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Summary
Summary
"My sister is pregnant with a Lemon this week, Week 14, and this is amusing. My mother's uterine tumor, the size of a cabbage, is Week 30, and this is terrifying."
When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Karen Babine--a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt--can't help but wonder: feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? And so she commits herself to preparing her mother anything she will eat, a vegetarian diving headfirst into the unfamiliar world of bone broth and pot roast.
In these essays, Babine ponders the intimate connections between food, family, and illness. What draws us toward food metaphors to describe disease? What is the power of language, of naming, in a medical culture where patients are too often made invisible? How do we seek meaning where none is to be found--and can we create it from scratch? And how, Babine asks as she bakes cookies with her small niece and nephew, does a family create its own food culture across generations?
Generous and bittersweet, All the Wild Hungers is an affecting chronicle of one family's experience of illness and of a writer's culinary attempt to make sense of the inexplicable.
Author Notes
Karen Babine is two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life . She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies . She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this collection of untitled essays, Babine (Water and What We Know) tenderly recalls a year spent with her close-knit Minnesota family, and the meals they share in times of both despair and celebration. One October, her mother was diagnosed with a rare kind of cancer; shortly afterward, her sister became pregnant with her third child. Whatever the news, Babine methodically and lovingly prepared meals in her colorful, vintage Le Creuset cast-iron pans and dutch ovens, which she had found in secondhand stores. The transportive and vivid descriptions of food in these vignettes (each one is only two to four pages) change with the seasons: she cooks purple cabbage and green apples in the fall as she reckons with her mother's cancer diagnosis ("I want... the bite of vinegar and sharp apples, because today is the day that stings inside of my skin"), while in spring, bright red rhubarb stalks emerge from the ground. Laced through the book, however, are academic-feeling musings on people's relationship with food, which interrupt the narrative (America has "a food culture with a strong relationship between shame and food"). Nevertheless, Babine's writing brims with tenderness-for her family, her home, and the food she prepares-warming readers' hearts. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A Midwestern writer finds what comfort she can in food and family as her mother suffers through chemotherapy.How do you hold it together when things are falling apart? As Babine (Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, 2015) suggests in these short, often impressionistic chapters, through the familiar, through ritual, and through tradition. The author addresses cooking, the weather, and the state of modern medicine, among numerous other topics, but always with the thematic undercurrent of her mother's health and mortality in general. Her mother had suffered through a cancer that typically occurs in children, and though her doctors considered her cancer-free, they strongly recommended chemotherapy to keep her that way. "We are reminded, many times," writes the author, "that if she does not do chemo, there is a 70 percent chance of recurrence and a 40 percent chance of survival; with chemotherapy, she has a 90 percent chance of survival if it returns." So her mother submitted to chemo, and life went on. The author also chronicles her sister's pregnancy, the death of a friend's spouse from cancer, and her father's sickness. Through everything, Babine cooked, sometimes for her mother and for others in her family, always to have some sense of order and control, a recipe with ingredients and instructions, in a world gone haywire. It's clear that for the author, food sustains like a lifeline or even a bloodline; there are traditions among the Swedish in Minnesota, wisdom passed down through generations. Babine found Le Creuset cookery in secondhand stores that she never could have afforded new, and she gave each of her new pots and pans a name. She also discovered "the kind of pastry I want to build my life with." She continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday.Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the author. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 It started this way: in early October, my mother's doctor asked her if she felt pregnant, if she had bladder issues, digestive problems, clothes not fitting right. My mother's immediate answer was no --but she went home and thought about where her weight was sitting, what she hadn't been able to exercise away, the constant constipation, the bloating she chalked up to eating badly while traveling, and she realized she did feel four months pregnant. I tried not to call the tumor her cancer baby , at least not out loud. My sister is currently fourteen weeks pregnant with her third child and the family is ecstatic with joy. Six years ago, when my sister was pregnant with my niece, she sent a text that she and the dog "were taking the Apple for a walk." We thought it was cute, as we are a small, tightly knit family that likes to think in Proper Nouns, to name things, to put even the most quotidian into its proper context. My sister is pregnant with a Lemon this week, Week 14, and this is amusing. My mother's uterine tumor, the size of a cabbage, is Week 30, and this is terrifying. Three years ago, my nephew was born at Week 36, but he was the size of that cancerous cabbage. There are patterns emerging here that I do not like. We learn that my mother's is a childhood cancer called embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma and they tell us it appears only in children under the age of ten, not in sixty-five-year-old grandmothers, and I keep thinking of embryos, about the physical and emotional dangers of pregnancy, the risks of birth in a country that boasts the largest maternal death rate among developed nations, that women of color are at even more risk from dying as a result of pregnancy and childbirth, and that the risk transcends economic status. Serena Williams's blood clots were not immediately taken seriously after she gave birth, leading to nearly deadly results; activist Erica Garner suffered a heart attack and passed away three months after giving birth. I keep thinking about what is inside us that never goes away, love and fear, scars that are emotional and physical. The long length of my mother's abdominal scar is a bright, rich eggplant purple, necessary so the surgeon could deliver her uterus and tumor intact; her own mother's identical hysterectomy scar had long ago faded to white, an ectopic pregnancy in 1952 that nearly caused her to bleed to death. The lines that tie us together are written into our skin, into our cells, the potential destruction of a family present in its creation. *** 2 Once upon a time, a girl who loved chocolate wanted to become a teacher. Her parents were both teachers, each the first in their rural farm families to attend and graduate from a four-year college. The girl loved music and believed chocolate was the answer to any question she had. The woman who loved chocolate made children the work of her life, spending the last fifteen years of her career teaching fourth grade. She would say, They're old enough to read and young enough to still listen . When Christmas would come around, the children remembered she loved chocolate more than anything, wrapping up Hershey's rather than another World's Greatest Teacher coffee mug. She would warn them that there's no fun in fourth grade and they would look up, startled, and say, But this is fun! and laugh at the twinkle in her bright blue eyes. I wonder what she would see now if she were still in her classroom, looking out at those ten-year-old faces. I wonder which stories this teacher would read to her students now, the lights dimmed after lunch. Would the woman who loved chocolate see old tales in their faces, the dark stories, the ones where the women are the danger, the absent and dead mothers, murderous stepmothers, evil disguised as grandmothers, the stories where witches lure children closer with houses made of candy and gingerbread, where stepmother-witches offer poisoned apples, where tiny bottles labeled Drink Me and cakes labeled Eat Me send us to places we never expected to go. *** 3 My beloved orange Le Creuset cast-iron skillet, size 23, was the first of my cast iron collection, and her origin story goes like this: I saw the bright enamel on a thrift store shelf more than a year before the cancer, before cast iron would become a thrill, before my mother's palliative doctor would remind her that "pleasure is important." The skillet was buried under other cookware, and when I flipped it over, I ran my finger over the gunk on the bottom of the pan, as if I could read the letters there by touch. Who brings Le Creuset to a thrift store? I took it home for $7.99, scrubbed it with coarse salt and oil, then set to season it with the help of Google because I had no idea what to do with cast iron. That night, I made a frittata that was mostly edible. The skillet's name became Agnes, named for romance novelist Jennifer Crusie's heroine in Agnes and the Hitman , a cook who tends to defend herself with her nonstick skillet as hijinks ensue. Halloween came a week after my mother was diagnosed, two days before she was scheduled for surgery because nobody wanted to wait, before the Halloween pumpkin language turned into Thanksgiving pies that would herald the beginning of chemotherapy, before I lost myself in the food metaphors of cancer, before I started hunting all that bright, expensive cookware in my local thrift stores, before the quest for cast iron became an obsession to keep me grounded, before my orange Le Creuset skillet became an explosion of color and delight that gave me a dedicated purpose, before I began cooking for my mother against the feeling that food had become something to be feared. Agnes is the color of orange not found in nature, not citrus or pumpkin or persimmon. She is cheap boxed macaroni and cheese. She is the color of warning, of flame and blaze orange, that keeps our hunter friends safe in the woods on these chilly days. She is the artificial-looking color of the gerbera daisies delivered to my mother's hospital room the day a three-pound, sixteen-centimeter embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma tumor is excavated with my mother's uterus. It is a cancer so rare in adults that I contact a high school friend who is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic for advice and he connects us with the sarcoma specialist there. My mother could have chosen to do her treatment at Mayo, but she decided on the University of Minnesota, since it is so much closer to home, and we begin a collaboration with their sarcoma specialist. We learn that if my mother were my niece's age, the doctors would know what to do, but she is sixty-five, and they must extrapolate a treatment plan from what they would give a child. A three-week cycle of chemotherapy, they decide--three drugs given on Day 1, one on Day 8, one on Day 15. Even then, they are still guessing that this is the right path. We learn that she is given a lower dose of this cocktail, because children can tolerate stronger chemotherapy, which seems counterintuitive. What they do say is this: my mother is cancer free after this surgery, but they are prescribing aggressive chemotherapy because if she does not do chemo, there is a 70 percent chance the cancer will come back, and if it does, she has a 40 percent chance of survival. With chemo, she has a 90 percent chance of survival if it returns. She chooses chemo. Nobody argues. *** 4 When October days grow short and opaque and the dense of sky presses down like the palm of a hand, I crave cabbage, the resistance of green steamed just enough to bite, Brussels sprouts cut in half and sautéed in butter and olive oil. In the celadon spring, I always want colcannon. In these early days of cancer, my family--my parents, two sisters, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew--institute a weekly family dinner to alleviate the fear in our bellies over what is happening to our mother. We are the kind of family that crowds three adult daughters into the consultation room with our parents and our mother's doctors, prompting one doctor to look from me to my youngest sister and back again and ask if we are twins, and we laugh and say there are four years between us. Our family is very close, both geographically and emotionally, and this colors our reactions to the world around us. Because we live within a ten-mile radius, it is common for us to toss out impromptu dinner invitations, so when we think about making each moment count, we realize that we have not changed much about the way we are with each other. Cancer simply requires that we articulate ourselves differently, reorienting our language as we become intimately aware of the words we use. We come to understand the idea of "cancer-adjusted normal," that what might have constituted a bad day a year ago is actually a truly good day today. We don't ask how are you doing? anymore--we ask how is today? On one of these nights full of family and color and sound, I pull out Estelle, my vintage Le Creuset cast-iron Dutch oven, rescued from a thrift store about the time my mother was diagnosed, and I realize that Estelle is Week 14 Lemon Yellow and I'm seeing pregnancy and cancer and food everywhere. Tonight, I want the bright of braised red cabbage against that pale-yellow enamel, the bite of vinegar and sharp apples, because today is a day that stings the inside of my skin like balsamic breathed too deeply. I sauté the sharpness of two thinly sliced onions down to sweetness, then add fennel seeds until they warm the room. Three Granny Smith apples, cut into chunks, are stirred gently into the onion, and then I turn to the red cabbage, which will be chopped and added to the pot with enough balsamic vinegar to braise over the course of an hour. I refuse to think of pathology as I slice harder than necessary through dark purple and white, the hidden patterns and swirls in the packed leaves too beautiful to be accidental. *** 5 My mother's surgeon says that the margins and lymph nodes are clear, but skepticism lingers between my ribs, a slight and constant pressure. Later, the poet Heid E. Erdrich introduces me to the concept of fetal microchimerism, the phenomenon of fetal cells being found in the mother decades after birth--"blood river once between you / went two ways / what makes us / own sole and sovereign selves / is only partially us," Erdrich writes in "Microchimerism"--and I wonder what alternate selves mothers carry in wombs that betrayed them, what muscle memories remain in the phantom space left behind when children have been delivered, when the wombs themselves are gone, or what we carry in wombs that, by choice or circumstance, never bear children. Scientific American tells me, "We all consider our bodies to be our own unique being, so the notion that we may harbor cells from other people in our bodies seems strange. Even stranger is the thought that, although we certainly consider our actions and decisions as originating in the activity of our own individual brains, cells from other individuals are living and functioning in that complex structure"--and I cup my palms together to imagine what my mother's three-pound cabbage-sized tumor would feel like, but the heft of my imagining disintegrates into the feel of my mother's hand in mine while the doctor attempts a second biopsy, necrotic tissue floating darkly in clear tubes, learning later that the cells simply fell apart when pathology tried to look at them. But I don't understand, not really. Are we our own unique beings or not? Science would suggest we are not. We exist within systems, networks, the matrix of family and friends, patterns. We are not alone. We are all connected, even on a cellular level, across time, space, and logic. Perhaps it is individuality that is the myth. *** 6 Agnes is the color of fear, of orange cones and emergency vests, a color to startle, to wonder at the point where cancer has become the rule, not the exception. Every new diagnosis surprises me a little less. It's cancer. It's always cancer. It is fall in Minnesota and our days are getting shorter. I feel time as physical oppression. I am so angry in these days, my world a flare of bright orange. Anger is a secondary emotion, they say, a reaction to fear or vulnerability or frustration or injustice, an active reaction, rather than passive, and I walk the halls of the house, my belly simmering with something less than rage. The heft of cast iron in my hands feels right in a way my mother's light Club aluminum does not. I am angry at the urgency they feel in giving my mother six months of destructive chemotherapy but not being worried when her blood counts are too low to receive treatment. For what feels like her oncologist forgetting she's a human being with a brain, with feelings, and this is something I will not ever forgive him for. We brush aside his poor bedside manner, as that's just the way he is , and my fingers tingle with resentment. For the subtext of You have cancer and you're getting chemo--what do you expect? For the nursing staff telling her, again, in voices that sound incredibly patronizing to my ear, If your temperature gets to 100.4, you have two hours to get to the ER; make sure you wash your hands; make sure you avoid sick people --or on her last visit, where her platelets were too low and her white blood cells were so scarce they could be individually counted, the nurse told her to be extra careful with shaving --and made motions with her hands like she was shaving her legs--and I could feel my brain seize. Look around you, nobody here has hair, my mother also clearly has no hair, and you're telling her to be careful shaving her legs? My mother's friend A., recently diagnosed with lung cancer, sent an email where she reported with amused exasperation the frustrated and angry reaction of her son to not knowing more after her recent CT scan, and A. reminded him that she was pleased with the report, that she was--like my parents-- perfectly happy to accept things as they come. Oh , my mother said to me when she read the email: There are two of you! My mother says she never felt patronized, or felt that she was treated poorly, but I felt it. Deeply. My father went so far this morning as to link such acceptance to maturity, Not , he hastily--but not hastily enough--added, not that you're not mature. At other times, he's suggested that perhaps I'm simply searching for somebody to be angry with. This might be true. I have the luxury of questioning these doctors when my parents do not. They need to trust that the oncologist knows exactly what he's doing, because if they cannot trust him, the consequences are unfathomable. My middle sister is a nurse: we are a family that trusts our medical professionals. We trust people who have risen to the tops of their fields to know what they are doing, whether they be cabinetmakers or world-class doctors. That is the way we function. Maybe it's the job of children to bear emotion our mothers cannot voice. Maybe it's a role reversal none of us are ready for, when the children feel they must step in front of danger, into the path of those who would take advantage. I don't know where my distrust has come from--maybe the corporate takeover of education and medicine, the destruction of natural resources for the sake of profit, a political philosophy that calls business the savior of whatever ails you. We watch a pharmaceutical company jack the price of an AIDS drug or my nephew's EpiPen simply because they can. Maybe I feel more strongly the outrage of my mother being told to use Glad Press'n Seal wrap when she puts lidocaine on her port before she leaves home for treatments, rather than the medical-grade Tegaderm she was originally given. Our mothers, using kitchen wrap for medical purposes. Maybe, as a cook, I should appreciate the ingenuity, but I don't. I really don't. Excerpted from All the Wild Hungers: Essays by Karen Babine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.