Book excerpt: Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill and eat animals. In order to understand why we eat meat, the restaurant critic and journalist investigated factory farms, learned to hunt game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partook in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska. In Springer Mountain, he tells about his experiences 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.