Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

"Nicole Walker writes with dazzling liquidity." —ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of Zoologies Nicole Walker made cheese and grew tomatoes as a means of coping when she failed to get pregnant. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, she cooked veggie burgers for friends and hamburgers for herself—to enjoy outside, six feet apart. Her Mormon ancestors canned peaches to prepare for the End of Days and congealed beef broth into aspic as a surefire cure for ailment. Throughout the richly layered essays of Processed Meats , Walker ponders food choices and life choices, dissecting how we process disaster, repackage it, and turn it into something edible. "Candidly personal…Walker frames the contrasting concepts of stability versus risk, abundance versus dearth, self–sufficiency versus reliance within the context of the larger global imperatives of climate change, pollution, and sustainability. The result is the kind of deeply thoughtful and relatable discussion one might have with one's best friends around a dinner table, back in the day when one could safely do that kind of thing." — BOOKLIST "[Walker] produces observations as beautifully written as they are thoughtful…An effective illumination of the profound difference between right thought and right action.'" — KIRKUS REVIEWS "This is some brilliant, snappy, poetic, serious, hilarious stuff." — CRAIG CHILDS, author of Virga and Bone "Walker plays her way linguistically deep into the grotesque and marvelous realities of what it means to live in a female body and to depend on other bodies—chicken, raven, pig, veal, cougar, husband and child—for one's sustenance. I woke from this book as from a sweet and slightly dirty dream, sex and cooking swirling in my mind, saying yes and yes to the bizarre beauty of a fleshly existence." — ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of Zoologies "Walker gathers seemingly disparate scraps of earthly experience and sniffs out their secret connections before stitching them together into the sort of tapestry that is as colorful as it is interrogative, as disarming as it is bursting with light." — MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK, author of Preparing the Ghost "Walker's meditative gaze ranges from Pringles to mushrooms to pork belly, from childhood to coming of age to pregnancy and parenthood. To think about food is to think about life, and Walker does so with brilliant complexity and insight." — BICH MINH NGUYEN, author of Stealing Buddha's Dinner "This book is more than funny, more than tough. It’s about appetite—food as, life as, place as, memory as, hope as—and about how, through the act of articulation itself, we can make a meal of life's pain and peace." — CHRISTOPHER COKINOS, author of Bodies, of the Holocene NICOLE WALKER is the author of The After–Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet , Sustainability: A Love Story , and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins among other books. Her work has been published in Orion , Boston Review , Creative Nonfiction , Brevity , The Normal School , and elsewhere. Recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and noted in multiple editions of The Best American Essays , Walker is nonfiction editor at Diagram and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. Preface Babies’ cheeks are delicious. We nibble and kiss. We say, "I'm going to eat you up," in a growly, hungry voice. Think of all the food that went into making that baby. How much butter the pregnant woman ate. How many leafy greens with that folic acid. Would the baby taste like Swiss Chard? It's a daunting choice—deciding to have kids. When I was growing up, my mom was an establishing member of the Zero Population Growth society. In the doctor's office, at the mall, in the grocery store, whenever we saw a family of eight kids, the eldest daughter managing the little kids, she would loud–whisper, "The planet cannot take so many humans." In a state where women marry youngest and have babies right soon after, having kids isn't a decision. It's an expectation. To be in Utah is to be pregnant, so I left for Oregon to attend college ASAP. After leaving Salt Lake for even–more–progress–than–my–mom city of Portland, no one was having kids any time soon. In Portland, it was well established that there were already too many people on the earth. Every house had a Diet for a Small Planet cookbook on the countertops next to the homegrown bean sprouts. In Portland, it was a given that food choices were political. Even in the late nineties, liberal Portlanders knew that eating red meat harmed the environment. On my not–so–ecofriendly Isuzu Rodeo, I stuck a sticker to my bumper that read "Cows Kill Salmon" because of the way grazing cows trotted through small creeks, turning spawning grounds into muddy, grazeable, land even though I, occasionally, ate burgers at McMenamins. Growing up in Salt Lake City, I was a picky eater, but after Portland's mind–opening ways,