All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer [Paperback]

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 Babinea cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and auntcant 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 foundand 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 Hungersis an affecting chronicle of one familys experience of illness and of a writer's culinary attempt to make sense of the inexplicable.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 wasno--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 hercancer 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 thatlãâ