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Food writer Julie Powell, who became an internet darling after a year of blogging about making every recipe Julia Child mastered the art of French cooking, has died at the age of 49.
Powell died of cardiac arrest on October 26 at his home in upstate New York, The New York Times reported. Powell’s editor at book publisher Little, Brown, Judy Klein, confirmed her death.
“She is a brilliant writer and a bold, original person who will not be forgotten,” Ms Klein said in a statement. “Our deepest thoughts go out to all who know and love Julie. Mourning, both personally and through the deep connection she made with readers of her memoir.”
Her sophomore and final endeavor — titled “Split: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession” — was a bit jarring in terms of honesty. Powell revealed her having an affair, the pain of falling in love with two men at the same time, her fondness for sadism and even having a self-punishing sex act with a stranger.
She told The Associated Press in 2009: “There’s going to be some emotional whiplash coming out of the movie ‘Julie and Julia.’ I don’t believe it’s going to be a Nora Efron movie.”
Powell began her romance in 2004, while she was putting the finishing touches on her first book, when she wrote that she was “starry-eyed and vaguely dissatisfied that I had too much time on my hands.”
By 2006, she had found an apprenticeship at a butcher’s shop two hours north of New York City, giving her a break from a crumbling marriage and a place to explore her childhood curiosity with the butcher’s.
“The way they hold the knife in their hands is like an extension of themselves,” she said. “I’m a very clumsy person. I don’t exercise. This kind of physicality is really foreign to me and I’m really envious.”
The book explores the connection between Slaughter and her own tormented romantic life.
At one point, while cutting the connective tissue on a pig’s leg, she wrote: “It’s sad, but also a relief to know that two things so tightly bound together can be separated with so little violence, Leaves a smooth surface instead of bloody debris.”
Her book takes advantage of the growing interest in old-fashioned butchery, and her experience cutting meat actually led her to eat less. She is an advocate for the humane raising and slaughter of animals.
“People want to get their hands dirty. People want to be involved in the process. People want to know where their food comes from,” Powell said. “People don’t want this mystery anymore.”
Her husband, Eric, survived.
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