A LOAD OF PIG SWILL
Posted: 16 Apr 2026, 01:13
A LOAD OF PIG SWILL
31 May 2002
Twenty five years ago I was having dinner with a group of friends in California. It was a good steak and I used a piece of bread to mop up the gravy and left my plate clean. I realised that everyone was watching me and it transpired that none of them had ever seen this done before and they were slightly embarrassed! We talked about it and I explained that, having been reared under food rationing, I never left anything on my plate. They had never gone hungry and this was, to them, very unusual behaviour.
Apart from what is left on the plates, every kitchen produces food waste, peelings, outer leaves, trimmings of meat and other stale or discarded food. In America almost every kitchen has a grinder in the waste outlet of the sink and all the edible waste is fed into this, ground to slurry and passes into the sewage system. Historically we have used totally different waste disposal methods in this country.
My picture this week is of a group of students communing with a pig in a sty in the back yard of a reconstructed building at Blist Hill Museum in Shropshire. Younger readers might be wondering why people kept pet pigs in the back yard! This was no pet, it was a vital part of the domestic economy and was common in Barlick 100 years ago. Many families kept a pig or some chickens, they would do this at home if they had room but many were on pens or spare pieces of land near the house if this could be found. The pigs were the main animals for waste disposal, every bit of edible waste went into the pig food supplemented by some meal from the Corn Mill.
On farms where butter or cheese was made, any surplus skim milk or whey went in to the pigs as well. A cottager would buy a pig in Spring, feed it until the back end and then kill it. Most of the meat was salted for bacon and everything else except the squeal and the tail was either eaten as fresh meat or made into faggots, chitterlings or sausage. If you kept a pig and your neighbour hadn’t got one they gave you their waste, or ‘swill’ as we called it, and when pig-killing time came round, you gave them some of the meat as a present. If you knew of another source of swill such as a pub or café you gave them a service by removing their waste and perhaps bought two young pigs a year.
During the Great War and the Second World War pig swill was seen as a national asset and the government made swill-feeding of pigs part of the war effort. With the advent of school meals and the growth of the hotel industry waste collection became an industry and specialised pig farms like Marshall’s with feeding units at Bradley and West Marton had a full-time wagon and driver collecting swill on a regular basis on contract. Many older readers will remember the row of galvanised bins outside the kitchen at school in those days. Millions of tons of waste was used usefully and produced high quality pig meat and bacon. This wasn’t low quality pig food, I used to deliver skim milk to Marshall’s from West Marton Dairy and if you were hungry the smell of the swill being boiled up and mixed with meal was mouth-watering! Imagine a porridge made up of reasonably fresh left-overs, meal and milk, it was literally good enough to eat! Fresh pig liver from Bradley was a regular item on the breakfast table at Hey Farm.
So what brought pig swill to the top of my mind? I have been following the trial of the owner of the swill-feeding farm in the North East which was one of the first cases of Foot and Mouth disease last year. One of the results of the outbreak has been that swill-feeding has been banned and now 1.7 million tons of pig swill is going into land-fill every year. When I see rushed legislation like this I begin to wonder. How many of the people connected with passing the law have ever had anything to do with swill-feeding? I admit that there will have been cases where untreated swill was fed to pigs but mostly it was adequately boiled and sterilised before feeding. None of the waste going into land-fill will be treated. How do we stop crows and seagulls picking bits of waste out and taking them into surrounding fields to eat them? Could they leave any mess? Have we unwittingly ensured that any microbes in the swill will be widely distributed? I don’t know the answers but common sense seems to indicate that there is more risk now than there was before. If the practice was so dangerous, how come we had no Foot and Mouth for almost 35 years while it was going on?
There were far more dangerous practices in times gone by. I used to deliver thousands of gallons of skim milk to farms where it was piped direct to drinking bowls, not mixed with the meal and boiled like Marshall’s did. On these farms, in order to stop the milk curdling as it soured, formaldehyde was mixed in with the skim. We know now that this chemical can cause cancer. The feeding units I hated most were the ‘sweat boxes’ where animals were fed skim through the drinking bowls and waste from food manufacturing factories like broken biscuits, misshapen chocolates and even liquorice allsorts! The sight of overcrowded pigs covered in muck and chocolate isn’t a pretty one!
What is certain is that the day of the family pig is over, we shall never see it again. We have lost good meat, an efficient and economical waste disposal process and at the same time increased pollution in land-fill sites. I suppose they call it progress.
31 May 2002
31 May 2002
Twenty five years ago I was having dinner with a group of friends in California. It was a good steak and I used a piece of bread to mop up the gravy and left my plate clean. I realised that everyone was watching me and it transpired that none of them had ever seen this done before and they were slightly embarrassed! We talked about it and I explained that, having been reared under food rationing, I never left anything on my plate. They had never gone hungry and this was, to them, very unusual behaviour.
Apart from what is left on the plates, every kitchen produces food waste, peelings, outer leaves, trimmings of meat and other stale or discarded food. In America almost every kitchen has a grinder in the waste outlet of the sink and all the edible waste is fed into this, ground to slurry and passes into the sewage system. Historically we have used totally different waste disposal methods in this country.
My picture this week is of a group of students communing with a pig in a sty in the back yard of a reconstructed building at Blist Hill Museum in Shropshire. Younger readers might be wondering why people kept pet pigs in the back yard! This was no pet, it was a vital part of the domestic economy and was common in Barlick 100 years ago. Many families kept a pig or some chickens, they would do this at home if they had room but many were on pens or spare pieces of land near the house if this could be found. The pigs were the main animals for waste disposal, every bit of edible waste went into the pig food supplemented by some meal from the Corn Mill.
On farms where butter or cheese was made, any surplus skim milk or whey went in to the pigs as well. A cottager would buy a pig in Spring, feed it until the back end and then kill it. Most of the meat was salted for bacon and everything else except the squeal and the tail was either eaten as fresh meat or made into faggots, chitterlings or sausage. If you kept a pig and your neighbour hadn’t got one they gave you their waste, or ‘swill’ as we called it, and when pig-killing time came round, you gave them some of the meat as a present. If you knew of another source of swill such as a pub or café you gave them a service by removing their waste and perhaps bought two young pigs a year.
During the Great War and the Second World War pig swill was seen as a national asset and the government made swill-feeding of pigs part of the war effort. With the advent of school meals and the growth of the hotel industry waste collection became an industry and specialised pig farms like Marshall’s with feeding units at Bradley and West Marton had a full-time wagon and driver collecting swill on a regular basis on contract. Many older readers will remember the row of galvanised bins outside the kitchen at school in those days. Millions of tons of waste was used usefully and produced high quality pig meat and bacon. This wasn’t low quality pig food, I used to deliver skim milk to Marshall’s from West Marton Dairy and if you were hungry the smell of the swill being boiled up and mixed with meal was mouth-watering! Imagine a porridge made up of reasonably fresh left-overs, meal and milk, it was literally good enough to eat! Fresh pig liver from Bradley was a regular item on the breakfast table at Hey Farm.
So what brought pig swill to the top of my mind? I have been following the trial of the owner of the swill-feeding farm in the North East which was one of the first cases of Foot and Mouth disease last year. One of the results of the outbreak has been that swill-feeding has been banned and now 1.7 million tons of pig swill is going into land-fill every year. When I see rushed legislation like this I begin to wonder. How many of the people connected with passing the law have ever had anything to do with swill-feeding? I admit that there will have been cases where untreated swill was fed to pigs but mostly it was adequately boiled and sterilised before feeding. None of the waste going into land-fill will be treated. How do we stop crows and seagulls picking bits of waste out and taking them into surrounding fields to eat them? Could they leave any mess? Have we unwittingly ensured that any microbes in the swill will be widely distributed? I don’t know the answers but common sense seems to indicate that there is more risk now than there was before. If the practice was so dangerous, how come we had no Foot and Mouth for almost 35 years while it was going on?
There were far more dangerous practices in times gone by. I used to deliver thousands of gallons of skim milk to farms where it was piped direct to drinking bowls, not mixed with the meal and boiled like Marshall’s did. On these farms, in order to stop the milk curdling as it soured, formaldehyde was mixed in with the skim. We know now that this chemical can cause cancer. The feeding units I hated most were the ‘sweat boxes’ where animals were fed skim through the drinking bowls and waste from food manufacturing factories like broken biscuits, misshapen chocolates and even liquorice allsorts! The sight of overcrowded pigs covered in muck and chocolate isn’t a pretty one!
What is certain is that the day of the family pig is over, we shall never see it again. We have lost good meat, an efficient and economical waste disposal process and at the same time increased pollution in land-fill sites. I suppose they call it progress.
31 May 2002