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

by Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker made cheese and grew tomatoes as a means of coping when she struggled 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.

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2021

Reviews

[Matthew Gavin Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicole Walker’s new collection of essays returns the things we only thought we understood to their innate, and so much more beautiful, complexity. In Walker’s awesome new morphology, slaughterhouse culture can dovetail with motherhood, and banana slug mucosa can contain meditations on pregnancy, and the demise of centuries-old fir trees. It’s all here, as Walker interrogates and upends—via an ever-unexpected imaginative alchemy—the beautiful and atrocious ways in which we consume, bear, rear, and decompose. This is the essay as carefully controlled kaleidoscope, as exhilarating filter through which the ornaments of transient existence are beholden to a fresh, and delicate whirling. Like a field scientist-cum-food writer-cum-oracular cartographer of the heart, 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.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely LOVED this book. Humorous,metaphorical and so relevant. I found myself nodding and laughing out loud more times than I could count. Nicole's style of writing is so appealing because it confirms perhaps some of your craziest thoughts and rationalizations that you might never admit to thinking about. You will laugh about the madness of raising kids, living through pandemics, climate change and indulging in gastronomic delights. We all need a little humor right now.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ignore the unfortunate title. Walker's funny and profound personal essays address themes of disasters, motherhood, food and the contradictions between right-thought and right-action. They are a delight.

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this essay collection! The author is an inquisitive and intrepid guide through unsettling times. With a balance of necessary reverence, joy, and satisfying skepticism, she reminds us both of the sensuous pleasures of human living (especially food!) and the planetary prices we pay for them. She has convinced me of how the smaller aspects of experience and the large link inextricable together, no matter how I might prefer one to the other...

[MacKenzie Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preparing for the end of times is nothing new for author Nicole Walker. Having grown up within a Mormon family in Salt Lake City, Utah, although never herself a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, earlier generations ingrained preparation and survival in her mind. Grow tomatoes, can peaches, boil bones to make aspic. No food product should go to waste—we’re not guaranteed more in the future. Open and conversational, her newest collection of essays explores how we prepare for and cope with the unexpected. Connecting fertility, community, pandemics and more back to food, her writing blends personal narrative with scientific fact, urging readers to be present in the ways they navigate and impact the world during uncertain times.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicole Walker has such an agile mind. She has written a really important and timely collection of essays--each one so well-crafted and filled with vivid writing and exciting intuitive leaps and twists. Walker writes beautifully on the sentence level; her voice is original and manages to be both laser sharp and down-to-earth. She skillfully combines powerful personal experiences with history, science, popular culture and more. I highly recommend this collection to anyone who cares about climate change, food, parenthood, writing, other people, the pandemic and how to stay curious, funny and solution-focused in the midst of serious contemporary challenges.

[Brigitte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the braided essay structure of these pieces, as well as the connections between food, the personal body, and the pandemic. I disliked the way she talked about vegetarians and vegans here, but that’s because I’m vegan.

[Evie Hemphill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book of essays. It's poetic, challenging and funny, and offers a searingly honest look at the moral conundrums of everyday life.

[Rae]

Climate change. Food. Pregnancy. Essays. Utah. Torrey House Press.