Life and death and food and love

KAREN BABINE

By Sarah Joyner

Karen Babine found solace in the science of the kitchen when her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

“I like science. I like knowing why things are the way they are,” Babine says.

“In those days, I was really trying to work through how I was feeling about cancer and this really mirrored cancer and her treatment and things that should not exist. It was nice to know that A plus B equals C if I do this in a recipe. At least I had something tangible in my hands to work with.”

Cooking comforting meals for her mother gave Babine purpose, a way to help. A vegetarian, she learned to perfect pot roast and the art of searing with her trusty cast-iron skillet named Agnes. She fed her mother mashed potatoes “spiked with as much butter and heavy cream” as she could manage, nourishing with a complete protein after a chemo treatment when her mother wanted to eat only the blandest of foods.

Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Babine also wrote throughout her mother’s illness. The culmination of that work, "All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer," was published in 2019 by Milkweed Editions.

The book is Babine’s narrative of food and illness and loss and won the 2020 Minnesota Book Award for memoir and creative nonfiction.

“This book means something in a way that can’t be repeated,” Babine says.

Her mom was there throughout the process with her first book, "Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life," but did not get to see "All the Wild Hungers" through to publication. The first book also won the Minnesota Book Award, and her mother attended the first awards banquet.

“We postponed her chemo a week so she could go. She was there. Dressed up and bald. Gorgeous.

“She passed away two months before the publication of 'All the Wild Hungers.' She got to read it, but she didn’t get to see the full thing. It’s very bittersweet.”

IN THE CLASSROOM

Babine had an opportunity to pair food and writing again when she taught an English senior seminar course on food writing in fall 2020. She started the semester with a caveat, “Food does a neutral good.”

She had the class approach their studies with these statements: “There is no such thing as bad food. There is no such thing as bad eating.”

“We’re going to come at this from ‘food is good,’ and we’re going to explore the complications of food, Babine says. You know, media teaches us that eggs are bad this week. We might interrogate that, but that’s not going to be our response.”

The readings began with David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” an essay about the annual Maine Lobster Festival published in Gourmet magazine in 2004.

“That was the first intersection because, up until that point, food writing had been written by food people, not writers. So here we have a writer being published in a food magazine, which is an interesting sort of cross-pollination,” Babine says.

From “Consider the Lobster” to a romance novel to M.F.K. Fisher’s "How to Cook a Wolf"—published after World War II when food was scarce, but the writer’s humor was not—Babine and her class of English students studied how people write about and interact with food. Along the way, she gives soon-to-be graduates tools for success beyond UTC, whether food-centric poems or writings for portfolios or literary and rhetorical analyses to use as writing samples for graduate school applications.

“We’re going to give you ways to think about something like food after you leave here,” she adds, “because food is the great common denominator. We all have to eat.”

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BOOKSHELF

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Karen Babine, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

"All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer" (Milkweed Editions, 2019)

"All the Wild Hungers" is a winner of the Minnesota Book Award, as is Babine’s 2015 Water and "What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life" (University of Minnesota Press).

She’s currently at work on her next book, an essay collection about camping to Nova Scotia to discover her family’s Acadian roots.

Babine also is founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, which she describes as publishing “the best critical scholarship of creative nonfiction texts, to facilitate all facets of nonfiction conversations in a variety of disciplines and to be a resource for writers, scholars, readers, and teachers of nonfiction.”