All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer

Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction/Memoir

“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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Reviews

Interviews

Foreword Reviews Face Off with Katie Asher
The structure of All the Wild Hungers is in essay form, and I really enjoyed the short anecdotes. Was there a reason for that type of writing structure? Was there a benefit to essays as opposed to a novel?
​Kao Kalia Yang, the wonderful Hmong memoirist, said something this summer that has resonated with me, something her father said: “The human life is individual. It is not unique.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the context of this book. I could have written this as a memoir, but it didn’t start out as a story for me—it started by being so disturbed by the food metaphors of cancer that my mom’s doctors were using. I know my Susan Sontag, I know Illness as Metaphor. But I hadn’t encountered the food metaphors before—and as a cook, that didn’t sit well with me. The nonfiction I like best always starts in those moments of friction.
"'All the Wild Hungers' is a Deft Culinary Tour of Life, Death, and Lefse" with James Norton, The Growler
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?’
Eat Your Words with Cathy Erway
How a cancer diagnosis helped this Minneapolis author find her love of cooking," with Erica Rivera, City Pages
People find a passion for cooking in many ways. A cancer diagnosis usually isn’t one of them.
But for Minneapolis author Karen Babine, a love of food grew out of a cabbage-sized tumor discovered in her mother’s uterus. In her new memoir, All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, Babine takes on the challenge of appeasing her mother's changing tastes during and after surgery, chemotherapy, and hospitalizations.
“Feed a fever, starve a cold," she writes, "but what do we do for cancer?” 
Sweet Connections
Name: Karen Babine
Title of Piece published in Sweet: Midsommar Dag
Issue: 8.3

​What inspires you to write?
It’s amazing how I don’t really believe in inspiration anymore, as I used to, the flurry of an idea and writing so fast so I wouldn’t forget. A lot of my work is research based, as even that provides really essential questions for me to explore. These days, I’m much more of the mind of the novelist Will Weaver, who once told me, when I asked him if he kept a writing schedule: “Yes, because it would be a shame if the angel of fiction showed up and I wasn’t there.” I try to keep to a schedule of Morning Pages, three longhand pages before I do anything else in the day, which is sometimes hard to maintain during the semester, but it’s the work of being a writer—and that always feels good, even if I don’t get anything earthshattering from it.
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