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.
Your definition of the word “unprocessed” went through many iterations in the book. How did its meaning change from the start of your year to the end of it?
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.
