Megan Kimble was a twenty-six-year-old living in a small apartment without even a garden plot to her name. But she knew that she cared about where her food came from, how it was made, and what it did to her body—so she decided to go an entire year without eating processed foods. Unprocessed is the narrative of Megan’s extraordinary year, in which she milled wheat, extracted salt from the sea, milked a goat, slaughtered a sheep, and more—all while she was a busy, broke city-dweller.
What makes a food processed? The answer to that question went far beyond cutting out snacks and sodas, and led to a fascinating journey through America’s food system, past and present. Megan learned how wheat became white, how fresh produce was globalized, and how animals were industrialized. But she also discovered that in daily life—conjuring meals while balancing a job, social life, and even dating—our edible futures are inextricably tied to gender and economy, politics and money, work and play.
Backed by extensive research and wide-ranging interviews, and including tips on how to ditch processed food and transition to a real-food lifestyle, Unprocessed offers provocative insights not only on the process of food but also the processes that shape our habits, communities, and day-to-day lives.
Praise for Unprocessed
— Lisa Leake, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 100 Days of Real Food Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace and contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine Gary Paul Nabhan, author of the award-winning Growing Food in a Hotter Drier Land and Coming Home to Eat Andrew Weil, M.D., bestselling author of True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and author of What to Eat
Lisa Leake
Tamar Adler
Gary Paul Nabhan
Andrew Weil, M.D.
Deborah Madison
Marion Nestle
