All the Wild Hungers

All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer

“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.

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Press

review

"Written in 64 vignettes, readers may initially think the book will be an easy read. They would be wrong. The bursts of text allow Babine to take focused plunges into living with her mother’s cancer recovery, each time from a different poignant angle. Much like someone working through intense physical therapy to achieve a seemingly impossible task, Babine navigates muscles and nerves to craft moments into manageable bites layered with significance regarding the bones of the matter."

review

"Achingly sad and incredibly beautiful, Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers is a welcoming invitation to dinner, family, and laughter, evoking a warm, full kitchen and good company."

interview

We all cope with tragedy and stress in different ways. Did you know when you were cooking, and writing, that that was what you were doing? Did it help? What did your family think of your ways of dealing with your mother’s cancer?

There’s two parts here: the first is when all this cast iron started showing up on the thrift store shelves and I kept bringing it home. I love thrift stores. Dad started joking about reinforcing the floor and “how many do you need?” became common reactions, especially when I started bringing home duplicates of Nordicware pans. I liked the idea of cast iron as indestructible (though I learned otherwise when I cracked my plattpanna one day), and it was access into a food history that was not mine, but I wanted to know anyway. As a vegetarian, I’d gotten out of the habit of cooking meat, but I kind of missed it, so having the dutch oven that could go from stovetop to oven when making a pot roast was really handy. And then I tapped into other memories, like the chicken rice bake my mom would make before church when I was a kid and the crunchy rice around the edges was just like the tahdig that I was learning how to make now in my favorite skillet. It was the best kind of cultural overlap I could imagine.

But I am a stress baker and have been for years. I’m a good friend to have during finals week. It’s something productive I can do, it’s predictable in its result (mostly), and I have to concentrate just enough that part of my brain can spin off and think through what caused the stress in the first place. It’s interesting to see the research now on brain chemistry and cooking—that there’s literal science behind my stress baking and why I feel so good when I do it.

interview

The Growler: What was the original crystal that this book formed around?

Karen Babine: It was when the doctors referred to my mother’s tumor as “cabbage sized.” They kept using these food metaphors—like chemotherapy “recipes.” I’m a cook, and I like to cook, and cooking is wonderful, and suddenly it was this gross thing.

But then conversely I started finding all this super-expensive cast iron in thrift stores and kept bringing it home, and then I got to play with new things I hadn’t gotten to play with before. It was a new thing because my family was not a cast-iron family and it got to the point where if I couldn’t do it in the skillet it was: ‘Well, what’s the point?’

interview