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On Eating
The Making & Unmaking of My Appetites
Description
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, journalist, and influencer Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book. On Eating is more than a memoir; in true Alicia Kennedy style, it is also on desire, on the roles of women “in the kitchen,” on domesticity, on diaspora, on foodways and food sovereignty, on home and how we find home through food, on how food can help us bring us back to those we love. Beautifully rooted in place—from Long Island (on oysters, on martinis) to San Juan (on plantains, on sugar), On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of appetite, it also challenges each of us to consider our own relationship with food, and how our need to eat—to live—impacts the world.
Ultimately, On Eating is a paean food and those who grow and cook it, asking the urgent questions in our world today about what and how we eat.
As a girl, I ate like a king.
So begins beloved author, journalist, and influencer Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book. On Eating is more than a memoir; in true Alicia Kennedy style, it is also on desire, on the roles of women “in the kitchen,” on domesticity, on diaspora, on foodways and food sovereignty, on home and how we find home through food, on how food can help us bring us back to those we love. Beautifully rooted in place—from Long Island (on oysters, on martinis) to San Juan (on plantains, on sugar), On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of appetite, it also challenges each of us to consider our own relationship with food, and how our need to eat—to live—impacts the world.
Ultimately, On Eating is a paean food and those who grow and cook it, asking the urgent questions in our world today about what and how we eat.
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Praise
“Though not a traditional cookbook in any sense of the word, everyone who loves to cook is excited about No Meat Required, food writer Alicia Kennedy’s contribution to the conversation about plant-based eating. In her signature evocative and thoughtful prose, Kennedy asks the reader to join her in questioning meat’s role in our culture.”
—Vogue
“One of the pleasures of reading this book is that it prompts us to think about nature’s variety and abundance, and about how that abundance can show up on our plates.”
—The Atlantic
“No Meat Required serves up a well-researched look at American veganism and lays the groundwork for plant-based cuisine.”
—Chicago Review of Books
"No Meat Required was always going to be a hugely important book, but it didn’t have to be a total pleasure. This is what happens when a writer as curious, compassionate, and truth-seeking as Kennedy goes all out on a subject that she knows matters deeply, to her and to the world.”
—Lauren Collins, staff writer, The New Yorker
“In a dietary discourse starved for historical and cultural context, Alicia’s work and analysis on the politics of eating meat (or not!) have been enduringly informed and insightful, punctuated by No Meat Required. There’s no one else I’d rather read on the subject!”
—host of High on the Hog and founder of Whetstone Media, Stephen Satterfield
“Everyone, whether vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous, needs to read this elegantly written, thought-provoking treatise.”
—Nigella Lawson
“An impressively exhaustive look at where vegetable-centered eating comes from and where it might head, and a vital reminder that today’s dominant idea of veganism tells very little of the story.”
—Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal