Free The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery

gain five pounds a day—a pound for every three pounds of plant food he eats; a calf needs to eat ten pounds for a similar gain.) Grunting, slurping, and snorting with delight, Christopher ate with the enthusiasm of a gourmand and the natural grace of an athlete. Food wasn’t just the number one thing on his list; we figured food occupied numbers one through perhaps fifty on his hierarchy of desires.
    We humans aren’t allowed to enjoy food this much. To do so is labeled the sin of gluttony, and its consequence, if we are to believe the magazines, is clogged arteries, shapeless couture, and guilt. For many of us, food is the enemy. But while Christopher was eating, it seemed he was communing with his Higher Power. It was a beautiful thing to see.
    No wonder our visitors often wanted to hand-feed Christopher. It was their way of joining in the fun. Long objects were safest: loaves of stale French bread, overripe bananas, overgrown zucchini—Chris didn’t bite, but it was wise to put distance between his eager mouth and your hand. (Small round foods, like cupcakes and apples, were best hand-fed when he was in the pen, when he would hold his mouth open so you could toss food in like a basketball.) These Chris would bite forcefully, but his next response depended on whether or not you let go of the other end. He liked you to hold on to the French bread, so he could tear away a bite-sized piece, using your grip the way human diners employ knife and fork. With denser, harder items such as zucchini and large carrots, he simply bit into them and expected you to keep the other half from falling on the ground. Not that he had an aesthetic problem with eating food off the dirt; he just liked the extra interaction when you fed him the next piece and, if it was big enough, the piece after that.
    Most of his meals, however, were too gooey or amorphous for hand-feeding; these we plopped into his bowl in the pen or poured onto the ground. The uninitiated might think that pigs just Hoover everything up. That was not the case with Hogwood. Unless the foods had commingled in the slops bucket to the point that they were indistinguishable, he carefully chose the items he liked best first, lifting them rather delicately, albeit noisily, with his flexible lips: pasta, pastry, cheese, and fruit. (From an early age, he had a sweet tusk.) Next best were carrots and starches, including rice and potatoes—especially if they had acquired, either in their original preparation or during their stay in the slops bucket, some kind of creamy sauce. Lastly, though still with flourish, he would eat the leftover kale, broccoli, spinach, and the like. If there was any trace of onion or a scrap of lemon or orange peel, he would leave this untouched. If the meal contained any unpeeled eggs, he would crunch them up and then slowly and delicately spit out the shells.
    When presented with an item so large or tough he could not immediately bite it in half—a pumpkin, for instance—Christopher would pick it up and shake it, exactly as a dog shakes a sock (and for the same reason: it’s a kill gesture, to break the neck of the imaginary prey). The shake-and-kill response was especially effusive when Christopher was presented with an unlikely meal of lobster—more precisely, lobster-flavored exoskeleton. One day, friends came with several guests and their big black dog to see what Chris would do with the remains of the previous night’s feast. Christopher picked up an enormous carapace as if he had been dining on lobster all his life. He shook it forcefully from side to side, sending forth a spray of melted butter and causing the lobster’s antennae and eye stalks to roust about in a gruesome, lifelike manner. Like a seal with a fish, he gave the lobster a brief toss before catching it again in his mouth, and then pulverized the red exoskeleton with his powerful jaws. Everyone was enthralled, but especially our friend the food