Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

**"Nicole Walker writes with dazzling liquidity."

-ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of Zoologies

Nicole Walker made cheese and grew tomatoes as a means of coping* when she failed to get pregnant. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, she cooked veggie burgers for friends and hamburgers for herself-to enjoy outside, six feet apart. Her Mormon ancestors canned peaches to prepare for the End of Days and congealed beef broth into aspic as a surefire cure for ailment. Throughout the richly layered essays of Processed Meats*, Walker ponders food choices and life choices, dissecting how we process disaster, repackage it, and turn it into something edible.