Pigging Out on GI Chow

To many North County residents, Operation Desert Storm meant the absence of a loved one as thousands of Marines were deployed from Camp Pendleton.

To 7,000 Riverside County hogs, it meant going on a diet.

In peacetime, the hogs at Standard Feeding Inc. near Ontario had depended on a daily ration of Camp Pendleton garbage. But when the Marines shipped out, their trash went with them. There were no aromatic potpourri of baked beans, scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes and apple pie for the pigs to eat. Not a single half-eaten cheese sandwich. No soggy french fries.

While the Marines manned their battle stations in the Mideast, the hogs had to make do with rejects from area food processing firms--tacos, burritos, cheese, pizza dough and broken eggs--mixed with hog chow.

“Pigs are the ultimate recyclers,” said Arie De Jong Jr., a San Marcos dairyman who is the brains behind this perfect marriage of Marine grunts and grunting hogs--the largest edible-waste recycling operation in Southern California.

In 1985, De Jong became the unsung hero of Camp Pendleton when top brass were notified that the firm that had picked up the base’s food waste for more years than anyone could remember was going out of business.

Camp Pendleton’s landfill is not permitted to handle “wet” garbage and the overworked mess hall septic systems would not have withstood the strain, so Pendleton called on De Jong and his Coast Waste Management Co. to take the mountain of garbage off their hands.

There was just one problem, De Jong recalled. Somehow, the garbage hauler’s name and address had been lost in the maze of military bureaucracy.

“All they knew was that some guy came by and picked up the garbage every week and that some other department on the base cut a check for the service every month,” De Jong said.

So De Jong delegated one of his employees to follow the truck which hauled the base’s edibles away. The trail ended at a dilapidated hog ranch on the outskirts of Ontario.

When De Jong went to visit the place, he found out that the operator, Lester J. Scritsmier, was getting up in years and that the farm buildings and equipment were almost as old as the proprietor.

“It reminded me of something out of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” De Jong said, describing the Riverside County hog farm. “They fed the pigs out of an old Model A truck and most of the buildings were vintage 1920s and ‘30s.”

De Jong saw opportunity in the aging hog ranch. He leased it and obtained the contract for hauling away Camp Pendleton’s edible garbage.

“I’d had a garbage route for my dad when I was in high school,” De Jong said, describing how, as a teen-ager, he had made the rounds of Escondido, collecting food scraps from restaurants and packing houses to feed his father’s hogs. “I figured it worked then, so why wouldn’t it work now on a larger scale?”

For the first few years, the hog farm was an orphan child of De Jong’s recycling and trash collection empire. Operation of his Hollandia Dairy, Coast Waste Management and Liberty Recycling came first.

But for the past year, the Standard Feeding Inc. operation climbed out of the red ink and into its spot as the largest edible-waste recycling operation in Southern California, thanks to the healthy appetites of the pigs.

Today, De Jong is proud of his pig farm and proud of his part in making the Marine Corps more environmentally sensitive. Now that things are back to normal at the sprawling Marine base, its 17 mess halls, three commissaries and two food supply warehouses are again overflowing with the edible discards of about 45,000 Marines--morsels that make De Jong’s porkers grunt contentedly.

De Jong, who makes money at both ends of the deal, is pretty happy as well.

Mark Brousema, manager of Standard Feeding, commutes from Escondido to Ontario daily to oversee the feeding of 30 tons of food waste to about 7,000 pigs.

The garbage--Camp Pendleton’s mess hall leavings, outdated and unsold produce from egg packers, cheese-makers, pizza companies, dairies, taco and burrito manufacturers--is mixed in a huge vat that has been modified with steam lines in the bottom and a lid on top.

The brew is mixed according to the dietary needs of different diners. The smaller pigs get more protein; the mama pigs are given less fat. Then the mixture is cooked for three hours, including 30 minutes at boiling, to remove any stray bacteria.

Still warm, the hog slop is loaded into a cement mixer, which then doles it out to the waiting porkers.

Both the cookers and the cement-mixer server are inventions of De Jong and his staff because, De Jong explained, “there are no other large operations like this around. You can’t hire expertise. You have to figure it out yourself.”

Standard Feeding raises pigs from birth to market, rarely buying its stock. However, Brousema said that last Christmas brought a crisis when the hog ranch turned too many of its porkers into holiday hams. Faced with an excess of garbage and a dearth of livestock, Brousema put in a rush order to the Midwest for hungry hogs to eat up the excess.

Camp Pendleton’s leavings make up a good share of the hogs’ daily diet, but food processing companies add spice and variety with pepperoni pizza toppings, chocolate milk, dated holiday candies and a seasonal favorite--avocados.

At times, the hogs have enjoyed gourmet menus including pies, sandwiches, bakery products and ice cream.

A load of outdated ice cream from San Diego gave the pig farm its biggest headache. By the time the ice cream was loaded into the truck for the 90-minute drive back to the pig farm, it was soup. By the time it was traveling along a Los Angeles freeway, it was foaming up and over the sides of the truck bed, froth flying over and onto the heavy 4 p.m. commuter traffic.

An alert motorist with a car phone notified the California Highway Patrol of the suspected toxic waste spilling on the busy freeway, and the truck driver quickly pulled over.

Standard Feeding has since converted to watertight trucks.