Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food
Written by Megan Kimble
Narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen
4/5
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About this audiobook
What makes a food processed? As Megan would soon realize, the answer to that question went far beyond cutting out snacks and sodas, and became a fascinating journey through America's food system, past and present. She learned how wheat became white; how fresh produce was globalized and animals industrialized. But she also discovered that in daily life, as she attempted to balance her project with a normal social life-which included dating-the question of what made a food processed was inextricably tied to gender and economy, politics and money, work and play.
Backed by extensive research and wide-ranging interviews, 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.
Megan Kimble
Megan Kimble is a food writer living in Tucson, Arizona, where she works as the managing editor of Edible Baja Arizona, a local-foods magazine serving Tucson and the borderlands. She is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and serves on the leadership council of the Pima County Food Alliance. She earned her MFA from the University of Arizona and works with the university's Southwest Center to promote food access and justice.
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Reviews for Unprocessed
28 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book! I picked it up to read a personal story of moving to eating a more healthy diet. The personal story is interesting, fun to read, entertaining, and very, very well written. A joy to read!But I got much more than that out of the book. I received an education from the author interwoven in and among all of her personal story details. Of course I've read some of those other healthy eating and food source books, but Megan Kimble incorporates extensive research and relevant details. This book feels like sitting down with a friend that is sharing what she has learned. In this case, the friend is very knowledgeable, thoughtful, and is an excellent writer.This is an important book as well. Understanding our food supply and how emotions, physical needs, nutrition, and other personal factors interact is important to me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very well-written and consistently interesting and informative. If you have an interest in eating a more healthful diet and supporting local food producers, you will find this book inspiring. On one level, it's just not that hard to buy a lot of produce, grains, and beans and then eat them, so she doesn't belabor her feelings of deprivation. (Compare "A Year of No Sugar," for example.) She does try things like canning, grinding her own wheat, and attempting to make almond butter, providing good insight into which of these sorts of things might be practical for the reader. She also tries to eat a healthy produce-based diet on the amount given to SNAP recipients, and she totals up her spending on food for the year - as a real cheapskate I appreciated this financial angle. This book does not come across as entirely a stunt like so many books about doing something weird for a year to get a book contract out of it. Well done, Megan.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I was looking forward to reading this book and gleaming tons of great information about unprocessed foods. For a while now, I have been wanting to move away from processed foods, even though they are quick for meals. I have slowly been making the move. However not to really take anything away from the author but I found this book to be really wordy. I got to chapter 4 and put the book down. I realized when I got ready to pick it up again that I could not process what I had read in the first 4 chapters. This is because the author seemed to put a lot of focus on other things besides the food process and it was not that interesting to me. So I was really just skimming the first 4 chapters. The only parts that were really of interest to me were the "Unprocess Yourself" sections at the back of the book. These sections really told you all you needed to know about Unprocessed foods broken out in sections like Wheat and Sugar.. However not sure how much I will try the recipes or suggestions that the author has. They seem really time consuming. At least I have an idea of what unprocessed food is and how to shop for it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unprocessed was different from what I expected. I thought I would be reading a book that was more like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and learn about what it takes on a daily basis to move from eating processed to unprocessed food. How exactly did she do that? What did it take? What are the steps? Yet, in the end I learned a tremendous amount about our food supply, what actually makes a food unprocessed and came to respect her research and detail-driven narrative. I also enjoyed her easy-going tone, and practical and heartfelt advice and her ability to make the political connections to how our food supply has become so unhealthy. My only objection with the book is that I do not think it should be used as a model of how a poor person can survive on SNAP or without means. Ms Kimble is not poor, she is temporarily broke with all of her connections, networks, privilege and access to possibilities in the future. Instead of using this as a can-do" model for poor people whose day to days lives are unimaginably hard (food deserts, lack of transportation, medical care etc), we could use our political will to ensure that nobody should be asked to live on $4 a day per person and that everybody deserves access to healthy, yummy, unprocessed food just like Ms. Kimble. Thank you to Edelweiss for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion.