SEATTLE, Washington (KING) – It’s a different kind of head shop found just down the stairs from the Pike Place market.
It’s the BB Ranch selling something that’s even better than bacon. It’s marijuana fed pork.
“The pig farmer has been feeding them marijuana for the last two and a half months of their life and they’ve been happy as hell,” said William Von Schneidau, owner of the butcher shop.
This is all thanks the voters of Washington who legalized marijuana in the last election. That’s when Von Schneidau saw the opportunity wasn’t just blowing smoke.
“And then all of a sudden marijuana, you know, became legal a few months ago and somehow, I don’t know how, I met the commercial growers and they needed to get rid of some of their stuff. So rather than going into the compost pile we said, ‘Lets try it out.’ So here we go,” said he said.
The pigs are raised in a farm about an hour outside of Seattle. In fact, these pigs are on the rock star diet. The mix contains drugs and alcohol, the booze coming by way of the spent grains from Woodinville’s Project V Vodka.
The pot pigs grow to be extra fat and really happy according to the farmer who wants to be anonymous.
Here’s the tough part of the story. The pigs love eating weed, and what gives me pleasure is BBQ pork.
So I brought some pot pork belly to my buddy Steve Freeman at Celtic Cowboy BBQ in Edmonds. And we decided to smoke it.
Steve rubbed the belly, which is basically the part that bacon comes from, with spices and tossed it into the smoker for about 45 minuets. He then seared it on a skillet.
Steve says the results are stunning.
“That’s some pretty happy pork right there. He’s done a good job with that. I really like that,” he said.
And that takes us back to the happiest farm in Washington. Yes, the pigs will become BBQ one day.
But if you gotta go, why not go out on a high.
