Researchers to EU: The Way We Feed Pigs Is Killing The Planet

For decades across Europe, human food waste (table scraps, that kind of thing) had been recycled into food for pigs. From a 2013 BBC article: “As recently as the 1990s ‘pig bins,’ into which uneaten food was placed, were a familiar sight in schools and canteens across the UK, but all of that changed when the foot-and-mouth crisis hit in 2001.”

Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious and dangerous virus that hit the UK especially hard in the spring and summer of 2001. Eventually about 10 million animals were killed to stop the spread of the disease, and officials across the world were eager to make sure nothing of that magnitude ever happened again. The cause is generally attributed to unsafe food given to pigs: garbage, basically. Rotting raw meat.

In 2001, the UK banned swill from being fed to pigs, and the next year the ban became law for the entire EU. There have been protests against the law ever since, and the newest is a study from the University of Cambridge that looks at land use.

This might seem like a small issue, but it’s actually a massive deal, with implications as far away as the Amazon basin. Here’s why: Without the ease of feeding pigs recycled human food waste, their food has to come from somewhere else. That means literally millions of hectares of land is dedicated to producing generally cheap, not-all-that-great food for pigs (soybeans, mostly). And big chunks of that land are in the Amazon, where rainforest is routinely plowed to make room for farmland that’s feeding pigs.

The study finds that if the EU emulates Japan and institutes a heating mandate for pig swill rather than banning it outright, about 1.8 million hectares of land would be saved from stripping and farming, including a quarter of a million hectares in the Amazon. The researchers also point out that recycled food waste is, surprisingly, more of a typical diet for pigs than the grain they’re currently fed: pigs, being scavengers and opportunist omnivores, would normally eat a bit of pretty much everything in the wild. They get that bit of everything with pig swill, but not with their current grain diets. It’s kind of like the difference between grain-fed and grass-fed beef.

Perhaps even more importantly, without a system to recycle human food waste as pig feed, millions of tons of food go to waste every year. Governments around the world, including our own here in the US, are scrambling to come up with some way to reduce the food waste crisis; wasted food means more land is used to grow unnecessary food and more energy is needed to dispose of it. And why bother with all that when pigs would happily, and healthily, recycle the waste?

You can read more about the study here.