Nonfiction

All the Wild Hungers

A Season of Cooking and Cancer
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award

“A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making.”—AMY THIELEN
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Winner of the Minnesota Book Award in Memoir & Creative Nonfiction

“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.

ISBN
9781571313720
Publish Date
Pages
184
Dimensions
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.5 in
Weight
10 oz
Author

Karen Babine

Karen Babine is two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer.

Praise and Prizes