City stickler

Megan Kimble’s year of unprocessed food

Megan Kimble, author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Years of Reclaiming Real Food, in conversation with cookbook author Deborah Madison at Collected Works

There is plenty of advice out there about how and what to eat. Whether your motivation is weight loss, managing food intolerance, helping the local economy, or some sort of spiritual or moral purification, there are books upon books available to help you tailor a meal plan or inspire you to a new way of life. The problem with many of these titles is that they often come with a preachy attitude about why a certain kind of eating — raw, local, and clean are among the common contemporary options — is superior to all others. And the advice contained in them — to live off your land, to only buy organic, to rule out entire food groups — is often impractical for people without much expendable income or time. Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food (William Morrow) is a more realistic approach to changing one’s diet, written by Megan Kimble, who was a graduate student earning about $18,000 a year when she embarked on her experiment.

Kimble reads from Unprocessed on Sunday, June 28, at Collected Works Bookstore. She told Pasatiempo that though she loves books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which the author’s family eats only what they grow, and Gary Paul Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat, about sourcing food from within a 250-mile radius of the author’s home, it would be impossible to emulate these diets. “I didn’t have access to land, I didn’t know how to grow my own food, and I made very little money. I couldn’t keep a goat in my backyard; I didn’t have a backyard. I eventually started gardening, but I’m still not very good at it. So I wrote my book as a response to these books. What if you don’t have a farm? What if you’re a consumer? I wanted to write for people in urban society.”

Ten years of dieting and struggling with her weight led to Kimble’s interest in writing a book about food and the environment while she was earning a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “I had been reading about how bad sugar is for our bodies, about factory farming and industrial meat production, and I didn’t know what I could do about any of it. There was so much information; it was overwhelming. And then I stumbled across the idea of ‘unprocessed,’ eating whole foods, things you could theoretically make at home. It seemed like a way to begin,” she said.

Technically all food is processed in some form or another in order to make it edible. Picking, washing, and chopping vegetables is a form of processing, as is milling flour or butchering an animal. But there is a difference between eating a cake made from flour, eggs, and sugar and consuming the nearly 40 different ingredients contained in a Hostess Twinkie. And then there is the problem with sugar: “To make refined white sugar, the ‘raw’ crystals tumbling out of the centrifuge are dissolved and purified with phosphoric acid and then filtered through a bed of activated carbon, or more commonly, bone char,” Kimble writes. This is why Whole Foods sells vegan sugar, but if you have a sweet tooth and want to give up refined sugar, raw local honey is a reasonable alternative. Kimble even learned how to make her own honey-sweetened chocolate.

The basic rules for the year were that she had to make her food from unprocessed ingredients, or buy prepackaged food without unnecessary ingredients. For example, many brands of tortillas are made with preservatives and emulsifiers, but other brands contain only corn and water, so reading labels is key — and an easy way to take small steps to unprocess your own kitchen. Another rule was to find out more about the foods she assumed were minimally processed, such as flour, which, she found out, is basically rancid by the time it gets to the grocery store. Kimble learns this fact from a man who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas, who explains to her, “As soon as you break apart a kernel of wheat, the components begin to oxidize. The oils break down. It’s why raw flour tastes bitter. The fats have turned.” He informs her that the nutrient value of the wheat plummets when the minerals in wheat germ interact with air, making bulk flour the least nutritious option. This is just the beginning of what Kimble learns about wheat and flour production. As she gets further into her year, she processes more and more food on her own, including flour, cheese, and mead. Although she was raised vegetarian and doesn’t tend to eat much meat, she participates in the slaughter of a sheep at a sustainable ranch in order to understand ethical meateating, since meat is important to many people’s diets.

“Every body is different,” she said. “There are some foods that I don’t really need, and some foods where if I don’t have them, I feel terrible.” Kimble is very attached to dairy — a food group that makes many people ill — so she does not espouse one true way of eating unprocessed. Hers is just one approach to food, not a strict regimen that you pass or fail.

Kimble also considered a number of economic factors during her year unprocessed. Processed and packaged foods constitute a $1.25 trillion market, and 10 companies control a quarter of that market — essentially dictating many of our food choices — while the American Farm Bureau Federation is more interested in protecting the wealth of large industrial farms than the assets of smaller growers or the welfare of consumers. Though writers who find movements like local eating steeped in class privilege, because such food can be costly, have argued that individual buying power doesn’t have much influence on a global problem, it’s still up to each of us to decide how and where we spend our money. Kimble is aware that though she wasn’t earning much income as a graduate student, her financial straits were due to a choice she was making, and she has no experience of long-term poverty. So she spent a week doing the SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge, attempting to live unprocessed for just 20 dollars, which is the amount SNAP recipients in Tucson receive. Her need for coffee put her five dollars over the limit, and she could see the inherent dilemmas in choosing between a head of broccoli and the similarly priced processed snack foods that have more calories and provide an immediate sense of gratification. At the end of the year, she tabulated her receipts and found she’d spent an average of $4.50 per meal, which is unaffordable for some but manageable for many.

Now that her yearlong challenge is behind her, Kimble continues to eat about 90 percent of her food unprocessed, which allows for flexibility when she goes out to dinner with friends. She no longer counts calories or macros, her weight doesn’t fluctuate much, and she’s rarely hungry. She has permanently given up soda because when she tried it again, she could taste only chemicals and aluminum, but she will never give up chocolate chip cookies. Ultimately, Kimble believes eating unprocessed is a personal choice that can and should involve compromises, flexibility, and baby steps.

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Megan Kimble, author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food, in conversation with cookbook author Deborah Madison 3 p.m. Sunday, June 28 Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St., 505-988-4226