A Vegetarian’s Farewell
Editor Kim Johnson Leaving
The Mountain Times This Week

When I was a senior in high school my entire family conducted an experiment in vegetarianism. By that I mean there was no meat in the house, but I was free to eat whatever carnivore delights I could find at the Watauga High School cafeteria. After school and on weekends I was a dishwasher and prep cook at Marvin’s Gardens, a funky little bistro located where Angelica’s Restaurant is in downtown Boone, so I was able to scrounge for some meat scraps at work.

Mountain Times managing editor Kim Johnson will leave the newspaper this week for a career in nursing. We will miss her! Photo by Jeff Eason

The lack of meat in the Eason household struck me as some sort of Charles Dickens-esque nightmare but my parents loved it. They enjoyed the camaraderie of meeting the other vegetarians at the food co-op on Howard Street and growing their own soybeans at our home in Triplett. My dad even made a wooden tofu press and created his own tasteless soybean curd creation from scratch. We grew our own bean sprouts and developed our own homemade version of slippery yogurt that never seemed solidify like the store bought brands.

What I mainly remember from our vegetarian days is making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches with tomatoes and sprouts. If cheese was the closest thing to meat I could find, my growing 17-year-old body was going to ingest it in mass quantities. It was during this time that I perfected the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich, a treat that I enjoy to this day…especially on cold winter days.

Although I was a vegetarian for only a brief period of time, I have an immense amount of respect for people who eschew, rather than chew, the flesh of other living creatures. If you’ve ever been on a road trip with a strict vegetarian, you realize how limited their options are at interstate eateries. If you’ve ever been grocery shopping with one, you begin to understand how many otherwise vegetarian food items contain traces of animal products such as lard or horse hooves.

I once met some vegetarians from The Farm in Tennessee who were so strict that they didn’t eat honey because of that industry’s exploitation of bees! That seemed to me a bit extreme, particularly when you think of how hard it might be to unionize a beehive.

I know some other people who claim to be vegetarians because they don’t eat red meat. I’m sure that distinction is of little or no comfort to all the chickens and fish in the world.

My friend and coworker Kim Johnson is a vegetarian whose motto is “I don’t eat anything that had a mommy.” That seems to me a dietary philosophy of both common sense and compassion, two qualities that Kim has more of than most of the people I know (including myself).

Although you might not have noticed her name in The Mountain Times masthead, as managing editor of the newspaper Kim has had a lot to do with what we cover and how it is presented each week. For the past five years or so she has been the link between us writers and you readers, deciding which stories, photos and irate letters to the editor wind up on the pages of The Mountain Times.

Kim’s job as liaison between writer and reader is an often overlooked one and also one that we writers would perish without. As writers we tend to live in our own little worlds, thinking that the majority of our readers enjoy the same things we do (Monty Python, Scrabble, obscure doo-wop bands from the 50s) and loathe the same things we do (soap operas, real operas, Celtic music). Good editors like Kim keep us writers reminded that without readers, we might as well be putting all our words in a Hello Kitty diary and slipping it under our pillow each night.

This is Kim Johnson’s last week here at The Mountain Times as she is heading to East Tennessee State University to study nursing full time. I could tell you how she is the most universally liked person I’ve ever worked with or how her personality always brings out the best in her coworkers. I could tell you about her four scrappy dogs and how much of an animal lover she is. I could tell you that she is a snappy dresser with a “little bit country, little bit rock & roll” fashion sense. I could tell you how she has single-handedly kept the Cheese Nips and Sun-Drop companies in business.

But none of that would convey the admiration, affection and respect that all of us here at the newspaper have for Kim. We will all miss her and walking into the office without seeing her smiling face will take some getting used to. The newspaper industry’s loss is definitely the world of nursing’s gain.

Good luck Kim! If the bedpans and bandages ever get you down, you always have a desk here at The Mountain Times.