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

by Nicole Walker (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.