Page 35 - summer17

Living

Unprocessed

From creative writing to better eating

by Margaret Regan
Jacob Chinn photos

he first time Megan Kimble ’13 baked whole-wheat bread, it didn’t
Tgo well.
The yeast didn’t foam and the dough didn’t rise. And after it did its time
in the hot oven, the flat loaf that emerged was more cutting board than
bread, she says. In fact, what it most resembled, as she laments in her book,
“Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food,” was a
“wheat Frisbee,” thin and hard as plastic.
That was on Day One of Kimble’s year-long project to eat food that was
as unprocessed as possible.
It wasn’t always easy to decide which foods to choose. After all, “All
foods are processed,” as she writes in the book. Even an apple is picked
from a tree, washed and shipped to market. But there’s a world of difference
between that apple and, say, Chex Mix, a highly processed manufactured
food with a long list of added ingredients.
“There are degrees of processing,” she remembers explaining to her
skeptical brother-in-law. “I’m trying to find the line when food becomes too
processed.”
Over the 12 months of her culinary quest to honor that fine line, Kimble
exiled foods with added sugars and mysterious additives. She feasted
instead on fresh tomatoes from Arizona farms and tasty local goat cheese.
She perfected the art of tempering chocolate in her kitchen and even
sampled meat from a lamb that she helped slaughter. And, perhaps best of
all, her homemade loaves of bread got better — much better.
Kimble’s book is an entertaining first-person account of her sometimes
flailing efforts to walk the unprocessed line, combined with hard-nosed
reporting about what she calls the “industrial food complex.”

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