Springer Mountain Meditations on Killing and Eating

"Restaurant-goers in the southeastern United States have likely noted the phrase 'featuring Springer Mountain Farms chicken' proudly displayed on their menu. After working the restaurant beat for years in Atlanta, restaurant critic and writer Wyatt Williams decided to find this fabled farm, to see just what, if anything, made Springer Mountain chicken so special. What he found instead was an elaborate marketing scheme. After some digging and a few interviews, Williams discovered that the Fieldale Farms Corporation, owner of the Springer brand name, sells millions of chickens from 'small family farms' like Springer Mountain that don't really exist. In fact, Fieldale is a huge factory farm producing poultry packaged under several different brand names before shipment to supermarkets and restaurants. After his Springer Mountain discovery, Williams spent a year dedicated to understanding what it meant to work and live meat. He moved to a chicken farm, learned to hunt his own game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and even traveled to Alaska to partake in Indigenous traditions around eating whale. Along the way, Williams contemplated the ethics and meaning of killing something in order to eat it, and how much work we do to divorce ourselves psychologically from that fact. A mix of investigative journalism, travel narrative, and creative non-fiction, Springer Mountain is not a polemic against nor a defense of meat eating. What we learn from the author's journey is that our modern connection to animals is predicated on why and how we kill them, that killing and eating animals is a human way of organizing and applying order to the world, and that the human pleasure of eating meat is indivisible from the pleasures humans take in assuming control, even over what lives and dies. This book 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"--