On Eating

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.

Author Biography

Alicia Kennedy is a writer from New York based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her weekly newsletter on food culture, politics, and media, “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy,” has been mentioned by TheNew York Times, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, W, Food52, Coveteur, and Vogue Australia. Her writing has appeared in Eater, British Vogue, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar. Kennedy has appeared on Good Morning America, the BBC World Service, and many more radio shows and podcasts to talk about issues of food media, culture, and meat consumption.