Photographs: Eat Me Daily

Farm-to-table is one of those irritating culinary trends that is hard to really stay irritated by. Fundamentally, it's just so darn right: we should be eating seasonally and locally, we should be supporting sustainable agriculture and the preservation of heirloom vegetables. The most delicious food is the stuff that's been harvested (butchered, cultivated, fished) as close as possible to the kitchen that's cooking it.

It's a delicious irony, then, that the proprietors of Walland, Tennessee's Blackberry Farm is the family that founded the chain Ruby Tuesday's, where the salad bar is anchored by shredded cheddar, diced ham, and macaroni salad. Blackberry Farm is a mega-luxury inn located on a remote 4,200-acre property that was farm-to-table before the hyphenate even existed, built as it is around a working farm from which the inn's extraordinary kitchen sources the vast majority of its ingredients. The Blackberry Farm Cookbook: Four Seasons of Great Food and the Good Life (Amazon), by innkeeper (and Ruby Tuesday scion) Sam Beall, is about as far from Ruby Tuesday as you can get without coming around the other side.

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