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, 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 to food and those who grow and cook it, asking the urgent questions in our world today about what and how we eat.