Zackary Vernon moved to Boone, North Carolina, to eat better. What he found, on the organic farms and in the pay-what-you-can restaurants of Appalachia, was that the people who have rejected the industrial food system are often the same people who have rejected a good deal else — and that the fringe is not always a comfortable place to take your meals.
Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World is a food ethics memoir with the rare quality of not having already decided what it thinks. Vernon interviews farmers, fishermen, biologists, and reality television personalities. He gets his hands dirty. And he discovers that the distance between an anarchist fantasy of food sovereignty and a myopic conservative attachment to the way things were is shorter than either side would like to admit.
Where Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma approached ethical eating as a research project with the journalist safely outside the system, Vernon is inside it — living in the town, working the soil, eating the food, and admitting when the gap between his principles and his pleasure becomes too wide to bridge gracefully.
This is a book for anyone who has stood in a grocery shop trying to do the right thing and found that the right thing was not labelled, not affordable, and not entirely clear.
