Around noon one recent Sunday, behind the wheel of a rented S.U.V. in dire need of snow tires, I barrelled down an icy dirt road in West Glover, Vermont, eyes peeled for a scrap of cardboard. I was on my way to meet Howie Cantor, one half of the couple behind the syrup-making operation Deep Mountain Maple, whose house—and sugar bush, as a grove of sap-rich trees is known—is at the end of a long, unmarked driveway. For my visit, Cantor had promised to fashion a sign, which I imagined would be small, tucked into brush or a forked tree branch. I laughed when I saw it: a cardboard box that I’d have trouble wrapping my arms around, with a house number scrawled in huge print. At the end of the road, I found Cantor, a sprightly man in his late sixties, with expressive caterpillar brows and a bushy gray beard. “O.K., let’s get you suited up!” he said, wasting no time before proffering fleece-lined waterproof pants, warm boots, and a pair of snow shoes, which he strapped on my feet before securing his own.

Cantor’s day was packed. Early that morning, he’d watched on TV as the U.S. defeated Canada in the Olympic hockey final; in a few hours, he’d be joining a “neighborhood ski,” a caravan of locals of all ages hitting the town’s winding forest trails to take advantage of a layer of fresh powder. In between, he had just enough time to take me on a tour of his sugaring setup. It would likely be weeks before the weather turned warm enough for sap to flow, but Cantor and his wife, Stephan, were almost done installing their taps, an annual exercise that they’ve performed for forty-odd years.

As we trudged down a path sculpted through deep banks of pristine snow, Cantor reminisced about his early days in the business, when sap was collected in metal buckets and transported by horse-drawn sled. Now the Cantors maintain a sophisticated network of plastic taps and tubing, but they’ve adopted little additional technology, eschewing the contemporary practice of significantly concentrating the sap before boiling it. What that technique saves in time, Cantor argues, it sacrifices in flavor, flattening the syrup’s caramel complexity and minerality. “Sadly, the industry is striving to get rid of the concept of terroir in maple syrup,” he said.

Such laments are not uncommon in West Glover and its neighboring towns, which compose a rural swath of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom, an hour and a half from Burlington and about as far north as you can get before hitting Canada. It’s a region so remote and bucolic that you might struggle to find a single bar of cell service, a place where Vermonters might go in search of an extra-strength dose of Vermont. Cantor—who, as the son of a history professor, grew up in various East Coast college towns—made his way to the N.E.K. as a young adult, lured by its potent natural beauty and by Bread & Puppet, the radical performance troupe, which began in New York in 1963 and relocated to a farm in Glover in the seventies. Bread & Puppet, known for its massive papier-mâché figures and for serving freshly baked bread, is where Cantor met Stephan, and where he learned to stilt-dance. It was a stilt-dancing gig that first led him to the Union Square Greenmarket, where the couple have sold their syrup since the eighties.

Vermont has long been a haven for idealists and iconoclasts, from the Putney Perfectionists of the nineteenth century to Depression-era homesteaders like Helen and Scott Nearing to the prickly Brooklynite who became the state’s most famous senator. In a 2009 book called “The Town That Food Saved,” Ben Hewitt, a northern-Vermont native, chronicled the arrival of a new cohort. By the early twentieth century, the Northeast Kingdom town of Hardwick had become a hub of granite production, so populated by hardworking, hard-drinking laborers that it was briefly said to have more bars per capita than any other American town. When granite fell out of fashion, after the First World War, the local economy entered a decades-long decline. Then, in the early two-thousands, a wave of young farmers, cheese-makers, and craft brewers set up shop in the area, buoyed by righteous fury at the indignities of Big Ag, hoping to create a conscientious and sustainable local food system that might serve as a model nationwide. If, twenty years on, this movement has not fully transformed American agriculture, it at least put the Northeast Kingdom on the map as a mecca for the C.S.A. set.

Vermont may be the Green Mountain State, but in the dead of winter the N.E.K. shows particularly well. On the afternoon I arrived, I stopped by the Genny—a nineteenth-century general store in Craftsbury that was taken over by a group of young women in the early twenty-tens—where I was one of few patrons not wearing cross-country ski boots. The store, which sells natural wine and cultured butter alongside hand warmers and lighter fluid, is linked by trail to the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, where aspiring Olympians and more casual athletes carve paths through the woods. Overnight stays at the center include three hearty meals a day in the cafeteria, prepared largely from local ingredients. After a blissful morning of skiing, I helped myself to a pulled-pork sandwich, baked beans, and a creamy ginger-clove sweet-potato mash, beneath a hand-painted sign that gently admonished, “Though you may be Feeling Hollow, Don’t take More than you can Swallow.”

I might have gone for seconds if not for my next stop: the fourth annual Curds & Curling tournament, organized by Jasper Hill Farm, in Greensboro. On a pop-up ice rink, players for teams like Havarti Party and This Is the Whey flung hefty wheels of Alpha Tolman, an Alpine-style raw-milk cheese, in place of curling stones. It was a thoroughly amateur affair, though Mateo Kehler, one of a pair of brothers who founded Jasper Hill, told me that avid curlers trek down from Canada every year in the hope of recruiting serious players. “They don’t realize that cheese curling has nothing to do with actual curling,” he said. As competitive as the game were the lines for poutine, mac and cheese, hot toddies, and, especially, raclette: thick shavings of nutty yellow Jasper Hill Whitney, draped oozing over roasted fingerling potatoes.

As we stood rinkside, Kehler described the farm’s marketing strategy: extract cash from far-flung epicures to reinvest back home. Making “outrageously delicious cheese,” he said, “is one way of securing a future for the landscape that we love.” I’d met Kehler through Annie Myers, the founder and owner of Myers Produce, a company that trucks the Northeast Kingdom’s wares to grocers and restaurants in New York and Boston. It was because of Myers, I realized, that I had regular access to Vermont’s finest vegetables and dairy when I lived in Brooklyn. It’s difficult for a farmer to earn a living selling only locally, and supplying a major grocery chain might mean keeping up with high-volume demand for crowd-pleasing items like romaine or mild cheddar. Myers’s aim is to help sustain small farms by getting city people hooked on more niche items, like fermented black garlic from Pete’s Greens, in Craftsbury.

One night while I was in town, Myers hosted a dinner party for some of the area’s artisan farmers. Myers had pressed her own tortillas and braised a chicken raised by her friend Hannah Pearce, who was in attendance; the feta was made by Paul Lisai, of a dairy farm called Sweet Rowen, who was there, too. The conversation turned to the unique challenges of farm life. Pearce complained, good-naturedly, about a pair of goats she’d gotten as companions for her dog; they were driving her so crazy that she couldn’t wait to butcher them. Seth Johnson, who grows beans, marvelled at the fact that heirloom varieties have become so popular he needs to persuade venders to relieve him of the more pedestrian kidneys and pintos. As snow began to fall, Cody Thompson, who raises cows for Wagyu-style beef, began to bounce around a little nervously. “I can’t be here really late,” he said—as the operator of one of Craftsbury’s snowplows, he’d have to be up before 4 a.m.

Listening to the group banter and commiserate, you got the sense that the region’s organizing principle is not just artisanal food but also a distinctly, defiantly Vermont way of living. Attractions at the roadside Museum of Everyday Life, in Glover, include a collection of manifestos. In the fifties, the Nearings, the homesteaders, published a manual called “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World,” which remains an apt tagline for many Vermonters today.

Spend enough time in the N.E.K. and you’ll eventually end up at the Parker Pie Co., a bar and pizza parlor, where the dough is rumored to be made with a touch of Deep Mountain maple syrup and where, in winter, the parking lot is filled with snowmobiles. Over beers and a Green Mountain Special, topped with spinach, bacon, apple, and cheddar, I chatted with a handsome white-haired man and woman, who turned out to be, respectively, a founder of one of the Outdoor Center’s first ski programs and a retired avian ecologist. When I mentioned why I was in town, the ecologist leaned in. “What you need to look for is bird-friendly maple syrup!” she urged, detailing the guidelines for protecting avian life in a sugar bush.

A blues trio called Gravel and Honey played to a packed back room; Cantor was there, swaying and bobbing his head. Though he gave up stilt dancing long ago, he considers himself a musician as much as a syrup purveyor. At the end of my sugar-bush tour, he’d played me his latest, soon-to-be-released single, a Zydeco-esque number that evokes a Vermonter’s escapist fantasy. “Gonna move to the city and paint my apartment blue,” he croons. “Sell my truck, every night eat Chinese food. . . . Snow falls down, someone else will pick it up, just sit inside drinking coffee from my cup.” ♦