal at a small elementary school cafeteria could produce of an awful lot of food waste.

Pigs, like us, are omnivores. And I am led to believe that they aren't very discriminating about what they get all omnivorous with. Giving food that has passed beyond my tolerance for consumption to a pig recycles the wasted calories of spoiled yogurt into the potential calories of bacon. (Mmmmm bacon). Which makes way more sense than just throwing those calories in a trash bag and taking them to the dump to be forever entombed in a landfill.

Of course, in order to make use of this fantastic calorie-recycling program, there needs to be a pig somewhere. Which brings me back to my initial reluctance to personally take on the responsibility of a pig. They are big and they have needs. I've already got two small people and a cat with needs that I don't seem to be able to meet on a day-to-day basis. I don't need to add a pig to this mix.

Therefore, this is not a post that is going to come to a simple conclusion.

At present, I am left with a general notion that there is more to explore on this topic. As much as it seems like our family wastes a lot of food, it isn't enough to actually feed a pig. So maybe I need to find more families that want to band together to slop and care for a pig. Because who wouldn't want that, right? It's the perfect project of community responsibility and reward. Pass on your food scraps, clean out the pen once or twice a month and, at the end of the year, we can have a luau!

Or not.

It is almost certainly the case that I would be better off entirely by finding someone who is already raising pigs and providing my food waste to them, excising the guilt without the responsibility.

Which sort of sums up the American style of penance, doesn't it? There's a post topic for another day.

While driving in the car with my family yesterday, I asked Rick if he had ever had a slop bucket at his elementary schools. After all, he grew up in Kansas, Colorado, and Georgia. Surely they would have had just as much of a shot of having pigs that needed slopping as we did in Dallas. Right? He just looked at me like I was crazy.

But L piped up from the back seat. She knew exactly what I was talking about: they have a slop bucket at her current elementary school. And, in truth, I would be astounded to learn that there isn't more than one pig currently living somewhere in our town. This place isn't North Dallas.

So maybe the answer to my issues about waste (beyond reduction - which I still need to figure out) is to find out if there is someone, or "Some Pig" in our neighborhood who would be delighted with the occasional gift of FreezerPot.