Food and culture writer, recipe developer, and No Meat Required author Alicia Kennedy weaves together the personal, the historical, and the political in the culinary memoir On Eating (Balance, Apr.). She spoke with PW about appetites, autonomy, and the many influences that feed her work.
How did this book come together?
The book is structured autobiographically via foods or ingredients that have been important in my life. It’s in line with what I do in my newsletter, but more expansive and with deeper research. I’ve taken all the work that I’ve done as a journalist, professor, and essayist, and made it fit into the confines of literary memoir. This book is a culmination of all this work and involves telling stories about reporting I’ve done—around oysters or mushrooms or sugar or pumpkin.
What challenges did you face while writing?
I’m accustomed to being present in my work; I’m very New Journalism vibes. But I’m not accustomed to being the subject who has to sustain the reader’s interest in me as a person, as a narrator, as a persona, over the course of a text. That was new for me, and it was daunting. I’m a write-first, craft-later type of person. So, I put myself in conversation with ideas about domesticity or daintiness or female appetite or what it means to be an artist and a woman and saw what happened. A lot of the work of writing this book was balancing “me” with ideas about how we eat and why we eat it—figuring out the gaps that need more me, or more research, or more stories.
How does this book ask readers to reconsider their own relationships with food?
I want readers to think about whether their own appetites line up with the world they actually want to live in. The answer might be yes, and the answer might be no. A lot of our appetite is mindless. I love lamb because my grandmother made me lamb, but that doesn’t mean I have to eat lamb for the rest of my life in her honor. I can make a decision to say that eating lamb doesn’t align with who I want to be in this world. I want to put people in tension with their own appetite by analyzing where their own tastes come from.
What books influenced this one?
Traditional food memoir—M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichel, and Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special—but also feminist excavations of existing as a woman writer, like Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin or Drifts by Kate Zambreno. Often as a woman writer when we’re talking about food it’s from the perspective of teaching people how to cook. It’s never what Anthony Bourdain was doing. I grew up feminized, but I also grew up being desperate to eat and to travel and to be in the world. On the first page, I say it’s a bit obnoxious to have had such a positive relationship with food for my entire life when for other people it’s so fraught and difficult. It’s okay to have a robust appetite and have epicurean ideas about food. It’s okay to revel in it and celebrate it.
