Carl DeLine

Nine hogs raised and fattened on left-over bread from the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank are going to turn up as hamburgers for the city’s needy next week.

This ingenious bread-to-pork-to-beef food conversion project paid its first handsome dividends Monday.

Volunteer workers at the Teen Challenge farm near Pridis, who raised the nine animals during the summer, took them to market and sold them for $1,530.

Gordon Peryk, manager of the hog marketing board terminal at Balzac, said a cheque for that amount will be mailed Thursday to the food bank at the request of Wayne Wessel, Teen Challenge executive director.

And Food Bank spokesman Carl DeLine said the money will be used to buy about 700 pounds of pure beef hamburger to be stuffed into food hampers, about two pounds per family.

Teen Challenge is a nationwide Christian organization that rehabilitates alcoholic men between 16 and 35 years old. Participants must commit themselves to at least four months of unpaid farm or ranch work and Bible study.

Wessel, who set up the Pridis farm last year, said “since we are already raising hogs for Teen Challenge with bread waste from the food bank, we thought it would only be fair to also raise a few hogs for them.

“They help us out, and we help them out. It’s a pilot project, and it works.”

The nine pigs, each weighing about 230 pounds and netting about $170, were raised entirely on old bread and dairy wastes, he said.

DeLine explained that the food bank often does not need all of the bread it receives in donations from city supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants–which amounted to 16,000 loaves last month alone.

“Rather than throw the surplus away, we gave it to Teen Challenge, and get some of it back in the form of meat.

“In fact, right now we’re looking for another hog farmer for the same type of partnership,” he said.

Originally published November 25, 1986 by the Calgary Herald (Calgary, AB), credited to Dick Schuler.