Move over Kobe beef, here come garbage-fed Hoosier hogs

I love pork fat as much as anyone, but a bill moving through the Indiana legislature could have me second-guessing my affection for pig meat.

The legislation, House Bill 1170, would allow farmers to feed “garbage” to hogs — but only after the waste has been treated to kill disease organisms.

I’m still not sure, though, whether that treatment is going to make The Other White Meat go down any easier when I think about what was used to fatten up the well-marbled donors.

I’m no stranger to hogs. As a kid growing up in rural Illinois, I helped the local vet “cut” hogs. (Trust me: If you don’t know, don’t ask.) And we had neighbors who “slopped” their hogs, feeding them food scraps from the dinner table — a gross mix that often included cigarette butts and worse.

Still, the innocent in me always rationalized that away. Surely, I convinced myself, the pigs that gave their lives to stock the meat counter at my local grocery store were fed a much better diet.

But reality, apparently, doesn’t fit my Portlandia-inspired visions of free-range hogs with names like Chubby and Knuckles feasting happily on apples, acorns and golden cobs of corn. And, apparently, the financial model for success doesn’t match that fantasy, either.

The National Hog Farmer website notes the makeup of hog feed “has become more diversified as pork producers and swine nutritionists make adjustments to control feed costs while ensuring efficient growth and reproductive performance.” The site notes “competition rendered by the burgeoning biofuels industry for the dietary mainstays — corn and soybean meal — will continue to challenge producers as they wring full value from all dietary ingredients, including the byproducts generated by those rivals.”

Enter garbage, the poor man’s corn and soybean meal.

The legislation authored by state Rep. Matt Ubelhor, R-Bloomfield, has sailed through the Agriculture and Rural Development Committee and was passed by the full House on Tuesday by a vote of 96-0!

Ubelhor said the bill actually deals with food scraps, but those products — unfortunately — fall under the state’s definition of garbage. (Who knew we even had an official and legal state definition of garbage?) It can be found in IC 15-17-2-34, if you want to check it out for yourself.

The garbage definition, at least when it comes to feeding animals, includes “any waste material derived in whole or part from any animal, including fish or poultry; or refuse from handling, preparation, cooking, or consumption of food that has been associated with waste material derived in whole or in part from any animal, including fish and poultry.”

I’m still not sure exactly what all that includes, but until now we’ve also had a law that prohibited people from feeding the stuff to pigs (IC 15-17-10-16).

Ubelhor said his bill makes additions to the Indiana Code to refine the food waste/garbage definition, bringing it in line with the federal definition.

The version of HB 1170 approved by the House also changes the prohibition to feeding garbage to hogs to say: “A person may not feed or permit the feeding of garbage to swine unless: the garbage is treated to kill disease organisms with rules adopted by the (Indiana Board of Animal Health); and the feeding occurs at a facility operated by a person holding a valid license issued by the board, for the treatment of garbage.”

The proposal calls for such waste to be cooked to a temperature of at least 167 degrees (the equivalent of well-done for a pork chop) for at least 30 minutes, or “subjected to another industrial process demonstrated to provide equivalent level of inactivation of disease organisms.”

A fiscal impact study said the legislation, if adopted into law, would require the Board of Animal Health “to adopt rules to implement the bill’s provisions.” The report said a permitting process also would be needed, all of which the board “should be able to implement ... within existing resources.” At least that sounds like good news for taxpayers.

Ubelhor insists his proposal isn’t as gross as it at first sounds. The bill is actually about recycling, he said, and was prompted by a couple of entrepreneurs in his district who want to start a business collecting and treating food scraps to resell as hog feed.

They would gather leftovers from universities, hospitals, schools, restaurants and prisons and process it for hog feed, he explained.

“A massive amount of food goes to landfills,” Ubelhor said, “and this would allow us to make use of it and turn it back into a productive system.”

Turns out my childhood neighbors weren’t as crazy as I thought.

A page about feeding food waste to hogs on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website says: “Recovering food discards as animal feed is not new. In many areas, hog farmers have traditionally relied on food discards to sustain their livestock.”

The website touts a program at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which has “the third largest student dining operation in the country ... (and) is a leader in food scraps diversion.” The university teamed with a local farm, the site says, which “collects on average 1.125 tons of food scraps per day from Rutgers’ four main dining halls and feeds it to its hogs and cattle.”

The program also makes economic sense for the university, according to the EPA, which notes that diverting the food scraps to the farm costs Rutgers about half of what it was paying to send the waste to a landfill.

Still, if this bill becomes law, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at a juicy pork chop with the same mouth-watering desire as before.

Tim Evans is The Star’s consumer advocate. Call him at (317) 444-6204. Follow him on Twitter: @starwatchtim.