Springer Mountain : meditations on killing and eating
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

"After working the restaurant beat for years, restaurant critic and writer Wyatt Williams decided to find Springer Mountain farm, to see just what, if anything, made their chicken so special. What he found instead was an elaborate marketing scheme. After his 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"--,Provided by publisher.