Tanker-truck full of inedible pig blood

Welp, there's something you don't see every day. Unless you work at an abattoir.

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: gross • not food • photos • Weird

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The Snowden Principle

http://twitter.com/randywalters Randy Walters

That’s for the new “Carrie” movie.

(and that’s what I get for not reading the sub-caption. Just call me Captain Obvious.)

I’m so embarrassed.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I’m so embarrassed.
  
  Well, it’s better than having all the girls throw tampons at you in the shower.
  - http://twitter.com/randywalters Randy Walters
    
    Let me think about that…
  - Preston Sturges
    
    They’re all going to laugh at you!
    
    They’re all going to laugh at you!
  - cavalrysword
    
    I’m hoping that comparison is not based on personal experience. And thank you for not including the word “used”.
    - Felton / Moderator
      
      It’s another reference to the film Carrie.
      - cavalrysword
        
        Ah. Thank you. You can almost always get past me with a reference to a horror film, as I avoid them. The characters do such stupid things, like running down the middle of the street to get away from a car. I can’t bear to watch it.
      - chgoliz
        
        In heels.
http://doran.pacifist.net/ Doran

It’s for our zombies.
- Chuck
  
  What about vampires? Is it OK for vampires?
  - edkedz
    
    Buffyverse vampires were known to live off the stuff for years, when forced to in various ways (Angel’s soul, Spike’s chip, etc.).
    - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
      
      One of the funniest moments was a part when Angel had a cup made by Harmony and he pulled a face when she said the secret ingredient is otters.
  - niktemadur
    
    Not kosher or halal vampires.
    Now that’s a Hollywood pitch: The Vampyr From Damascus.
    - Robert
      
      The funny thing is, Jewish law allows eating nonkosher/treif if it’s required for you to stay alive. So a Jewish vampire may drink blood. Seriously, the things I ran across when researching my screenplay.
  - Diogenes
    
    Damn, niktemadur beat me!
  - CLamb
    
    It’s especially good for pig vampires.
Antinous / Moderator

Probably make fine fertilizer.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
  
  Or food coloring agent. Or cigarette filter ingredient. Or drug ingredient.
  Lots of uses for pig’s blood that don’t involve directly feeding it to people…
  - Boundegar
    
    Who knew? I figured folks were just chugging it right down.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
      
      Well, that too…
    - Gilbert Wham
      
      Black pudding. English or the Spanish kind. ‘Everything but the squeal’, as the saying goes…
- OldBrownSquirrel
  
  My first thought as well.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I had a neighbor in SF who worked in the blood bank. He used to bring home the expired product to fertilize his house plants. Those days are long gone.
    - Stooge
      
      Let me guess: he now works in a nursing home and brings home the expired product to fertilise his house plants?
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        It was in the 70s. There’s a pretty good chance that he’s fertilizer now.
      - Stooge
        
        …and so we are all connected in the great circle of life.
- welcomeabored
  
  I was driving behind a truck hauling liquid manure once. It was a hot July day; I had the windows rolled down and we were on a windy country road, moving very slowly. There was no possibility of passing the truck. The smell coming off that truck was beyond retched. I began to gag and slowed down, till finally I pulled off onto the shoulder and just tried to breathe and not vomit.
  
  I think that nothing that smells that disgusting should be allowed anywhere near a crop of anything edible. The only smell I can recall that made me as sick as the liquid manure was rotting blood. There are probably worse smells; fortunately I haven’t experienced those yet.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Worse than that stretch of I5?
    - welcomeabored
      
      What’s on ‘that stretch of I5′ that might be worse?
      
      There’s a stretch of 36, between Greeley and Fort Morgan where we roll our windows up, turn off the fan and avert our eyes lest it stain our souls and send us even further down the road to eternal damnation for being meateaters. Cattle and sheep feedlots on either side for miles. The stench is of manure, piss, blood, and mostly acres of bovine misery.
      - Diogenes
        
        Indeed. Feedlots are kryptonite to carnivores. The stench is beyond adequate description.
      - Charles-A Rovira
        
        Feedlots are abominations for everyone and everything.
        
        I can’t imagine a more soul deadening place to work except Nazi concentration camps, where nothing come out except for immediate burial.
    - cavalrysword
      
      The part by Bandini Mountain?
    - tomrigid
      
      Cowschwitz
  - voiceinthedistance
    
    I used to work next to a mushroom farm that received tanker trucks full of liquified chicken manure once a week as a growing medium. That was bad. Very bad.
    
    The all time worst smell I ever was subjected to, though, was following a collection truck headed for the tallow factory on a hot day in traffic, when I couldn’t immediately take a different route. Instant gag reflex. The smell was bad enough to make me long for some liquified manure to mask the tallow truck smell.
    
    If there was a Scoville hotness scale equivalent scale for stench, the I-5 stockyards would be like a Jalapeño. Rancid tallow renderings would be more like a Naga Jalokia pepper that makes you beg for mercy.
    - welcomeabored
      
      Ugh! I was pretty sure that whoever rung in with a stinkier story, it would involve rotting corpses of some sort. I’m pleased to say I’ve been spared that experience. I’d offer my sympathies, but in a competitive stink storytelling contest, you’re holding a terrific hand. :^)
      
      I’ve been trying to figure out what might be worse still… skunk? wolverine? a rotting human corpse? multiple rotting human corpses? I’ve read that they have to spread deodorizers of a sort on graveyards, if several fresh bodies have been buried there. The smell of the liquefying remains can travel to open air even from six feet under.
      - chgoliz
        
        Durian.
        
        Which I love.
        
        And Casu Marzu. Which I don’t.
  - CH
    
    Oh, yes! That reminds me of the nice winds after the farmer who had cows spread cow urin on the fields. Mmm-mm!
    
    I bought a bag of chicken manure pellets to fertilize my flower bed. Urgh… that was pretty bad, too. Fortunately the smell didn’t reach more that a few meters and dissipated pretty fast.
    - welcomeabored
      
      The truck pulled off onto a dirt road that led to the backside of a large ranch with several hundred head of cattle. The rancher grew his own hay fields, so the liquid manure was probably for the purpose of fertilizing the grass.
  - http://profiles.google.com/westcarleton Ray Perkins
    
    Had to take some stuff to the city dump once. A truck pulled in beside us filled with this yellow slop which was from the local rendering plant. The plant turned things like bloated cow carcasses into fertilizer. The stuff they couldn’t use was taken to the dump. Unbelievable horrid smell. I really don’t know how people could work in that plant.
- GlenBlank
  
  Yep. Blood meal is one of the more popular organic nitrogen fertilizers.
  
  (Just don’t tell your Vegan friends that while they’re chowing down on their organic veggies. Trust me on this. :-))
rocketpj

Part of our daily tribute to the vampire overlords.
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

If the government doesn’t want us drinking this pig blood, there’s must be something great about it.
- Chuck
  
  I’ll keep an ear out for some nutrition expert to promote it on Coast to Coast AM.
- class_enemy
  
  I could maybe choke down a homeopathic pig blood product, diluted about twenty successive times.
  - Ipo
    
    In theory there’d be less pig blood in it than in bottled drinking water, wouldn’t there?
    - Charles-A Rovira
      
      Well that‘s why they call it “Red Bull“.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=663322224 James Anderson

Better than a truck full of edible pig blood if you ask me…
- http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
  
  Pork is for the nobles, pig for the vassals/
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Yea, I say unto thee once more: Black Pudding.
DrMedicine

To: Jim Haggerty
geeks

Am I the only one that thought it might be on its way to an arms facility for use in racist carpet bombs? (For the record I think the US government does many bad things, but am not actually suggesting they would weaponize pork for use against Muslim countries…).
- toyg
  
  Better to weaponize bio-degradable pork than spent uranium, which has a half-life of centuries. Thanks to NATO ordnance, Boznia will keep having high rates of tumours for quite a long time; a bit of pig blood would have just helped plants grow a bit faster for a year or two.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Better to weaponize bio-degradable pork
    
    Why bother when raw poultry is already such an effective bioweapon?
bcsizemo

Brings new meaning to “blood on the highways”.
chellberty

viral marketing campaign for cabin in the woods 2?
Rider

It’s probably full whiskey and that’s just a clever way to keep anymore from screwing with it.
PhosPhorious

Inedible, they say? That sounds like a dare. . . !
- cavalrysword
  
  “All Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.”
SomeGuyNamedMark

That means Christmas is coming!
Eric Francoeur

Pray tell, what do you guys think blood pudding is made of? Strawberry juice? Although I prefer mine from edible pork blood.
- billstewart
  
  There’s a Taiwanese snack that gets called “rice cakes”, little cubes of rice and pork blood fried crunchy. I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t eat the things, but my wife gets them at the local boba drink place. And there’s black pudding at the pub.
  - Gilbert Wham
    
    Crunchy pig-blood, you say? Why was I not informed?
bo1n6bo1n6

“not intended” implies it could still work in a pinch though.
cavalrysword

No hazmat placard on the truck. Any idea where this was?
- kjh
  
  English speaking country, drives on the left. Not Quebec then.
http://twitter.com/coherent_light Scott Elyard

This vehicle always has right-of-way.
Daneel

Now I want some black pudding.
Preston Sturges

Blood is also used in various microbiological applications, but I don’t know about pig blood. Gonorrhea plates used powdered beef blood, and strep plates used fresh rabbit blood. For the strep plates you have to let the agar get pretty cool before you add the blood so it doesn’t coagulate, and then you get that rich steamy coppery fresh blood smell.
nvlady

Probably taking it to a CAFO to use in animal feed.
noah django

me. halloween. 2004.
- awjt
  
  NIIIIIIIICE, very stylish. You’re slathered in pig blood, no?
  - noah django
    
    well, my whole MO is to use what I have laying around the crib. so, yeah. pig blood.
    - awjt
      
      You’re living my dream lifestyle, then.
apoxia

My guess is this blood is on its way to be dried and then most probably used in fertiliser. It’s dried by blasting it into a superheated metal tank where the water evaporates and the dried blood falls to the bottom. Same way milk powder is made. I used to work for an animal byproducts exporter so know a lot about this stinky stuff (fish meal is the worst, and it’s also potentially explosive)
- welcomeabored
  
  Every so once in a while, I think about the game show, ‘What’s My Line?’ That job description sounds like a sure winner – the panel would be stumped.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbZliXx8kIQ
  - apoxia
    
    Luckily for me the company I was employed by was a middle man between the producer and the overseas buyer, and so the worst we had were sample bags of meal we sent for testing. My primary function was completing the export documentation. However, those sample bags came in handy for garden fertiliser.
- Gilbert Wham
  
  My friend’s dad worked his whole life for Birds (they of custard-powder fame). He was blown up several times in food product-related detonations.
- kringlebertfistyebuns
  
  Wait…fish meal is explosive? How, from the dust? Or something else?
  - apoxia
    
    The internet says: “Fish meals with high oil contents can present problems during storage. Fish oil in the meal will oxidise after production and the reaction can lead to considerable rises in temperature. This can become a fire hazard.”
    
    Combustible might be a better way to describe it rather than explosive. But if its locked up in a shipping container in the sun with other containers all around the results could be pretty disastrous.
    
    When exporting the stuff the documentation had to note it was a fire hazard.
awjt

Soylent Green is people.
- niktemadur
  
  I’ll have an order of Soylent Green with a slice of Soylent Orange, if you don’t mind.
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

Pet food. Do I win? Gimme the prize, gimme the prize!
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

Good job causing me to frown deeply??? I don’t know what else to say
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

Just leave the one sticker on. I mean who is going to see “pork blood only” and think HOLY SHIT A FUKKEN FOOD TRUCK JUST GOT HERE
- awjt
  
  That’s not the point, but the METH TRUCK just drove by…
http://www.facebook.com/michael.vandeberghe Michael Van De Berghe

WTF? Why inedible? I used to eat pig blood cake every Sunday dim sum at Pine and Bamboo Garden. I wasn’t crazy about it but my son loved it.
- apoxia
  
  It’s animal-grade food, not people. People-grade is produced under more sanitary conditions with stronger regulations. Of course you can have people-grade blood also.
niktemadur

Next time I transport a truck full of Baja California abalone, I’m gonna label it as Inedible Pig Blood, that’ll keep the mob’s truck hijackers at arm’s length.

Seriously, Baja California abalone trucks are primo prey for truck hijackers, pound for pound about as expensive as drugs. I mean, just look at it:
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5183/5554027716_efeeb59413_z.jpg
- welcomeabored
  
  Nom nom nom… abalone is delicious! Umm, when did you say you might be driving through with this precious cargo? Maybe a crate could just happen to fall off the backend?
http://twitter.com/carlosalonso Carlos Alonso

Well, in Galicia (North-west Spain) we use pork blood in a sort of crêpes called “filloas”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%AApe#In_other_countries
Andrew Singleton

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Righteous and apposite Thrash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8mEOiI4pjs
Petzl

This is viral marketing for:

Game of Thrones Season Premiere.
March 31, 2013.
DJBudSonic

A friends loft looks down into the alley across from the Detroit Eastern Market slaughterhouses. Workers rinse the floors with a hose, and the blood runs out under the loading dock doors, and falls into the street sewers. Around that same time, the ‘Stomach Truck’, a stake truck with an open top we can look down into will rumble through, filled to the top with jiggly innards, mostly stomachs. Never feel the urge to jump into it, though it could be a great setup for a Kung-Fu movie escape. Mmmm..what delicious wonders a meat based diet conceal…
- Preston Sturges
  
  It’s probably going to an exclusive sex fetish club.
  
  It’s hard to dismiss that idea when so many impressionable young guys have been raised on slasher movies.
Michael D

Because, you know, anytime there’s a truck of blood on the highway it attracts crowds of people with straws and cups looking for a handout.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Dave-Green/100002488361855 Dave Green

Reminds me when I worked at a Toronto abbatoire; the plant filled one whole tanker truck every 8 hours! What goes out in the tanker isn’t the worst; you should see what goes out in the covered trucks, and into the city sewers.
https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith

Might be horse DNA in there.
Vanwall Green

I was driving in the middle of nowhere California, and came up on a big rig with the ‘radioactive hazard’ triangle open on the back. Passed it very quickly.
http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

I’m more reminded of ‘Pig Blood Blues’ by Clive Barker:

“Don’t believe them if they said I never loved you, or if they said I ran away. I never did. They fed me to the pig. I love you. -Tommy”
jackie31337

In Finland, they sell pigs’ blood by the liter in the frozen food section. People use it for making pancakes.