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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...