Big Kibble by Shawn Buckley

Author:Shawn Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Farm to Bowl Step #3: Recycle at the Rendering Plant

Los Angeles: Palm trees and celebrities. The crash of the Pacific Ocean and the hum of sports cars. When you think about L.A., you probably don’t envision Vernon, an industrial city just southeast of the city, crisscrossed by railroad tracks, a place where tractor trailers are the only action you see on the street and where the skyline is comprised of industrial smokestacks, telephone poles, and the occasional shaggy Washingtonian palm tree peeking up next to an industrial oil storage tank.

Vernon is home to manufacturers, wholesalers, importers, slaughterhouses, and a variety of waste-management facilities. Factories here make chemicals, metal products, food products, furniture, machinery, paper, plastics, and rubber. There are fueling stations for tractor trailers and a huge automotive repair center for broken-down food trucks and tour buses. When it comes to processing waste, Vernon is home to standard waste management services, recyclers of medical products, metal, plastics, glass, corrugated boxes, and textile scraps—and renderers.

Standing on a sidewalk in this hot, windy industrial city, you can see the glass towers of downtown L.A. to the north and the mountains rising through a dusty haze to the east. On a scorching, brilliant Monday in August, bloody-looking meat scraps fall from a green metal chute into a truck at Baker Commodities, one of the town’s handful of rendering plants. Steam rises from various spots throughout the Baker complex. You can hear a steady mechanical whir—shring, shring, shring—the sound of industry, audible even above the continual roar of eighteen-wheelers picking up and dropping off ingredients for one of the nearly two thousand businesses that operate in Vernon. You can also see seagulls in this town twenty miles inland. They are circling and diving and swooping over Baker Commodities.

Visiting Vernon is like peeking behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz and seeing who’s running the show. Or, like the 1976 sci-fi flick Logan’s Run, in which young, beautiful people are confined to a clean, lovely domed city (and, as it turns out, murdered when they turn thirty). Those who escape find a very different, far less utopian world outside. Similarly, you could live your entire life in Los Angeles and never drive into Vernon.

If you do visit Vernon, however, you might smell the rendering plants before you see them. As with the transportation of raw meat, the rendering of it involves pretty noxious odors. Driving up Indiana Street toward Bandini Boulevard, for example, the odor wafting down the street from Baker Commodities hits you, making you reflexively breathe through your mouth to avoid inhaling the scent of raw meat. If, instead, you park your car at one of the wholesale distributors farther down Bandini and walk up toward Baker, you pass Innovative Waste Transfer. Here, the smell of straight-up trash can make you hold your nose to pass. If you keep walking, the garbage smell gives way to the meat smell—more bloody, warmer—the closer you come to Baker.

For years, the stench from the rendering

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