Meet The Team / Mark Ellwood

Self-described "food-centric mountain irregular" Mark Rosenstein moved temporarily to the Great Smoky Mountains at age 19 to work at a restaurant. Thirty-eight years later, he's still there -- and it's easy to understand why.

Long before locavores and sustainable sourcing, the food here relied entirely on farm-fresh or foraged ingredients. Habits originally developed through the poverty-long endemic to the area are now cherished by ingredient-obsessed foodies like Rosenstein.

"It's difficult to farm here, it's so up and down, the weather can change and get extreme, soils are not as fertile." Thanks to the rugged, sometimes difficult terrain, he says, big farms didn't evolve; rather, land workers were cottage industry all-rounders. "At 50 acres or less, people tended to be very independent and the farm was much more diverse – a pig or two, chickens, making their own sorghum. And today, we're sort of in a revival of that," he notes.

Read our "only in North Carolina" list after the jump...

Two things define the food of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay metropolis: spices and seafood. And the former owes its prominence to the latter -- plentiful crabs that once bred like hard-shelled rabbits in the bay's warm waters. "When they were prevalent, bars here would have steamed crabs as giveaways," explains local food writer Dara Bunjon. "So that people would drink more, they made them that much more spicy." In other words, it seems that the city's core condiment, known as Old Bay Spice, was cooked up as a ruse to raise profits at drinking dens.

Food guru Marguerite Thomas theorizes that the city's history as a port combines with its Southern-tinged psyche to make spice such a staple. "You can go to a crab house and order cracked crabs without Old Bay, but people look at you funny," she chuckles. "Baltimoreans take great pride in it." The difference between restaurants' recipes for crab cakes is usually centered on the seasoning. She also loves the crab cake-esque coddie: "I grew up eating them. I'd go to the fountain and for 11 cents, I got a coddie and a Coke as my after-school snack." Thomas says that coddies were traditionally a Jewish treat, a kosher riff on the crab cake made from cod and potato and served on a saltine with a dab of mustard.

Read our "only in Baltimore" list after the jump...

Yesterday, we learned all about how St. Louis came to be the home of fast food. Here are some of the local delicacies that keep the city true to its hundred-year-old claim on fantastic junk food.

St. Louis Pizza

If any city can claim to be the capital of the Fast Food Nation, it's St Louis. In a single year, the low-key midwestern metropolis gave America a slew of delicious, if devilish, treats: peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy and even crunchy ice cream cones.

Each of them made their debut -- at least, in the national arena - during the 1904 World's Fair, staged in St Louis's Forest Park as a centenary celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Compared with rival Chicago's fair 11 years before, which had focused on pomp and ceremony, this was about mass marketing and shopping (one exhibition showed the time-saving tricks of cooking with the innovation known as electricity). This fair was focused on everyday innovations, so it was natural that inventiveness should stretch into food, too.