Where's Erin Brocovitch when you need her?:
Paiva, a free-lance photographer and graphic designer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, was seeking fresh material for his passion of “night photography of the abandoned roadside West,” when he and a friend stumbled across the food cache near the hamlet of Helendale, along the fabled Route 66 highway between Barstow and Victorville.
Looking for a museum run by retired strip-tease dancers in early March, they ventured up a dirt road and came to what appeared to be an abandoned ranch. When they opened their car doors, they were nearly felled by the stench.
“It was horrendous,” Paiva recalled Friday. “It was really bad. Sometimes you smell dead animals and that’s what it smelled like. Creepy, spooky, gross, disgusting, filled with animals and bugs.”
... They snapped a few images of old cars, trailers and buildings, then rounded a corner and saw an awful buffet spread before them. “There was a case of eggnog … whole cases of spinach that are just desiccated into a bunch of dry leaves … a case of Rembrandt tooth whitener, which I find highly amusing as a food bank item anyway.”
The stuff may have covered an acre of land, Paiva estimated. In among it all were several barrels with the name and telephone number of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, a program that works with 390 member charities to help feed 200,000 people a month, according to its Web site.
Shown Paiva’s photographs of the macabre scene by MSNBC.com, food bank General Manager Jerry Creekpaum immediately recognized the crates and pallets as “the product that we send out to our pig farm, product that has gone beyond code shelf life.” Checking into the matter further, Creekpaum found that the pig farmer had been evicted from the ranch in January before he was able to feed the stuff to his animals or move it.
“I was unaware that he had been evicted,” Creekpaum said. “Nobody knew that there was still food on the land.”
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