megan kimble

I just finished my first ever e-book, read on my shiny new Kindle Fire. Last week, I was reading my first e-book on my shiny new Kindle Fire as I spun around an elliptical machine at the University of Arizona rec center. I saw two friends on the weight machines below and waved a jolly hello, and then went back to my reading. When we ran into each other at the abs mats—isn’t that where everyone runs into each other these days?—we said hello. “Kicking some butt on the elliptical, huh?” my friend said, mid-crunch.

“Hmm,” I said. I had hardly broken a sweat. “Not really. I guess?”

“You looked intense,” he said. “You looked like you were trying to start a fire with your mind!”

To which I shared with him that I had, in fact, been furrowing my brow at my Kindle Fire! I don’t suppose this is what the name refers to—the furrowed brows of people setting fires with their minds presumably not the image Amazon marketeers want to convey—but I thought it nicely apt. And a very helpful reminder to turn up the font size in all future e-books so as not to accidentally light fires with my mind.

I have neglected you, dear blog. I feel this can be best explained in a short picture essay.

before (circa September)

after (3 months later)

I feel the intellectual equivalent of having eaten an elephant. Or, you know, an entire cow. Or a more appropriately vegetarian metaphor. I love graduate school. I could also take a picture of the 17 drafts of an essay I just submitted (mydocuments://essays//cloudseeding__finaldraft_withedits_5.doc) but that just seems silly.

On Sunday, I took a field trip to the Food City in South Tucson: The Pueblo Within A City. I didn’t make that tagline up: the incorporated city has it on its website, suggesting, as reputation would have it, that South Tucson is where one might go to practice her Spanish.

I went to Whole Foods last week to begin my October Unprocessed endeavor, and Food City seemed like its natural (or necessary) counterpart—an attempt to investigate or justify that unprocessed eating can be had on both ends of the spectrum. The Food City is on 6th just north of I-10 and Whole Foods is on Speedway and Country Club, which should tell you enough about their respective demographics. I arrived at Whole Foods at noon—the worst time of hunger to arrive at Whole Foods—and left at 1:30, wide-eyed and harried like I accidentally got sucked into an hour long phone conversation, and, in a way, I had, reading nutrition labels and ingredient lists and muttering, “What on earth is ascorbic acid?” (It is, incidentally, a “naturally occurring organic compound” and, as high school chemistry taught me long ago, simply another name for vitamin C). The Whole Foods on Speedway is not one of those expansive theme-park Whole Foods like the three-story monstrosity in Pasadena, but rather more like a natural foods co-op should be, with cramped aisles and nooks and crannies holding displays of prickly pear jelly, and so, harry and hunger aside, it was an enjoyable (and expensive) time spent rummaging through its goods.

I went to Food City on Sunday evening and parked in front of a booming blue FOOD CITY sign spread over a broad storefront. There are no hand-held baskets, just oversized shopping carts, and the store is a hodge-podge assortment of Spanish-language packaging alongside Cheerios; glass-bottles of Mexican cola alongside plastic bottles of diet coke.

As it turns out, Food City was a much better find for my unprocessed venture. They sell tamarind sugar—literally lumps of dark, wet sugarcane—and dried jamaica hibiscus flowers to make jamaica tea and fresh tortillas made at the in-house tortilleria and containing only lard and flour and salt and water. They also sell cocada, the soft coconut candy that I fell in love with in Brazil, and chicharrón—the fried pork rinds that I did not fall in love with in Nicaragua but whose call pervaded every bus ride and market trip (chicharooooooone).

The produce section has a lot of produce but not a lot of variety: mangos and persimmons and a giant pile of tomatoes from Mexico. The displays throughout the store are similarly bulk-scaled and organized helter-skelter: a large median in the frozen foods aisle held overflow stocks of salsas and tomatillo sauces. If the aisles of Whole Foods feel like a homey and perfectly cluttered antique store—a lot of different products but only a few of each—then the displays at Food City are like jumbo lego blocks, seemingly interchangeable within the store’s design.

I spent far less money at Food City than I did at Whole Foods, and now my fridge displays an amusing convergence of the two food systems. At Food City, one may not choose between white eggs or brown eggs or eggs birthed by “organic hens fed 100% organic vegetarian diets.” They just have huevos grandes. 

There’s a deliberate lack of transparency within the food industry, and we have been deliberately removed from the process of what goes into our food.

I am in the midst of October Unprocessed. What’s that? Some dude decided to give up processed foods for a month, and now he’s got three thousand (and one!) people doing it with him. He says:

“In October of 2009, I was struck by a simple idea: What would happen if I went for an entire month without eating any processed foods? This question would have been laughable (rather, nonsensical) just a few decades ago. Nowadays, it seems that almost every food that comes with an ingredients list on it is likely to be laden with extra sugar, fat, and salt.  And preservatives.  And flavorings.  And artificial colors. I’m not okay with this.”

I’m not either. I actually tend to stay away from most processed foods as a matter of preference, tummy-happiness, and that I like to cook, but, once you start looking, it’s amazing how pervasive processed chemicals are in the most whole-food seeming items. So, right: what’s unprocessed? According to Eating Rules (the blog run by the dude that started all this fun):

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients. I call it “The Kitchen Test.” If you pick up something with a label (and if it doesn’t have a label, it’s probably unprocessed), and find an ingredient you’d never use in your kitchen and couldn’t possibly make yourself from the whole form, it’s processed. It doesn’t mean you actually have to make it yourself, it just means that for it to be considered “unprocessed” that you could, in theory, do so.

Righto. Got it. I’m on board. I bought plain Greek yogurt and organic whole wheat bread with no preservatives, and a whole block of feta cheese  instead of the crumbled stuff, which has emulsifiers and non-coagulants. Last Monday, it’s day 1, and in the blear of 7:05 a.m., I mixed some Greek yogurt with honey and fruit and then shook some blueberry flax seed on top. Oops. And…duh. Golden Roasted Milled Flax Seed with blueberries: milled roasted flaxseed, blueberries, corn starch, maltodextrin, cane sugar, natural flavors, soy lechithin. 

Blueberry flax seed escaped my Sunday processed-food-in-the-refridgerator inspection, probably because it’s flax seed. It’s like the spinach of breakfast confections, but evidently it’s chemically modified spinach.

After the flax seed debacle—an inauspicious start to my endeavor—I decided to try again Tuesday, to begin the grand October Unprocessed count anew. So, on Monday, since I had already eaten maltodextrin for breakfast, I cracked open a can of diet coke for lunch and enjoyed my last sip of: carbonated water, carmel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, natural flavors, citric acid, caffeine, and phenylalanine. Yum.

I’m now a week in, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m doing two weeks because a week didn’t seem long enough and a month seemed too long—and also because, as evidenced by my first day of unprocessed, I thought I would need some wiggle room.

My first CSA! (Hurray)

I promise I will not become one of those people who posts a picture of everything they eat, but tonight I just cannot help myself. Googling all the new items arriving in my canvas bag injected some sparkle into that awkward hour between 6 and 7 p.m., when it’s too early to eat dinner but too sunset-y or hungry to be productive. There’s nothing better than doing something that you’ve been meaning to do for a long time (Michael Pollan, are your ears burning?). I bought a share in a community farm (thus, the name: community supported agriculture) and so they today provided me with roasted chilis and obese watermelons and funny little purple pods that are, evidentially, purple beans (not green).

If college is when you figure out who you are, then graduate school feels, much more than college (and maybe even more than those couple years after college when you’re really just too tired from working all the time) like that time when you do who you are. When you have no income (however small it once was), the important things seem to stick out more, and thus I indulge in produce that seems expensive (compared to Safeway) but seems also more consistent with how much food should cost.

So, then. I’m going to post a recipe. On a blog. (I know.) Actually, it’s more a list of ingredients, most of which arrived today in my canvas tote, a few which were already in my fridge (contributing to the victory of this recipe).

(My First CSA) Watermelon Greek Salad

Watermelon, diced. Cucumber, sliced. Feta Cheese, crumbled. Olives, pitted, halved. Red onion, thinly sliced. Brown rice, cold. Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey, greek yogurt—blended (salad dressing). Salt and pepper?