“As a girl, I ate like a king.” The sentence is Alicia Kennedy’s, and it does what all good opening lines do: it makes a promise and a provocation in the same breath.
Kennedy has spent years building one of the most influential food newsletters in the English language — a publication that asks, with genuine intellectual seriousness, what it means to eat well in a warming, overworked, globalised world. On Eating is the book that newsletter has been circling: part memoir, part argument, part love letter to appetite itself.
The memoir moves between Long Island and San Juan, between oysters and plantains. But the book’s real territory is the space between pleasure and politics — the question of whether you can eat for joy and justice simultaneously. Kennedy does not pretend to have resolved this. What she offers instead is the quality of the thinking — rigorous, sensual, rooted in place.
If Wendell Berry wrote about the ethics of eating from the farm, Kennedy writes from the market and the table. Both writers insist that eating is a moral act. But Berry’s morality is agrarian and settled. Kennedy’s is diasporic, feminist, and restless.
If you have ever stood in a kitchen and felt the full weight of what it means to feed someone — the love in it, the labour, the politics you did not ask for but cannot avoid — this is a book that will meet you there.
The oysters. The plantains. The martini she makes as if it were a form of prayer.
