The summer of 1971 was drawing to a close, and I had a large and growing problem: Kosher, my pet pig. I was 16, and the pig had been a poorly-thought-through joke gift from my father. When he brought her home to our Manhattan apartment in June, Kosher — the name was also his idea — was a (sort of) cuddly pinkish-white football who fit into a shoe box and drank from a bottle.

But by the end of the summer, which we spent at the beach, Kosher was pushing 150 pounds, eating voraciously and eliminating incessantly. She had taken to muscling out of her pen and afflicting the neighbors, toppling garbage cans and, once, a flaming Weber grill, making off with the steak that was sizzling atop it. A return to apartment living was out of the question.

Kosher had one other achievement in her brief life. That summer, I entered her in the local agricultural fair, in the category “Sow Under One Year.” She looked great and took home the blue ribbon. This accomplishment was dimmed just slightly by the fact that Kosher was the only pig competing in her age group. The local food movement had not yet gotten off the ground in 1971, so pigs were still quite rare in summer resort areas.

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Hanging around the paddocks at the fairground, grooming Kosher with baby powder, I met a massive, full-grown pig named Mona. Mona’s owner was the singer James Taylor. Earlier that year the two appeared together in a cover article in Time magazine, so I recognized them both immediately. He and I chatted a bit, mostly about pigs. Mona, also uncontested in her category, won a blue ribbon, too.