Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating

by Wyatt Williams

Based on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill animals and why we eat meat. In order to understand why we eat meat, restaurant critic and journalist Wyatt Williams narrates his time spent investigating factory farms, learning to hunt game, working on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partaking in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska, 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Pandaduh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I want to say that I think this book is what praxis without ethics looks like. He didn't know what or why he was doing what he did at first. Maybe he did come to an answer, but did that make it right? Pretty sure many disturbed (is that the word I'm looking for? Troubled?) people have come to similar awakenings, after realizing why they did something after years of not being able to rationalize their behavior. Parts were so beautiful it brought me to tears, but ultimately the ending felt like he, a white man, was using indigenous meat-eating practices as just one more way to justify his own killing and eating, which, in my view, will never justify his eating and killing of animals for meat when he has other options and traditions available to him. That isn't kinship. It's him romanticizing the relations of one people with a species. His conclusions did not satisfy me. So, no, I don't think he's trying to understand why humans are still drawn to meat-eating. It's not a question that needs to be asked any more than why do humans cause war or suffering or do evil. The answers are too varied and of course his conclusion fed into what he was already doing. What is the point on meditating on what is, if you also fail to imagine something better?

[T.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tellingly, the negative reviews of this book complain about what it isn’t. What it is is plainly stated in the subtitle: a meditation. I think it’s a very good one and I expect it’ll be a long time until I stop thinking about this slim book.

[Ashley Holstrom]

“A short fever dream of a book, Springer Mountain combines historical records with personal philosophies about the evolution of meat-eating and vegetarianism in human beings.”

Reviewed for Foreword Reviews.

I also had the honor of interviewing the author about his writing and eating, for Foreword.

[Micah Winters · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately a book that rather steeply underdelivers. There are engaging bits -- Williams clearly has a knack for storytelling -- and moments of charming prose. But on the whole it's a disorientingly uneven work, and I had the continual impression that I was reading a rough draft, with much work left to do. Nice cover design, though.

[James Allen Parker · Rating 2 out of 5]

It didn’t tell me anything different than what I already knew. We are predators, killers. We are good at it. And we like it. Nature tells us that we are not the only killers. We are just among them. The best part is the author’s observations on the town of Barrow, it’s people and subsistence on whaling.

[Hannah Bonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a nuanced and thoughtful book. This book exemplifies what the essay is: not working to defend a predetermined thesis, but allowing questions and uncertainty to guide the research and the writing.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting meditation on what it means to be human, and what it means to be an animal. It doesn’t give you answers, if that’s what you’re looking for. But it’s certainly beautiful, powerful, and painful. It makes you think— and that’s all it needs to do.

Loved it.

[Michael Denham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The killing and eating were kept separate. This whale, the one I ate that day, was the way meat always is: cut up into the small pieces we can handle.

Springer Mountain is a series of reflections on meat—its consumption, sourcing, disavowal, and, ultimately, illusion.

This is a short book, split up into three sections. The first is a story of Williams investigating the brand behind the name Springer Mountain, which keeps cropping up in menus throughout his work as a restaurant critic for an Atlanta magazine. The second is at its heart a collage—facts and anecdotes that vary from a list of ingredients in chicken feed to a letter about the founding of a "Vegetarian Society" written by a relative of novelist Louisa May Alcott.

One snippet describes the reaction of a medical student and her peers to the cadaver lab in their anatomy course:

The first day had been difficult—the lab is a challenge known to dissuade some students from the profession—and instruction went on longer than expected. By the time her cohort had washed up and gotten dressed it was late, eight or nine at night. They were tired and hungry. Someone mentioned getting dinner. It was another student, not her, who admitted it first: what he wanted more than anything in the world was a steak, a thick, medium-rare cut of meat. A wave of relief passed through the group. They’d all been too confused by their own appetites to admit them. They’d all been thinking the same exact thing.

The third and final section illustrates Williams's trip to Barrow, a small town in the Arctic Circle that has since changed its name to its traditional Inupiaq name of Utqiaġvik. He eats whale and grapples with the meat of his entire enterprise, his goal of writing a book that lends order to the portion of the animal kingdom that people consume, a "kind of narrative field guide to eating meat."

It is a beautiful temptation to collect from the world and arrange what you collect so that the collection reduces the world around it, so that things around you that were once unexplainable and unknowable can now be seen clearly in a single glance. This is what maps, museums, books, farms try to do. They try to make the world knowable. They organize nature. They try to explain the order of animals. The trouble is that the world isn’t reducible in that way; it can’t be understood in a glance. It can’t be made a single inch smaller than it is. The only real map of any territory is the territory itself.

The writing is direct and unflinching—an approach that Williams implicitly suggests comes at a cost. Although a clean, tidy answer to the grand mystery of nature would be as illusory as the title of the book, Williams confronts the abstract and literal messiness of killing and eating with the humility of one who can step back and marvel at the unknowable.

[Mark Braunstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This personal essay about the implications and consequences of eating meat are conceived with insight and written with charm. The author’s thirst for knowledge was not satisfied by merely drinking blood. He wanted also to shed it. Following the example of Michael Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he engaged in short stints working on a chicken farm and in a chicken slaughterhouse. But first, by interviewing Frank-Purdue-wannabe corporate executives, he probes the myths and lifts the veil behind which corporate America hides the grim realities of industrialized factory farming. His is the voice of experience, and these are this brief book’s highpoints.

After that, the author treads on thin ice with his thin logic for embarking on an ecotourist escapade in the Arctic to indulge in a whale meat feast. Finally, with his concluding defense of meat eating, this macho male’s testosterone-tainted mind deludes itself into believing that he speaks for our entire species when he’s speaking only for himself. His creepy credo can be summarized in a single Descartes-like sentence. “I kill, therefore I am.”

As a vegan since 1970, I aspire to read what challenges my views rather than only lazily read what aligns with and reinforces them. Subtitled "Meditations on Killing and Eating [Meat]," this extended essay indeed inspired and provoked my own ruminations. Rather than change my vegan views, it only further strengthened my resolve. If you eat meat, after reading this book you might either strengthen or question your own complacency regarding it. For this reason, this book provides nourishing food for thought for both vegans and carnivores alike.

[.W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was tipped to this based on Williams' article in an issue of The Sun, excerpted from his longform piece in Harper's. i have mixed feelings about it. the tripartite nature of the book makes it easier to draw the line between "good writing" and "wanton musings" which, yes, are endemic to meditation generally - but the difference in execution is stark. Williams does not spare himself the lash during the writing, which i appreciate, but the structural rigor applied in the exceptional first part is sorely missed as the book progresses.

Williams asks an essentially rhetorical question and takes to the road in pursuit of an answer. he's only loosely "researching" despite the oft-referenced copious notetaking; he's experiencing, or trying to experience, events or processes germane to his growing obsession with putting some guardrails around his query. working at various slaughterhouses to understand the industrial efficiency of butchery, for example. these sections inspired a queasy sense of nihilism. i was disturbed less by the viscera - e.g. the "blood bucket" - and much more by the soul dimming logistics of it all, the banality of the killing & the scale. one becomes inured - and one must never become inured - to the deaths. the photographs were chilling in that regard.

but this indulgence isn't the path toward wisdom or even any kind of answer. it's just a journalistic exercise, at great spiritual expense. what follows is more of the same flailing in increasing levels of incoherence, culminating in a trip to Alaska to witness a whale hunt, interspersed with a number of undirected quotes about the (political) origins of the vegetarian movement. the one thing that could really have buttressed his final conclusion (on which more in a moment) - the actual hunt in Mississippi - he fails at utterly, having no experience or woodcraft to speak of. all for the best - one can only imagine the pain an amateur would have inflicted on a deer.

having suffered in mind and body, sacrificed relationships and wandered north America in dogged pursuit of answers, the one Williams settles on is "we like to kill." "The tongue doesn't lie," he says; salivation is incontrovertible proof of our genetic blood frenzy, you see, not an evolutionary biological function of the body. that we understand ourselves and each other through killing is a conclusion i fully reject, a hard no, and i was truly baffled when he arrived there. it feels like a tourniquet, a way of trying to control the spurt of raw experience of life, ultimately futile. Williams ends it best himself:

"And like every other time, there weren't any words to be found. Nature offered the answer that Nature always does. I wrote nothing in my notes."

if only he'd listened.

[Roxy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Williams takes inspiration from Alfred Russell Wallace's practice and embarks on a 103 page inquisition to understand why humans kill and eat animals. His conclusion is remarkably simple and almost anti-climactic: we kill and eat flesh to know our own flesh, to understand our own violent nature as a killer in a world filled with violence. I found some of this frivolous or long winded, and it reminded me of that joke about how men are always late to realize things women learned when they were 12.

There were some enticing segments on animal rights, carnal pleasures, and the complex relationship between eating native species and anti-whaling groups. But Williams is also strange -- he notes his obsessive project hindered many of his romantic and social relationships, yet he never namedrops his partner or her friends (yet, he does for his male friends and colleagues). He also is just a strange individual that I think is too afraid to admit that maybe he's just interested in violence. He argues that his multiple years spent researching slaughterhouses and other hunting and food prepping methods are for anthropological, academic importance, but I think he also just...likes it

[Adam Burnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slim book with profound tidbits best devoured whole in one sitting. Wallace is concerned with questions that can only be answered through killing and eating. We kill and eat, and we fuck and murder, to know who we are. We devour to understand our nature. And, also, because it’s delicious.

[Daniel Adler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three brilliant essays that contemplate what it is to eat meat and to be human.

[Emily Bragg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meandering, but full of some lovely bits throughout.

[Madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

hm, as much as i didn’t agree with his conclusions, this book is beautiful and meditative and certainly worth the read. fodder for anyone struggling with the idea of consumption.