Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food

281 Pages·2015·1.47 MB·English

by  Megan Kimble

DEDICATION
For my parents, Midge and Jeff Kimble.
Because of Katie, my best friend and faithful editor.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
Change is a process.
1. SUPERMARKET
Processed sells.
2. WHEAT
Grain is unprocessed if it is whole.
3. SWEET
Sugar is processed if it is made.
4. PRODUCE
A million melons are processed.
5. SALT
Manipulated food is processed.
6. STUFF
Obsolescence is processed.
7. OUT
Try your best.
8. DRINK
Unprocessed alcohol takes time.
9. REFRIGERATION
Good work is unprocessed.
10. DAIRY
Milk is a process of scale.
11. MEAT
Meat is processed. Some meat is processed.
12. HUNGER
People unprocess.
EPILOGUE
Receipts accumulate.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR UNPROCESSED
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION
Change is a process.
“Wait,” Tyler says. “Isn’t peanut butter processed?”
The peanut butter jar is in my left hand, spoon in my right; a banana, unpeeled, waits
on the counter. I stick the spoon back in the jar and turn to face Tyler, my sister’s husband,
sitting at the kitchen table of my parents’ house outside Los Angeles.
“No,” I say. “It’s just ground-up peanuts.”
“Isn’t that a kind of processing?”
“Well, yes. I mean, all foods are processed, at least to some degree.”
“So then what’s the difference between ground-up peanuts and, say, partially
hydrogenated peanut oil?”
I sigh. I thought my sister had already explained the logic of my upcoming year to her
husband, but evidently Tyler is feeling contrary this January morning so soon after the
holidays. It’s pestering like this that makes him feel more like a brother than a sister’s
husband, but I am nervous on the cusp of a year unprocessed and I don’t want to argue
semantics. “There are degrees of processing,” I say, placing the peanut butter jar back on
the counter. “I’m trying to find the line where a food becomes too processed.” With the
exception of, say, a raw, foraged mushroom—risky business—all food has undergone
some processing before landing on our plates. By way of harvest or heat, all food is
processed, and often it is the better for it.
But increasingly, it is not. Today, the word “processed” refers to adulterated foods—
foods that have been shifted and shaped into packages that are not better, not for us or for
the earth. All foods are processed, but if we understand the difference between an apple
and a bag of Chex Mix—and we do—and if the space between the two matters for the
health of our bodies and the environment—and it does—then the question of what makes
a food too processed also matters.
I’d decided to see if I could go a year without eating a processed food. Or rather, a
food I deemed “too processed.” When I first hatched the project, around the time that
Tyler was bugging me in my parents’ kitchen, I thought that I should figure out precisely
what made a food processed and then begin. But as it turned out, it would take me a year
to figure out where to draw the line, to understand where our food system succeeds and
fails in processing food from land. That figuring out is what you’re holding in your hands.
I HEARD MICHAEL POLLAN INTERVIEWED on NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me several
years ago. The host of the show, Peter Sagal, introduced him as “the most well-known
authority on food and food economics working today,” a description that is as true now as
it was then. The two chitchatted for a bit and then Sagal asked Pollan, “So, if you ever
want to eat a cheeseburger, do you have to go hide somewhere?”
Pollan laughed. “Shortly after I got to Berkeley,” he said, “I was in Berkeley Bowl …
a local supermarket, which has wonderful fresh produce, grass-fed beef.” What was
Michael Pollan buying at the Berkeley Bowl? Fruity Pebbles—his son Isaac’s Saturday-
morning treat. “So I was reaching for a box of Fruity Pebbles,” he said, “and somebody
tapped on my shoulder. And it was this tall, bearded graduate student and he said
[whispering], ‘I’m watching Michael Pollan shop for groceries.’”
When you are ten years old, even if Michael Pollan is your father, Fruity Pebbles are
fun to eat on Saturday mornings. When you are twenty-six, even if you know better,
shrink-wrapped chocolate chip cookies are fun to eat on Saturday nights. With food, it’s
not just easy to look the other way, to ignore the ingredient label—it is, in fact, delicious
to do so. On a Saturday morning, Michael Pollan is a father who’d rather relax than
explain to a ten-year-old why the corn syrup in his processed cereal is causing his
pancreas to overproduce insulin.
Although it is impossible to speak of food without discussing the dysfunction in how
we now grow, prepare, and eat it, this is not a book focused on what’s gone wrong.
Michael Pollan, for one, has already led the charge of uncracking the truth of a food
system gone astray. Since Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Gary Paul Nabhan
wrote Coming Home to Eat—the epicenter of his 220-mile local food experiment was just
south of Tucson, where I live and where my year unprocessed unfolded—and Barbara
Kingsolver left Tucson to write Animal Vegetable Miracle, consumer consciousness has
swelled. Awareness has shifted. Local, organic, sustainable—these are all words now in
the public vernacular. But in early 2012, when I stopped eating processed food, farmers’
markets accounted for only 1 percent of total food sales; organic foods represented only 2
percent of total grocery sales. If we knew what had gone wrong, why weren’t we doing
anything about it?
This is where I begin. You’ve likely heard the charge—Vote with Your Fork—but I
wanted to test how feasible that advice really is. Today, many of us are stuck between
knowing what we should do and feeling like we don’t have enough time or money to do it.
Eating unprocessed was my attempt to find another way in, unburdened by “should do,”
focused instead on “can do.”
Change is hard. Small choices gain inertia and turn into habits, and we are all busy,
broke, and stuck in our whirlwind cities. But if Suze Orman writes money books
enlightening the Young, Fabulous & Broke about their financial futures, then this, I hope,
is some small manifesto for the busy, urban, and broke about their edible futures.
IN THE SPRING OF MY SENIOR YEAR in college at the University of Denver, I saw Al Gore
give the famous PowerPoint presentation that inspired the documentary An Inconvenient
Truth. I had seen the film the previous Christmas with my sister and mom; those two hours
sitting in a dark theater horrified us. The world was beautiful, it was whole, and we were
breaking it apart. And then the credits rolled. The theater lights lifted and we walked,
knob-kneed, out of the theater. Our fear dissipated into dinner plans.
The evening I went to see Al Gore in the flesh, I was on the precipice of all those
decisions that come with college graduation. Riding the light rail downtown, I read a few
pages in Ernesto Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. I was taking a senior seminar about Che,
and although I wasn’t into the icon’s militarism and ego, I was enthralled by his boldness,
how he’d stuck his thumb into the spinning status quo and changed how one small part of
the world worked. I was enthralled, but in my life, being this bold—Che bold—felt
incompatible with an infrastructure already in place, one that included careerbuilder.com
and an apartment lease. As commencement approached, we graduates were told again and
again: Be bold. But I didn’t really know how. I wondered: Does boldness exist only in
military fatigues? Could it also wear a sundress and flip-flops?
Al Gore was, as I expected him to be, amiable and twangy. But unlike the movie
experience, I was actively in my mind and body as I listened, fidgety and lacking the
distance offered by film. The lights in the convention center never dimmed and so they
didn’t rise. I carried my terror with me all the way home. It was all happening now,
chemicals in the air, a sweating world, it was nownownow—9 P.M. on a Tuesday. I called
my dad, a quantum physics professor, arbitrator of big decisions.
“Right,” he said. “It’s scary stuff.”
“But what do we do?” I asked. “What do I do?” I should change my major from
English to astrophysics or environmental science, I could just stay in college for another
year. I would learn the tools needed to fix this problem. Global warming was my
generation’s problem—this would be my life’s big gesture.
“But, Megan,” he said. “Do you like science?”
“I don’t know. I could!”
“Big gestures are important,” he said. “But big stuff starts at the day-to-day. You’ve
got to like what you’re doing on a Wednesday afternoon in order to solve the big
problems.”
Rather than figure out what should fill my Wednesday afternoons, I approached the
professor who was teaching the class about Che Guevara and asked him for contacts in
Latin America. I wanted to Make a Difference. I wanted to See the World and to Speak
Spanish. My professor e-mailed a friend who owned a hotel in Nicaragua and needed a
volunteer English teacher. So I finished my English degree and moved to Playa Gigante, a
small fishing village of five hundred people, to work at the hotel and start a free English-
language program for the town’s residents.
I arrived in Playa Gigante expecting—well, I don’t know what I was expecting. Fewer
scorpions. More infrastructure. Less mud. More electricity. I lived in a bunk bed in the
staff quarters, shared a bathroom with four surfers, and lived out of my backpack. Only
after I arrived did I learn how closely Nicaragua had been tied to Che and Castro; how,
inspired by the Cuban revolution, in 1979, a scrappy crew of guerrilla soldiers and
untrained civilians overthrew a government backed by the biggest superpower in the
world.