On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

With lush prose and evocative storytelling, Alicia Kennedy shares her journey “from eater to cook,” exploring how we can eat for both joy and justice in a warming, overworked, and globalized world.
 
As a girl, I ate like a king.  
 
So begins beloved author and journalist Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book. On Eating:The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites is a deeply personal work about being a girl who loved to eat but worried that cooking could derail her life. Would it mean ceaseless domesticity and service? Do we have to eat and cook “like a man” to have our appetites taken seriously? Or can we eat and cook in a way that is true to ourselves, that roots us in the places we’ve called home, and that helps define our politics and ethics?

From eating her grandma’s lamb chops and picking apples with her mom on Long Island, to an interest in chocolate leading her to open a vegan microbakery and mushroom reporting in Puerto Rico steering her toward the love of her life, Kennedy has always been guided by curiosity and a hunger for flavor and experience. On Eating teaches us that we don’t have to choose between what is delicious and what can sustain our planet and ourselves. But it’s also about the deep hunger of loss, grief, families, and the stories we tell each other in order to survive.

On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of desire, but it also challenges each of us to consider our own relationship with food and how our need to eat—to live—impacts the world.