JV Life - The Chancho bucket

JVs tend to be save-the-world types, trying to do everything they can to make the world better and not mess anything else up. So naturally, many of them feel an urge to compost.

But here in the Mountain House, composting would be a bad idea. A compost heap in our tiny patio would smell, and that smell would climb up through my bedroom window and make my nightly time to ignore the world a less pleasant experience. Plus, we wouldn't have anything to do with the dirt anyways. We have flower bed, but they get almost no sunlight so we don't actually grow anything in them.

The solution is to look to local culture and see what people here do with vegetable scraps. They feed them to livestock. Some people have guinea pigs, some people have chickens. The school has dogs that  eat my lunch when it's got things like tripe* in it. We don't have livestock, but we live in a farming town so there's plenty of animals around. We give our scraps to our friend's chancho. Chancho is Quechua for pig. Somehow it's a word that survived the arrival of the Spanish (the Spanish for pig is cerdo).** As far as I know, it's only a Peruvian word. So don't go to your Mexican restaurant and ask for chancho tacos.

Vegetable scraps in the Mountain House get dumped in the chancho bucket out on the patio. The responsibility of taking the chancho bucket 4 blocks away to the chancho is rotated between the six of us. The chancho shoves his face in the food almost as soon as you lift the bucket away. Every time I watch him root around in our smelly, slightly decomposed scraps, I am grateful that I have hands so that I don't have to shove my face into a plate of food to find the good stuff. Sometimes the chore of taking out the chancho buckets is ignored for a few weeks. Then even the chancho rejects the foul pile of former vegetables.

The chancho is a little bigger ever time I see it (remember I only see the chancho once ever 6 weeks). And then suddenly there'll be a tiny chancho where the big one used to bed. The little guy in the picture is the third chancho I've seen since I arrived.

If you're thinking of starting your own chancho bucket, you should know that chanchos don't like citrus. So orange peels go in the garbage. And things like pits and very thick peels, which you could compost, are too tough for chanchos to eat, so those have to get thrown away too. But pretty much everything else is fair game.

*First time I heard of tripe was in Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone when Ron is explaining Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans to Harry and mentions a tripe flavored one. Having tasted tripe I can vouch for Ron's opinion that it's terrible.

**Chancho even survived the arrival of the gringos. It's one of those local words that has slipped into our English. I don't remember the last time I used the word “pig” to describe God's most delicious creature.