Norma Jean’s Club in Castroville wasn’t a Hispanic gay bar with a drag show when I went there as a kid. Back then, the place was called the Franco Hotel Restaurant, and it was the sort of Italianjoint with red-and-white checkered tablecloths that serves spaghetti and meatballs. Jimmy Bell would take me to Franco’s for dinner after the livestock auction, when his truck was empty of animals and his pockets were full of money. Sometimes the meal at Franco’s was a treat, and sometimes I’d really earned the money—like the time we were on our way to the Castroville auction with a truckload of wild boar piglets: they squeezed out from between the stock racks while we idled at a red light and got loose in downtown Seaside. I had to dodge trucks and motorcycles before I could run the first piglets to ground from between parked cars.

Luckily for us, back then Seaside was a military town, with bored, athletic young soldiers on the sidewalks, walking from bar to bar, or ambling around the used-car lots that dotted the main drag. When the soldiers saw the little striped piglets scooting through traffic, a great cry went up, and for a moment it was like the county fair back in Iowa or Georgia—no pink cotton candy to be sure, and no Ferris wheels, but it was an impromptu, no-referee greased pig contest on Main Street, and that makes for a carnival atmosphere every time. Okay, so there wasn’t any grease either, but piglets don’t need grease to run fast or execute dramatic evasive maneuvers. A swine’s extremely low center of gravity allows it to take corners in ways that defy physics.I caught the first two piglets myself, and then climbed into the back of the truck with one creature squirming and squealing under each arm.

I stayed in the back of the truck and struggled to keep the recaptured piglets contained, while volunteer GIs ran after the rest of the herd. The bars emptied out onto the street. The soldiers’ buddies hooted and their girlfriends giggled and pointed, and a good time was had by almost all. I rode the rest of the way to the auction yard in the back of the truck, squatting in the turds and the straw, keeping an eye on the swine so they didn’t perform an encore.

The spaghetti and meatballs that night at Franco’s were good, but Jimmy still owes me.

At the meat market

Strictly speaking, it was illegal for us to sell the piglets at the auction. Back then, wild boar were considered game animals, not a menace to the environment, and it was against the law to raise them or sell them. But Jimmy had shot a wild sow oneevening, right at dusk, as she was starting to climb a steep slope in a tight canyon. Above, he saw an immense bay tree that the sow had been making for. Its limbs fanned out from the base like a candelabra. He pushed on up the hill. There, snuggled among the leaves, were six little striped piglets. He felt sorry for them, so he scooped them up and brought them home. We ate the males when they reached 60 pounds, but saved the females, and when they were mature, he bought a mate for them from another rancher in the area who also kept a pen of wild hogs.

There came to be a tradition of spit-roasting wild boar on the Monterey Peninsula. It’s hard for a chef to make menu plans around a hunt, but every time we had a batch of tasty, young wild pigs in the pen, the size and heft to be cooked whole, we’d take them to the auction yard in Castroville. Jimmy always called ahead a few days to the auction-yard owner so the auctioneer could notify the chefs he knew who took an interest.

If the California Fish and Game Officer was present when we reached the auction yard, it was no problem. Jimmy knew the guy, and he’d slip him a 20-dollar bill. “You’re working too hard!” he’d say. “Get yourself a beer.” The auction yard had a refreshment stand where you could buy a hotdog, a sack of potato chips, a Budweiser, or a pack of smokes. Auction yards like to serve alcohol—liquor limbers up the imagination of the customers, acting like Viagra to the bidding impulse.

Inside the arena the noise was intense, what with all the squealing, bellowing, mooing, bleating, neighing, and braying—plus the amplified amphetamine jabber of the auctioneer. We’d take our seats in the bleachers that rose in a steep horse shoe from around the pit of the auction ring. The auction would start with the smaller animals first, the goats, sheep, pigs, and calves. Then would come the beef cattle and the dairy cows. Finally the dog-food equines made their entrance—the broken-down horses, donkeys, and mules. The Castroville auction was not the kind of place that an equestrian would go to buy a fine riding animal. Far from it.

Skinny little Filipino women sat in the first row, smoking cheroots the size of ice-cream cones, and sending up black clouds of tobacco smoke as they waited to bid on pigs. Mexican vaqueros with shiny hammered metal tips on the pointy toes of their cowboy boots leaned against the walls, sipping instant coffee laced with cinnamon from Styrofoam cups. Red-faced white men in cowboy hats sat apart from the Mexicans, drinking cans of Bud and waiting through the smaller animal sales for the cattle auction to start.

My attention was often drawn to a gigantic black man who was a fixture of the place. He bid on every kind of animal, so I’m guessing he had a meat market, but what made him so memorable was that he sported a molded, shiny white, plastic cowboy hat of gargantuan proportions—it had to be at least 20 gallons of sombrero.

Sod fellows

I turned dirt farmer when I grew up, but I’ve never lost my interest in raising livestock. Besides my goats and sheep, and my two pet donkeys, I’ve got some pigs. No wild pigs for me—their instincts are for running riot in the forest, not for gaining weight in the pen. When I decided to “pig out” I bought a Gloucester Old Spot. Actually I bought five pigs. It’s cruel to raise only one hog, because swine are social creatures, and even if they’re fated for the abattoir, they have such an animal capacity for pleasure it would be wrong to deny them the joys of companionship. Pigs like to sleep in piles, they investigate their world together as a herd, and they root through the fields after worms and grubs shoulder to shoulder. There’s also a practical element to raising more than one pig. Hogs are greedy, and they’ll compete to eat as fast as possible. Thus, each pig eats more food, and gains weight faster as a member of a herd than it would if it were alone. Every time I feed my pigs it brings the old times for me.

There’s nothing like a flavorful meal of generous proportions to put a curl in a pig’s tail. The delight that pigs experience eating dinner—their squeals of anticipation, their grunts of contentment— makes feeding swine fun. For one brief moment five times a day, as the pigs gobble their chow, I look out across the corral and get a flash of that satisfaction chefs must feel when they look across their dining rooms and see the crystal stemware twinkling, the silverware flashing, and the faces of their patrons glowing with red wine and contentment.





The Alice Waters doctrine has it that great cooking is about buying the best ingredients—then not ruining them. As a farmer, I have to agree. Many modern breeds of swine have been bred for length of loin and rate of gain, and the quality of the meat has suffered. Not only that, as most hogs are now raised in cramped cages on diets of grains adulterated with antibiotics, breeding for animals with the natural health and vigor to thrive on pasture has been deemed irrelevant. But I want to have the highest-quality pork, and that means raising pigs on healthy, natural diets. If Alice is right, and a meal can never be better than the ingredients that go into it, I want the best kind of pig. And I want to feed my pigs the best kind of food. In choosing to raise Gloucester Old Spots, a hardy heirloom breed noted for the succulent quality of its meat, I figured I could kill three birds with one stone—I could fill my freezer with meat I trust, I could use the cull vegetables and leftovers from my farm to feed the pigs, and I’d finally have a sentient being or five to feed that would appreciate my cooking.

That’s right; my “cooking.

”Pigs are different than other farm animals. Goats browse. Sheep and cattle graze. But pigs, like humans, are omnivores. Caprines, ovines, and bovines are ruminants. They run their bulky meals of foliage through a series of four stomachs to complete digestion. To aid the process of digestion they cough up their half-digested meals and chew them a second time as cud. The contemplative look that goats, sheep, and cattle assume when they slowly chew their cud gave rise to the philosophical word “ruminate.”

But pigs are restless omnivores like us, not overly introspective, and their internal organs are similar to ours. In nature, pigs will root for grubs and bulbs, for insects and worms, they will sniff out birds’ eggs and eat carrion, they will graze on grass and feed on acorns, nuts, and berries, and if they can catch a quail or a squirrel on the run, they’ll eat them too—fur, feathers, and all. Wild pigs order off the same menu that we humans did before we discovered fire. And, just as with humans, the list of things that a pig can eat gets longer if there is someone to do the cooking.

For a baseline diet, I give the pigs several acres of pasture they can roam and root in. Pigs do enjoy eating fresh grass. Rooting also gives pigs something meaningful to do with their days, and helps them fulfill their ambitions as well as their bellies. But if eating goats, sheep, and cows is the way people eat grass, then eating pigs is the way we eat bugs, roots, acorns, grubs, and agricultural waste. All kinds of garden waste can be reclaimed if it can be cooked so that it is palatable and easy to digest, then fed to swine. I do feed the pigs a bucket of grain in the morning, so they’ll come to me when I call. Then, throughout the afternoon, I throw baskets of vegetables over the fence, and in the evening I slop my pigs with the swill I cook up during the afternoon. Pigs eat a lot. To give you an idea of their appetite, when the piglets were just little 15-pounders, barely weaned, they ate two gallons of grain for breakfast, 50 pounds of heirloom German Marble Stripe tomatoes for lunch, and 30 pounds of boiled French Fingerling potatoes mixed with kitchen scraps for dinner, plus whatever grass, roots, and bugs they’d foraged from the fields for brunch, snack, and tea.“

Wait a second,” you might say. “You’re cutting back on grain, and then you’re feeding your livestock fancy heirloom vegetables that could go to feed some hungry, moneyed gourmet at a farmers market?”

Well, yes, and no. From a farmer’s point of view, food is only wasted when it isn’t paid for. It’s no waste to feed beautiful heirloom tomatoes to pigs if it’s going to cost more in money, time, and packaging to sell and deliver the crop to customers than can be recouped from the sale. As for the potatoes, when we wash the crop after harvest, we sort out all the spuds that have blemishes. Pigs don’t care about blemishes, but consumers do. By feeding the cull potatoes to the pigs, I recoup some of my harvest costs.

It is interesting to see what pigs do care about, though. One day I picked too many lovely lavender Rosa Biana eggplants, so I threw them over the fence. The pigs rushed over in a great frenzy, but after a nibble or two, they wandered off, unimpressed. Next I tried mixing the eggplant, with bent carrots, cabbage leaves, sprouted onions, and salt, and then boiling it up. But when the pigs left the trough, they left the eggplant behind. Finally, I tried grilling the eggplant over mesquite. No go!

Squash have also presented difficulties. When our winter squash harvest was underway I sent samples of several heirloom Italian squash I’d grown for the first time out to the various restaurants we serve, asking for feedback. There were huge, green 35-pound Piena di Napoli squash, bulbous zucchetta Rampicante, and rock-ribbed zuccha Rugosa. I threw raw and cooked samples of these same squash over the fence to the pigs that day, too. Then I sat back and waited for the results of my informal poll to come in. I found it charming that the kitchen staff at Zuni Café in San Francisco agreed with my agreed with my herd of pigs—zuccha Rugosa is fantastic, and Piena di Napoli is far superior to zuccha Rampicante!

The auction yard in Castroville is long gone now. Not that I mind. I don’t raise animals for sale anyway. Highway One is a freeway now, entirely circumventing downtown Seaside. Even the military base at Fort Ord is gone, and so are the soldiers. A lot has changed in 35 years. Franco’s Hotel Restaurant on Main Street in Castroville is now the site of Norma Jean’s Club. Do you know why they call it that? Because before she was Marilyn Monroe, she was Norma Jean, and she happened to be visiting nearby Salinas to lend her voluptuous gorgeousness to a jewelry store promotion. Over in Castroville, the local artichoke growers were planning their first Artichoke Festival, and they didn’t have an Artichoke Queen. I can’t believe the local artichoke growers didn’t have daughters cute enough to crown, so the problem must have been that the growers couldn’t decide which girl was prettiest.

Anyway, they solved the problem by hiring Norma Jean for the day. It’s even possible that the future Marilyn Monroe blessed the future Norma Jean’s Club by stepping inside the Franco Hotel Restaurant. Who knows? The Artichoke Festival became a popular annual event, and the town fathers never again lacked for pretty local girls. If Castroville has been sidelined by the freeway and lost its auction yard and an Italian restaurant, at least it has plenty of queens now.

Share this story: delicious · digg · facebook · newsvine