Associate web editor Rochelle Bilow may work on the internet, but when it comes to cooking, she prefers to keep it old-school. From making her own butter (seriously) to grinding her coffee beans by hand, Bilow’s all about doing things the slow way. This week, she’s speaking with author Megan Kimble.
Megan Kimble is not your average twenty-something. In addition to being the editor of Edible Baja Arizona, Kimble spent an entire year untangling herself from the industrialized, "processed" food system. She wrote a book about the experience; Unprocessed is a beautiful and refreshingly honest look at the sticky business of making ethical and responsible food choices in our current food landscape. We spoke about the challenges she faced during her year of unprocessed eating, as well as the lessons she learned and the habits she still maintains today.
I remember feeling a lot of nervousness, trying to figure out what "unprocessed" meant. I settled on a definition that was, theoretically, "if I could make it in my home kitchen, it was unprocessed." For example, grinding wheat berries into flour or fermenting grapes into wine. We've been doing these processes for a very long time, but figuring out the line for myself was really hard. When you get into needing things like citric acid to make these products [at home], are they still unprocessed?
At the beginning of the year, I bought food only with ingredients I could make at home. So, for example, I only bought bread with whole-grain flour, water, and yeast. I bought honey instead of sugar. But every food has its own level of processing, so it was hard to come up with a blanket term for "processed" without considering each individual food. Milk seems very unprocessed. It's the first food for all of us, and it comes straight from a mammal. But the way we produce milk today is from a very "processed" industry. It takes a lot of resources, animals are treated like machines… the production is processed, even if the product itself is not.
By the end of my year, the idea of examining the people and industries around food became much more important to me. I didn't eat refined white flour, but there's a miller in Phoenix near me who, in addition to whole-grain flour, mills refined pastry flour from heritage grains. That's so much better than a whole-grain flour from who-knows-where that's been sitting on a shelf for who-knows-how-long.
Alcohol was a huge one, partly because the hardest part about eating unprocessed was the social element: meeting friends, family, or co-workers for food. So wine was definitely one of those "oh, I could ferment grapes on my own," things. But when I took a look at the more industrialized wine production in this country—and in particular, the type of wine that I was able to afford—I guess I just made a compromise. As we all have to do when we live and participate in a food system that is very much industrialized. It's very hard to remove yourself totally from it. Beer was much easier to consume, because there are lots of local breweries in Tucson and around the country.
Eating out was also very difficult. The first time I did, I was a terrible dinner companion. I asked so many questions to the waitress, I took forever to order, and I remember it being a really stressful experience. At some point, I decided that I just had to try my best. I would never know if [restaurants] were putting refined sugar in their marinara sauce. I would never know if they were using preservatives in their bread. In order to maintain the ability to go out and connect with people, I had to learn to accept that.
For me, it's thinking about where your food dollars are going. It's less about the food than it is about the systems around the food. Try to support companies that deserve your money; go to local stores and farmers' markets, buy from companies that have an ethos that matches your values, whatever they may be. On a more practical level, it's so important to read the ingredient labels on every item you buy. Before I started my year, I'd just look at the front of the label and think, "Oh, that looks healthy." But you have to define what's too far in terms of additives, pesticides, hormones, or antibiotics for yourself and make informed decisions from there.
I asked myself, "How do the little food choices I make impact our food system?" I guess the question I'd ask everyone else is, "What's important to you?" Food is such a personal thing, and we all have a stubborn streak. We say, "No way. I'm not giving that up." I think that's okay. Once in a while, we indulge. I don't eat out very often, but when I do I'm flexible because it's a treat. But in my daily life, I'm very careful about the food I buy and consume.
I still make chocolate now and then. As for other holdovers, I'm roasting a ton of vegetables right now, because I got a ton in my CSA and I know I'm busy for the rest of the week. Thinking ahead by doing things like making a big batch of beans became very intuitive. I make bread now more than I ever used to. It remains fun and novel to do that myself. I can tomatoes every summer, and I'm also going to try dehydrating a bunch. I'm on a dehydrating kick right now.
So many people think that eating unprocessed is more expensive, but it's an act that's really accessible to everyone. You just have to decide that it's important. If this is important to you, it's so doable. Not eating any processed food for an entire year may seem like an extreme thing, but you don't have to go that extreme. You can do just one thing. Make one choice. And then take it from there.