Food ethics in the face of climate disaster
Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World by Zackary Vernon. University of North Carolina Press, 2026, 156 pages.
What does it take to eat ethically and sustainably? And what do when we can’t do it perfectly?
In the hit NBC comedy The Good Place, the Judge of the universe (played by Maya Rudolph) hears arguments about the system used to send people to Heaven and Hell. The universe, you see, is in crisis—almost everyone is going to Hell. “Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough,” says Michael, an immortal played by Ted Danson. “Just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.”
This is essentially the problem at the core of Zackary Vernon’s newest book, Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World, in which Vernon gives an account of his own efforts to source food ethically and eliminate his sense of complicity with the impacts of commercial agriculture. He writes about his experience in grocery stores, examining packages: “I can’t help but think of the steps that led to these finished products—the landscapes ransacked and ruined, the animals tortured and killed, the workers mired in abject poverty despite their brutal hours of backbreaking labor.” His dilemma is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to eat more ethically and found that every option has its drawbacks.
Like most Americans, Vernon does not have any specific scientific training or specialized knowledge in this field, so his essays document his attempts at eating ethically without a traditional academic lens. This sends him off to meet with a cast of curious characters: Eustace Conway, an off-the-grid Western North Carolina environmentalist and reality TV host; Eustace’s brother, Judson, a fly-fishing instructor; a couple who runs an organic farm guided by the mystic principles of biodynamics; the organic farm’s free-spirited and eccentric band of twenty-something apprentices; and more. Through his experiences volunteering and networking with other eco-consciousness people near his home in Boone, North Carolina, his ideas about ethical food consumption shift and waver, and ultimately leave him faced with the reality that all efforts must always remain imperfect.
Vernon’s journey begins when he moves from Boston to Boone, a transitional period in his life depicted in chapter one, “Dancing with Nature.” Vernon and his wife are faced with new challenges posed by the encroachment of nature—mice in their cabinets, deer in their garden, coyotes outside their back door.
When he learns that Eustace Conway—a radical environmentalist, the subject of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, and the host of the History Channel’s show Mountain Men—runs a nature preserve just outside of town, he knows immediately that he wants an interview.
He books a paid buggy ride, and while bumping along the trails of the Turtle Island nature preserve, Eustace presents Vernon with his vision for the future: “there would be no cars, supermarkets, or strip malls; there would be no houses, or at least there would only be houses that you built yourself using materials you produced yourself; there would be no pollution because there would be no industry and no burning of fossil fuels; there would be no trash because there would be no commodities.”
The contemporary world, with its shortcuts and plastic commodities, Eustace says, is “degrading and horrible to the human spirit.” But what Vernon ultimately takes away from his meeting with Eustace is the idea that protecting his garden and home, the means of his survival, is part of an intricate dance with nature. He ends the chapter with a touch of irony, concluding that in order to live amongst the wild, you must inevitably beat it back.
In the chapters “Against the Grain” and “F.A.R.M. Café,” Vernon explores the work of two local nonprofits that offer alternative approaches to food production and distribution. Ultimately, though, these are not so much essays about food as they are essays about the kinds of communities that form around alternative food initiatives.
“Against the Grain” is the name of an organic farm guided by the principles of biodynamics, an approach to agriculture founded by Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner that mixes mysticism with holistic farming practices. Vernon volunteers there alongside about a dozen apprentices, most of whom are in their 20s, and who Vernon describes as “tattooed, hairy, horny, and hungry.” Working with these apprentices is the catalyst for much of the political analysis in this chapter. Although the goal of his volunteer work is to explore sustainable farming options, he spends much of his time, it seems, contemplating what the future will look like in the hands of the next generation. He is troubled by the radical opinions of the apprentices, sensing that the far right and far left are growing ever closer together. Speaking of two of the young men he works with, he writes, “It’s harrowing to consider whether Nate and Josh are merely fringe voices or harbingers of what’s to come.”
Ultimately, Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World is a book that explores the experiences of one man on a quest toward more ethical consumption. By the very nature of the project, it is not all-encompassing. Regardless, it is often a compelling study of many interesting organizations and characters working toward an impossible goal.
In fact, Vernon might be most successful at portraying himself as a character in his own right. One walks away from this book with a sense of him as a complicated figure. Though his attempts at ethical eating seem to have some shred of optimism underlying them, he is fundamentally pessimistic about the fate of our warming world. Though he expresses some guilt about animal suffering when fly-fishing and tries to buy local, ethically-sourced meat, he never seems to consider actually forgoing meat or animal products. And though he is willing to interrogate how American agriculture and food systems impact people’s abilities to make ethical food choices, he also, in one strange moment, frames large-scale coal mining as a damnable “choice” made by the people of central Appalachia.
In the book’s final chapter, Vernon reflects on the imminent fate of humanity as we approach a climate crisis that may alter forever the landscape of the earth. “The history of the future might not contain us,” he writes, “but it will undoubtedly be full of life, in forms old and new, too strange and perhaps too beautiful for us to imagine.” Ending on a note equal parts grim and uplifting, he puts this fears to the side, pours himself a drink, and goes to pick vegetables from his garden. Life goes on, it seems, and in the face of mass extinction, dinner must still be made.