Pig Compost

While traveling city to city we were periodically greeted with trucks or bikes carrying stinky, huge, messy looking barrels. We didn’t understand what was in them or why they were collecting all the smelliest things in the city. When we finally found a bookstore with English guidebooks I started reading a panda guidebook. It explained that those people driving their cars or bikes around were farmers going from restaurant to restaurant collecting food scraps. I’m not sure who gets paid in this situation, the restaurant or the farmer, maybe nobody. It is a brilliant system that reduces any waste from happening in the restaurant business and keeps farmers pigs well fed, ones that they might even end up with. I’ve heard of chestnut finished pigs and we read about the avocado fed pigs in Rowan Jacobson’s, American Terroir, but imagine a pig fed on hot chilies and Sichuan peppercorns.

The next time we spotted one of the trucks we climbed aboard and snapped this shot. Looks spicy…