Unprocessed by Megan Kimble follows the twenty-six year old author on a year long journey where she vows to eat only unprocessed meals. While maintaining a budget. And living in an apartment without her own garden. And maintaining her social life which includes dating and eating out.
A feat to say the least.
I must start by saying that I absolutely loved Kimble's writing style. Her ability to pull you in to a scene with its scents and textures and visuals was incredibly impressive. I would totally read any fiction novel written by her for her descriptions alone.
Throughout the chapters, Kimble takes us through her own life while living unprocessed, starting with what it even means for a product to be unprocessed. Aside from the obvious, pulling a carrot from the ground or a cutting a head of lettuce, what made a product processed? Where did it begin to shift into the murky areas of unprocessed, and when did it cross the line into becoming ultra-processed? And where on this spectrum would Kimble, herself, reside while still maintaining a budget as well as her current lifestyle, more or less?
This is part of what I most loved about Unprocessed. Kimble often presented multiple sides of an argument, interrogating both with questions that didn't contain a black or white answer but was often riddled with nuance based on circumstance and a particular person's set of beliefs. This was especially evident in the chapters on milk and meat where she tackled everything from the environmental impact to the moral quandary to the health effects that these two sectors of our food pyramid seem to reside.
I also appreciated that Kimble dedicated her final chapters on the very real issue of poverty in the US and shined a light on the food stamp challenge, a challenge I hadn't heard of. I understand why this section appeared later in the book, as it was the final challenge Kimble undertook, herself, after having gained the knowledge of her full year unprocessed. However, I almost wish food poverty and navigating around it while also choosing healthier options had been touched on earlier because it is such an important topic to consider, one that affects millions of people, not only in America, but around the world.
If Kimble had started the book with this challenge and kept it in mind for the entire year, I think it would have been all that much more impactful. To have set a specific budget up front that she constantly touched base with would have been a really lovely way to measure her progress throughout the year and the viability of putting such a lifestyle into practice. I am grateful that at the end of the novel she touched back to how much she had spent throughout the year and compared it to what she had spent on average before the start of the challenge, but because it was at the end, I struggled to connect it back to her year of struggles and triumphs.
Overall, this was a really thought provoking novel, one that left me with a handful of action items to try out in my own life and also a new set of questions to ask the next time I am wandering the aisles of the grocery store.
Interested in diving into this book yourself? You can find a copy right here!