Marijuana waste helps turn pot-eating pigs into tasty pork roast

By Jonathan Kaminsky

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - With Washington state about to embark on a first-of-its-kind legal market for recreational marijuana, the budding ranks of new cannabis growers face a quandary over what to do with the excess stems, roots and leaves from their plants.

Susannah Gross, who owns a five-acre farm north of Seattle, is part of a group experimenting with a solution that seems to make the most of marijuana's appetite-enhancing properties - turning weed waste into pig food.

Four pigs whose feed was supplemented with potent plant leavings during the last four months of their lives ended up 20 to 30 pounds heavier than the half-dozen other pigs from the same litter when they were all sent to slaughter in March.

"They were eating more, as you can imagine," Gross said.

Giving farm animals the munchies is the latest outcome of a ballot measure passed by Washington voters in November making their state one of the first to legalize the recreational use of pot. The other was Colorado. Both were among about 20 states with medical marijuana laws already on their books.

The federal government still classifies cannabis as an illegal narcotic, and the Obama administration has not yet said what actions, if any, it will take in answer to the newly passed recreational weed statutes.

Matt McAlman, the medical marijuana grower who provided the pot leavings for Gross' pigs, says he hopes the idea expands with the likely impending expansion of Washington state's marijuana industry.

"We can have pot chickens, pot pigs, grass-fed beef," he said.

Draft regulations issued last week to govern the burgeoning recreational-use industry seem to leave open that possibility. The rules dictate that marijuana plant waste must be "rendered unusable prior to leaving a licensed producer or processor's facility," adding that mixing it with food waste would be acceptable.

Gross' pigs were butchered by William von Schneidau, who has a shop at the famous Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. In March, von Schneidau held a "Pot Pig Gig" at the market, serving up the marijuana-fed pork as part of a five-course meal.

He quickly sold out the remaining weed-fed meat at his shop but plans another pot-pig feast later this summer, he said.

"Some say the meat seems to taste more savory," he said.

The results beg the question of whether pot-fed pork contains any measurable traces of THC, the mind-altering chemical ingredient in cannabis.

The European Food Safety Authority reported in 2011 that "no studies concerning tolerance or effects of graded levels of THC in food-producing animals have been found in literature."

The agency also noted that "no data are available concerning the likely transfer of THC ... to animal tissues and eggs following repeated administration."

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Bob Burgdorfer)

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German dumpster divers get connected to wage war on food waste

Berlin (Reuters)-just after midnight behind a supermarket in Berlin, two young men with flashlights tied to their hats wool scour trash cans for food that is still edible, load the bicycles with bread, vegetables and chocolate Santas and cycle out into the darkness.

Not poverty that inspired an increasing number of young Germans like 21-year-old student Benjamin Schmitt to forage for food in the garbage, but anger over the loss and waste that estimates U.N. food and Agriculture Organization to one-third of all the food produced worldwide each year is estimated at about $ 1 trillion.
In ecologically conscious Germany, attentive to prices, "foodsharing" is the latest fashion, using the Internet to share food salvaged from dumpsters supermarket while it is still in good condition.
"Dumpster diving" for the cast-off company is a rapidly growing phenomenon among sub-cultures in Europe and the United States and "freegans"-vegans who do not believe in paying for the food-I've been long sifting through dumpsters supermarket.
But the "foodsharing" movement that has sprung up in cities like Cologne and Berlin brings efficiency and technical expertise to the table in ways that make it unique.
More than 8,200 people across Germany have registered to share food on the www.foodsharing.de site in as little as seven weeks of existence, said Organiser Berlin Raphael Fellmer.
The Web-site that has a look appropriately-recycled paper-assists people where there are "baskets" and what is in them: organic sausages in Cologne or spaghetti and Darjeeling tea in Chemnitz. Members may access or use a Smartphone app to see the nearby address of baskets or a time and place. They then can rate the transaction as normal online retailers.
For people who can't afford Internet, Fellmer established the first of what he hopes will be many "hot spots" where food can be collected anonymously: a refrigerator in a covered market Kreuzberg in Berlin, where anyone can help themselves to food.
"I've come to a few rolls of bread, just a couple," said Frank, a 47-year-old unemployed, which was alerted to the location of a treasure trove of fresh bread on the site and calls home by Fellmer.
Opening his backpack, he helped himself out of a bag of rolls that had been sold at a bakery close to the 19 of the previous evening.
TASTE OF WASTE
Throw away food is a rich country but the problem of a poor country.
Camellia Bucatariu, a political expert on food waste at the FAO in Rome, said that North American and European consumers reject 95-115 kg of food per capita annually, compared to only 6-11 kg in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. As economies develop, grow the level of food waste, said Bucatariu, who is Romanian.
The topic of foodsharers tons of wasted food in Germany could feed people in poor countries is not as simplistic as it sounds: less waste means less drain on resources in producing countries and less upward pressure on prices, he said.
"It is not only wasting an Apple, but wasting the resources embedded in that apple that can be produced outside of Europe," Bucatariu told Reuters. In addition to economic damages, there is the cost to the environment of using energy to grow food that ends up in a landfill, emitting greenhouse gases like methane.
FAO is studying how to change this behavior and if you require changes to legislation on retailers "brands" differentiate "better" from "using"-the latter date when food can start to become a biological hazard.
Fellmer is on a three-year-old "money shot": he does not earn or spend a dollar and he, his wife and the child eats only food that was rescued from the trash.
A rangy 29-year-old man in a baggy blue jumper with spiky blond hair and a spiky beard, is already something of a media phenomenon. On a recent visit, a documentary film crew and a reporter from a local newspaper were crowded in his Studio.
He plonks down on the table a package of pepernoten for Christmas-from a batch of hundreds caught off the nearby trash-bearing a date of "use" that is still a month away. They taste fine, as do some chocolate Santas and gold wrapped.
The dates of "use" exasperate the foodsharers, many of whom were first inspired by the 2011 movie "waste" from their taste guru Valentin Thurm.
Waste documents ranging from farmers discarding the tomatoes that are not red enough for bakeries burns the excess bread that they did hold the shelves trying full until closing time.
Fellmer Schmitt's friend was born in a family very vegetarian-conscious ". Her mother is a food chemist who advised him on hygienic ways to eat and share food from plastic bags that admits sometimes are "sentimental" under your fingers in the dark.
As he lives not Fellmer in East Berlin, with its history of squats and communes, but in a leafy Western suburb of Dahlem, where he dives dumpster under the nose of the richest residents of the German capital.
Foodsharing appeals to hipster culture «» of Berlin with its tradition of anti-establishment protest, Schmitt said.
German crowdsourcing techniques could be "best practices" for reducing waste in other countries, said FAO Bucatariu.
"Solutions can vary according to culture, context and what access to food is there," he said. "But each of us can do something."
(Additional reporting by Fabrizio Bensch; Editing by Gareth Jones and Sonya Hepinstall)

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