Top chefs cook thousands of free lunches at The Pig Idea Feast in Trafalgar Square

In support of campaign to put food waste back on the menu for pigs

 12 noon to 4pm on 21^st November 2013, in Trafalgar Square, London

Top chefs and award-winning restaurants will be cooking up a delicious free lunch at The Pig Idea Feast, between 12 noon and 4pm on Thursday 21^st November, in Trafalgar Square, London, in a bid to get food waste back on the menu for pigs.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Thomasina Miers, Valentine Warner and DJ Sara Cox will be among the big names making dishes in support of the campaign.

Members of the public will be able to turn up and enjoy a free lunch prepared by famous chefs from top London restaurants – Wahaca, Bistrot Bruno Loubet, Cabana, The Delaunay, Paternoster Chop House, Le Pont de la Tour and Soho House – with an array of dishes from Braised Pig’s Cheeks to Pork Belly Pizza.

Pork from pigs reared on food waste will be served at The Pig Idea Feast.  The Pig Idea’s campaign team has reared eight pigs at London’s Stepney City Farm on a healthy menu of legally permissible waste from nearby food companies.  Their diet included spent brewer’s grains from local microbrewery the White Hart, whey from Gringa Dairy in Peckham, okara (a tofu byproduct) from Clean Bean Tofu on Brick Lane, and unsold fruit and vegetables from Reynolds Catering Supplies and Watney Market.

Cooking Demonstrations by Celebrities and Chefs.  Some of the UK's best-known chefs will offer a taste of their favourite pork dishes.  Some of our Hambassadors will feature in ‘live’ cooking demonstrations on the main stage:

ž   Thomasina Miers and DJ Sara Cox – cooking the winning recipe from the ‘People’s Pig’ recipe competition

ž   Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Tristram Stuart – cooking Chinese Pig’s Trotters

ž   Bruno Loubet and Giles Coren – cooking Pork Chops with Winter Fruit

ž   Valentine Warner and Stevie Parle – cooking Tongue Tacos and Chairman Mao Pork

There will be fun and entertainment for everyone, including ‘live’ cooking demos;, restaurant food-service tents;, a sustainable food and farming information zone; and The Piglet Pen: a special kids’ entertainment area featuring piggy finger puppet-making, face-painting and a story-telling corner.

The Pig Idea (www.thepigidea.org) is a campaign calling for pigs to be fed on waste and surplus food, rather than crops that people could eat such as South American soy.  The initiative was launched by Tristram Stuart, founder of the food waste reduction campaign Feeding the 5000 and author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009), and Thomasina Miers, chef of award winning sustainable restaurant Wahaca. The Pig Idea is campaigning for the removal of the EU ban on feeding certain types of food waste –  including catering waste – to pigs in the long term, whilst calling for more legally permissible food waste to be fed to livestock right now. Supermarkets, for example, are allowed to divert bakery, confectionary, dairy, fruit and vegetable products to livestock feed: and yet most do not currently do this.

The best use for food surpluses is to ensure that they are eaten by humans, for example through food redistribution charities such as FareShare and FoodCycle. But where food is unfit for human consumption, feeding it to pigs and chickens is the next best option – far more economically and environmentally beneficial than anaerobic digestion or composting.

The Pig Idea is supported by the Campaign for Real Farming, Compassion in World Farming (and its Raw campaign), Farms Not Factories, Forum for the Future, Friends of the Earth, the Health EducationTrust, Real Food Festivals, the Soil Association, Sustain, the Sustainable Restaurant Association, the Sustainable Food Trust, Slow Food London, the Slow Food Youth Network, Waste Watch and WWF UK.

Pigs and other livestock are being fed crops that people could otherwise eat, such as wheat, soy and maize. This is wasteful of the planet’s limited resources, increases the environmental impact of livestock farming, puts pressure on global food supplies, exacerbates global food price volatility, contributes to global hunger, and is economically unviable in the long term. Commercially produced pig feed also contains a significant proportion of soymeal imported from South America – the production of which contributes to deforestation in the Amazon and the destruction of the valuable Cerrado grasslands. 

Tristram Stuart says, “Feeding food waste to pigs is a millennia-old tradition and a fantastic way of producing meat that avoids the colossal environmental cost of growing commercial pig feed, much of which is currently imported from South America where it is causing deforestation and the destruction of the Cerrado habitat. Farmers could save money by using local sources of food waste instead of buying pig feed, which is getting ever more expensive with the squeeze on global food supplies. This would also liberate crops currently fed to livestock, that could instead be used to feed people. We’ve got to make our food system more sustainable and less vulnerable, and rearing pigs on food waste – alongside eating less meat overall – is one win-win way of achieving this.”

The current EU ban on feeding catering waste and animal byproducts to pigs was brought in following the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak. But when properly cooked, food waste is safe for omnivorous pigs and chickens. The governments of other countries including Japan and South Korea, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, actively encourage the recycling of food waste by feeding it to pigs; centralised food waste recycling plants have been established for the safe treatment of food waste.

“The objective of The Pig Idea is to garner support for some proper research into a safe, regulated and robust swill industry using modern technology to put food waste to efficient good use. We want to use Japan, South Korea and parts of the US as inspiration for a cleverly designed system where food waste is properly ‘cooked’ to kill all disease and then fed to pigs. Let there be no more waste! Pigs are ingenious creatures for effectively recycling food waste, reducing the destruction of beautiful land across the globe to grow them feed. Where there’s swill there’s a way!” says Thomasina Miers, founder of Wahaca and one of the instigators of The Pig Idea.

Many high profile Hambassadors have signed up in support of the campaign, including Phillip Schofield, John Torode, Janet Street Porter, Fergus Henderson, Michel Roux Jr. and Giorgio Locatelli.

The Pig Idea campaign thanks Wahaca, Ballymaloe Cookery School, Bistrot Bruno Loubet, Cabana, D&D London, The Grain Store, Rex Restaurant Associates, the River Café and Soho House for their generous support.  The Pig Idea Feast is supported by Rosie Boycott and the London Food Board.

Rosie Boycott, London Food Board, said: “It simply doesn’t make economic or environmental sense that mountains of food waste in the capital are being sent to costly landfill sites, when it could be put to good use. This food could be fed to livestock here in the UK which is instead being reared on soy fit for human consumption which has been imported over oceans from thousands of miles away. The Pig Idea is a brilliantly creative way to illustrate this issue of inefficiency in the food system, which if addressed, could help alleviate a host of environmental issues. I am pleased to be supporting this great initiative.”