Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating

By Wyatt Williams

Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill and eat animals. In order to understand why we eat meat, the restaurant critic and journalist investigated factory farms, learned to hunt game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partook in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska. In Springer Mountain, he tells about his experiences while charting the history of meat eating and vegetarianism.
 
Williams shows how mysteries springing up from everyday experiences can lead us into the big questions of life while examining the irreconcilable differences between humans and animals. Springer Mountain is a thought-provoking work, one that reveals how what we eat tells us who we are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469665498

Wyatt Williams

Wyatt Williams is a former restaurant critic. His essays have been published by The New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, The Believer, and The Paris Review. In 2018, his essay "After Oranges" was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and anthologized in The Best American Food Writing series.

Book preview

One

I began this investigation in the fall of 2011. The magazine I was working for kept their headquarters in a tall glass building in downtown Atlanta. I was covering the food scene, a beat that I still found vaguely glamorous, leaving work every day at five for another round of free juleps at another restaurant opening. The people at these little parties were always the same—a handful of silent investors with similarly silent personalities, a few chefs who had become so successful they hadn’t cooked in years, a dozen media professionals like myself whose time and attention could be bought with rounds of cocktails and plates of free food. The menus were all serving a similar spread of gussied-up southern cuisine—deviled eggs, pickled okra, country ham, and fried chicken—and established credibility and luxury by identifying the ingredients’ local origins. I was never served deviled eggs; I was served Wandering Brook deviled yard eggs topped with Bramlett Trout Farms cured trout roe.

It was hard to keep all of these places straight. Were the eggs from Wandering Brook or Whispering Meadow? I often could not remember. I did not have this problem with the chicken because the chicken was always from Springer Mountain: Springer Mountain roast chicken over confit potatoes, Springer Mountain fried chicken and biscuits, pâté of Springer Mountain chicken liver and muscadine gelée. I was told that Springer Mountain was a little family farm just north of Atlanta. I was told Springer Mountain raised the best chickens that Georgia had ever seen. I could not hear the name without picturing a creek running through a Blue Ridge forest. Where was this spring-fed paradise? I wanted to go there, but no one at these parties could tell me where it was exactly. The chefs had never been there. I set out to find Springer Mountain and see it for myself. My investigation was only meant to solve a minor local mystery.

I looked for the farm’s address online but found only a P.O. box in Mount Airy, Georgia. When I typed Springer Mountain Farm into Google Earth, it directed me to the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. The satellite image showed me pine and oak trees and rolling mountain ridges cut through with walking paths. I couldn’t see a patch of cleared land for miles. I went to the farm’s website, and it gave me thousands of addresses for restaurants where I could eat Springer Mountain Farms chicken but not the address of the farm. There were no owners’ names listed. There was an 800 number, but no one answered when I called.

I emailed the head of a local agricultural nonprofit and asked if he had visited Springer Mountain.

Never been there. Several years ago we requested a tour of the Springer Mountain facilities. There were no responses, he replied. He added, somewhat cryptically, Been waiting for the day when someone took a good hard look at Springer.

Eventually I noticed a fax number on the Springer Mountain website. After a brief search, I determined it was also the fax number for a company called Fieldale Farms Corporation.

Unlike for Springer Mountain, information was available about Fieldale: company executives, family owners, industry rankings, phone numbers, and even a physical address for the headquarters. I called the number. A receptionist quickly answered. Before long I’d been transferred to the desk of Tom Hensley, the president of Fieldale. As it turned out, he was a longtime subscriber to the magazine I was working for at the time. He wondered what he could do for me.

I said, I’d like to come up and take a tour of Springer Mountain Farm.

He paused for a second and, I think, chuckled. We set a date to meet and he gave me the address of his office.

When I arrived at the headquarters of Fieldale, just north of Atlanta, I found not a farm but a glass building, not entirely unlike the one that I worked at downtown. I walked in the wrong entrance and, after wandering through a couple of hallways, eventually found myself in a reception area looking at a sign that read WELCOME WYATT WILLIAMS ATLANTA MAGAZINE. I was shown to Tom’s office, where we continued the genial chat we’d begun on the phone. I asked him how business was, he said business was good, and so on.

I could not help but notice the many chickens all around us: ceramic chickens, paintings of chickens, cut-iron wall hangings in the shape of chickens. It seemed to be the work of a collector. The office contained everything but living, breathing chickens, which were what I’d come about. I figured we’d get around to that eventually.

Before long, a receptionist ferried me from Tom’s office to a larger conference room where I was introduced to Gus Arrendale, the owner and heir to the Fieldale legacy. Gus was dressed in a comfortably cut black suit and sneakers. His hair was longer than average, styled the way that wealthy, successful men like Richard Branson sometimes wear their hair when they no longer have to affect an illusion of professional discipline.

We chatted briefly, in the same genial manner that I had with Tom, before Gus introduced a new direction for the conversation. His voice was slow, rich southern molasses.

Now, I understand you want to write a story about Springer Mountain, he