They are perpetually hungry omnivores!

 I’m referring to my adolescent pig (his name is Dorky Porky) and my flocks of chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks. During the months that they mature to become food for us, I procure food for them.  What they ingest becomes the meat we eat.

No sophisticated cost-benefit analysis is required to conclude that purchasing grain would bankrupt my venture.   Foraging off-sets, but does not solve the cost problem.

Left-overs from Camp Ramapo’s kitchens are my salvation.  Each evening I arrive at the loading dock with five gallon buckets. The staff fills them to the brim with hot and cold foods that were prepared but not distributed.  Besides the astonishing quantity of food waste, these kitchen offerings provide valuable insights into the food preferences of children and animals.

But first a word about the camp:

Each summer several hundred troubled children are transported from the inner city to the Ramapo Camp property which is next to my own. The camp provides the children with alternatives to the urban blight and debilitating clamor of urban living, believing that alternatives to familiar experiences of home will refresh their spirits, clear their minds, heal their anxieties, and restore their bodies.   

Lessons from Ramapo kitchen: Children demand precisely the foods my animals reject.

Evidently the children resisted including food in the new experiences they were offered. I know this because the fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains, and broiled meats that were served in the beginning of the season were gradually replaced by industrially manufactured nuggets, fries, and patties. As the foods that resembled their original forms disappeared, foods that were bleached, colored, reconstituted, and molded into geometric standardization appeared.  It seems the kitchen staff succumbed to 6 – 15 year olds' preferences.

The pleasure of my animals' dining experiences proceeded in the reverse direction. They gulped down the fresh foods and they refused to eat hot dogs, curly fries, chicken nuggets. It is as if they don’t recognize these substances as food.

May I tell you a third astonishing insight? Even my compost rejects these items! 

If it is deep friend and battered, like onion rings, it remains for weeks undecomposed, resisting the assault of huge populations of bacteria and insects voraciously chomping and digesting all the other organic offerings. 

These preferences reveal the inherent good sense of organisms that are immune to the appeal of advertisers and the influence of marketers. At the same time they confirm the power of culture to divert people from their body’s built-in messaging systems. Complex humanity might take a lesson might take a lesson from a big dumb pig and tiny bacteria - they  know what's good for them.

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