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On Eating

The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

Coming Soon
On Eating Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Alicia Kennedy

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Apr 14, 2026
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Balance
ISBN-13
9780306836336

Price

$30.00

Price

$40.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $30.00 $40.00 CAD
  2. ebook $14.99 $19.99 CAD
  3. Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99

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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 and journalist Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book. On Eating:The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites is a deeply personal work about being a girl who loved to eat but worried that cooking could derail her life. Would it mean ceaseless domesticity and service? Do we have to eat and cook “like a man” to have our appetites taken seriously? Or can we eat and cook in a way that is true to ourselves, that roots us in the places we’ve called home, and that helps define our politics and ethics?

From eating her grandma’s lamb chops and picking apples with her mom on Long Island, to an interest in chocolate leading her to open a vegan microbakery and mushroom reporting in Puerto Rico steering her toward the love of her life, Kennedy has always been guided by curiosity and a hunger for flavor and experience. On Eating teaches us that we don’t have to choose between what is delicious and what can sustain our planet and ourselves. But it’s also about the deep hunger of loss, grief, families, and the stories we tell each other in order to survive.

On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of desire, but it also challenges each of us to consider our own relationship with food and how our need to eat—to live—impacts the world.

Genre:

  • On Eating is both a compelling first-person account of a curious and intelligent woman’s life, and a well-researched and engagingly written treatise on the practices of growing, distributing, cooking and eating food, a serious subject that Kennedy nevertheless imbues with wit and charm. I am always better and smarter for having read anything Alicia Kennedy has written.
    Laurie Woolever, author of Care And Feeding: A Memoir
  • If her book No Meat Required and her laser-sharp writing on her weekly newsletter hadn’t already proved it, On Eating emphatically confirms Alicia Kennedy as one of the food industry’s most thoughtful thinkers. Kennedy’s prose is alive, tactile, and at times heartbreaking, a delicious and evocative exploration of how the food we consume shapes how we view ourselves and the world around us, and vice versa. I devoured every word.
    Hetty Lui McKinnon, food writer and cookbook author
  • This book moved me with its uncompromising reflections on grief, its elegant and witty chronicles of falling in love, and its gentle challenges to make me think harder about what I eat and why. Alicia Kennedy is great company on the page, and On Eating asserts her as not only one of our finest writers on food but one of our finest writers, period.
    Mayukh Sen, author of Love, Queenie and The Tastemakers
  • Already a cultural force in food writing and activism, Alicia Kennedy reveals her lyrical and literary gifts to the fullest in this richly personal memoir. Acutely observed, sparklingly intelligent, forging pointed and unexpected connections between the personal and the political—it's a fresh, seductive, unputdownable read.
    Anya von Bremzen, author of National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home
  • Gorgeous and effortless in her prose, Alicia Kennedy weaves seamlessly through the personal, the historical, and the political. Through evocative and clear-eyed examinations of her appetites, Kennedy inspires readers to reflect on the way food shapes both our inner and outer worlds. On Eating is a remarkable feat of memoir, cultural criticism, and a celebration of both food and one’s own humanity.
    Ifrah Ahmed, author of Soomaaliya: A Cookbook

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Alicia Kennedy

About the Author

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.

Learn more about this author