US farmer treats pigs to Vegas buffet
Bob Combs, owner of Combs’ hog farm, recycles the leftovers from Vegas casino buffets to feed his hogs.
Every night, Combs’ three trucks — with their image of a cartoon pig in bib overalls — arrive at the backsides of 12 client casinos to collect the day’s buffet leftovers. And by morning, it is back at his 160-acre farm, where it goes through a sorting and sanitizing process Combs devised himself, which includes heating tanks to meet health codes and a conveyor system to make his job easier.
Combs has been picking up food scraps at Las Vegas casinos and feeding them to his hogs since 1963. It all began on a family trip to Las Vegas, when his father stumbled across a large galvanised can where workers tossed food scraps outside the Thunderbird Hotel. To Combs’s father this was a pot of gold. At the family’s San Diego-area pig farm, they paid restaurants for surplus food. But in Las Vegas the leftovers were free to anyone who could haul them away.
With most clients, Combs hauls the culinary debris free, as long as restaurants throw in their used cooking grease, a vital element in his pig stew recipe. “Pigs like things deep fried,” he says.
As an added bonus with top layer of grease is sold to soap and cosmetic makers
Source: Los Angeles Times
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