Pigs and Fish By Nick Fisher

Pigs and Fish

By Nick Fisher

When I was a boy, pigs would eat anything. At my Norfolk grammar school we’d queue up at the kitchen window, where rosy-cheeked dinner ladies would splat great wedges of bone-dry shepherd’s pie on our plates. These we’d coat in white pepper and salt (the only condiments available) and eat as much as was humanly possible. This pleasure-fest, would then be followed by something lardy, with a wafer thin seam of red jam and a covering of lumpy discharge laughably referred to as ‘custard’.

At the end of each course, we’d take our plates, table by table, back to the hatch, where the dinner ladies gaggled, and we scraped our plates into the ‘pig bin’. Two heavy gauge dustbins stood side by side, and into them we scraped our ‘dirty wee leavings’ as my dour Scots granny would call anything left on a plate by a small boy.

The pig bins fascinated us. Of course, like any school boys, we’d ‘accidentally’ lose spoons and forks in the swill, which I’m sure gave some local pig farmer a prize pain in the butt (and an unnaturally full cutlery drawer), but at least it established a tangible link between us and farm animals. On a very basic level, we were made aware that pigs ate swill. That what we didn’t eat, could be eaten by pigs, and in turn, that bacon and pork might come from pigs that were fattened on our leftovers. It closed a circle and illustrated a simple and direct connection between our eating habits and the farmed livestock that is bred for us to eat.

Now, no-one knows what pigs eat. Slop bins have been outlawed. Pigs are no longer allowed to gorge themselves on the food we chuck away. Instead, our slops and scrapings, which in some households and institutions constitute up to 40% of total waste, is now sent to landfill or for incineration.

This is such a shame. It’s one of those hard-to-comprehend situations we so often find ourselves in these days where, because of fears of contamination—which in the past led to BSE and Foot and Mouth disease—swill feeding of pigs is deemed too risky. Which is a crying shame, not just for what we lose in terms of a neat circle of recycling, but also, it’s a tragedy for pigs.

Pigs eat anything. And the more they have to work to get a mouthful, the more they enjoy it. Every year, at home we fatten a pair of saddleback boy pigs, from weener to a kill weight of about 80 kilos. Their life with us lasts only from May to November, by which time they’re ready to be slaughtered.

During the six months that they live at the bottom of our garden, they eat everything from gone-to-seed broad bean plants to de-breasted pheasants and barrow-loads of crab apples. In the past, my pigs have eaten squirrels, mackerel, doves, crab shells, the rough ends of pineapples, rabbit skins, beech masts, acorns, avocado stones, several Aga accidents of black charred meals left overnight in the simmering oven, and 26 sesame coated buns left over from school sports day.

I realise there is no practical way for commercial pigs to enjoy this sort of diet, but pigs really do love it. I watch them eat. See them wrestle and headbutt each other over the rights to a well-picked corn cob or a pile of slimy scallop frills. Eat is what pigs do. Eat and dig. Oh, and when they’re boys, they compete. Over everything. My two current boy pigs, try to outdo each other all the time. They compete over food obviously, but also they see who can dig up the most rocks, roots and treasures with their snout.

Like most Victorian house gardens, mine is littered with buried bottle dumps. One day, a couple of years and a couple of pairs of pigs ago, I arrived at their pen one afternoon to see my two pigs fighting over an ancient Thermos vacuum flask complete with plastic cup which one of them had dug up.

During the summer, as I catch trout to make gravad lax or teriyaki-flavoured fillets, all the heads and frames are fed to the pigs. Sometimes, if I can be bothered, I’ll boil them up for Spike, but the pigs take them raw. They’ll fight over heads and skins and spiny fish skeletons, like Sonny Lister and Muhammed Ali slogging it out in the ring.

Commercial pig feed is uninspiring stuff. It looks like anemic All Bran and most of the protein content is from fishmeal anyway, only in my house I’m able to give it to them direct, without the need for processing. Living off fish scraps and garden vegetable waste in the summer, and then enjoying an autumn of crab apples and buckets of windfall fruit, I believe these are the happiest, and ultimately the tastiest pigs, you could ever hope to eat.

The joy of raising pigs like this is not just the lip smacking, chin-drooling, end product, for me it’s also about the pleasure I get from seeing every scrap of waste food from my household being eaten. Otherwise, guts, heads and skins just get put into a black bin bag where they putrify and gather bacteria around them quicker than Mrs Beckham can muster a swarm of paparazzi. These swell in the summer heat for a week (two weeks, if the refuse collection changes, as threatened) only to be then buried alongside industrial and domestic waste in an ever-growing landfill hill, somewhere off the A303.

Fish waste is the worst to deal with; buckets of bass scales, bags of slimy scallop frills, mackerel heads and handfuls of hairy ‘dead man’s fingers’ this sort of waste has the potential for serious stink. It never feels right chucking this stuff away, in fact it’s probably more likely to cause a health hazard sitting out on a street, ripped up by mangey foxes and pesky cats when my pigs could make it disappear with a snuffle and a burp.

Actually, I’ve been wondering if they could maybe do the same to the VAT inspector.