Alicia Kennedy Aims for the Stomach and Hits the Heart

Alicia Kennedy has been a food and culture writer for over a decade, but that job title fails to capture the scope and spirit of her work. From her home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she runs a “one-woman magazine,” featuring a mix of cultural criticism, food writing, interviews and essays, weaving the edible with the political, historical and personal.

Where her first book, “No Meat Required,” examined vegetarian and vegan foodways in the United States, she takes a more intimate and introspective approach in “On Eating,” with a focus on her appetites and how they’ve shaped her life, both personally and professionally. She recently sat down with Milk Street’s Claire Lower to discuss those appetites, the questions they inspired, and how aiming for the reader’s stomach can be more effective than aiming for their heart.

“On Eating” almost feels like a prequel to “No Meat Required.” Is that fair to say?

I couldn't have written this book before I wrote “No Meat Required.” I've had both of these books in my brain and in my body for a very long time. But when I wrote a proposal for what I thought would be this book in 2017, it didn't sell. I hadn't lived enough to make it what it needed to be. Ultimately I'm really grateful I wasn't a viral woman essayist at that time, who would have wound up selling a crappy book.

“No Meat Required” is a book about vegetarian and vegan food in the United States. This book is about being a woman with an appetite. Both of them are the books I've really wanted to write.

One thing that is apparent in all your writing is that you really consider the effects of all the choices you make. When did you start to think about your choices and how they impact the world around you?

When I was a teenager, I had all these aspirations to be vegan or be vegetarian. I was very into all these progressive or subcultural signifiers. I thought it was cool. And when I was an adult and actually in control of what I was eating, I did try cutting meat out of my diet. I was like, “Oh, I like this a lot. I feel very aligned with myself.” And at my local natural food store on Long Island, I started to really notice the labels on everything.

I write about this in terms of chocolate—noticing the Fair Trade labels and being like, “Huh, what does that really mean?” You know, “What do these things have in common that make them have fair trade labels? Oh, they come from the Global South.” And so that was this big wake up call for me. But caring about where these things come from, and about the Global South, is very rooted in my ongoing interest in Puerto Rico, and my grandmother being from Puerto Rico. Even though I hadn't been to these places yet, they felt very real to me. And then you start reading about the United Fruit Company and all this stuff about what happens with bananas and all those things...

I also started going to yoga around this time. This is always a fraught part of the narrative for me, because it feels so absurd, but it's true—it's part of my food narrative, and I cannot get around it. I started to go to yoga really obsessively in my early 20s, and everyone was talking about being vegan, and raw food was really big at the time. And I was like, “Let's dabble in this.”

And all of this was happening while I was baking really obsessively, which I think is just a thing that happens to some people. At the same time, I was starting to feel like I wanted to go vegan. Kids these days who want to do vegan baking don’t know how easy they have it. I don't even want to talk about it. In those days I was going on forums, on message boards, on blogs. That's how I came across Legusta Yearwood, who became so important to my thinking about food. She's a chocolatier here in New Paltz and New York, and she had this whole blog writing about coconut oil and all this stuff. And it was so intensely scientific in many ways.

I was already obsessed with the baking part of it, and then it opened up this whole portal into this more intense type of baking and all these new things that hadn't necessarily been figured out yet. Being a vegan baker was the next level in my kind of galaxy brain moment. I was really intense about sourcing, buying Fair Trade sugar and New York State flour. Then I realized, if I'm intense about sourcing, my product is going to be wildly priced. And it could have gone the way of me being like, “Oh, this is bullshit,” because you should be able to make a vegan cupcake that costs less than $5.

So that made wonder, like, “What's really going on with the global food system?” If you can't make things in a way that's not exploitative—if you can't make a vegan cupcake that doesn't exploit land and people while helping giant agribusinesses profit—something really needs to change. And obviously, other people have had these revelations. Raj Patel’s “Stuffed and Starved” came out in 2007. But I came at it from this very tactile way—dealing with people, dealing with customers, dealing with farmers. I wasn't coming at it from a scholarly angle. I was coming at it from a very human angle. I wanted to make sure that kids with certain allergies could have a birthday cake. And I wanted to make sure that people who decide to be vegan don't have to sacrifice their love for a chocolate chip cookie. There was also just this very basic human desire to create things—simple, beautiful things for other people —without doing all this damage, and not being part of this terrible system, and realizing how all the cards were stacked against me in doing that, and would have been stacked against anyone doing that.

That's my origin story as a food writer, which is just setting out to do my best, and to make something beautiful for people without doing harm, and then realizing that that's impossible. How can I use what I know in a way that is more survivable? How do I go from talking to people over the table at the farmers market to talking to larger groups of people about the issues we have in our food systems?

In one of my favorite chapters in the book “On Oysters,” you write “The logic of veganism to someone ecologically and cuisine minded had been faltering.” Where was that logic breaking down for you at the time?

I was just like, “Why would I eat cashew cheese? Cashews don't grow in New York. Why am I using so much coconut oil, so much coconut milk? They don't grow here. Would it be better to focus on farms where they care about animal welfare and that sort of a thing?” The funny thing is, lately, I have been feeling like, “Oh, I think maybe it's time to lean back more vegan,” and the only thing that I really give a shit about other than shellfish—which, frankly, I'm not going to give up—are eggs. Eggs are the irreplaceable thing. When I wrote that, it was because at that time I just really wanted to eat a fucking egg. And I was like, “What am I doing?”

That chapter is about my brother passing away. I started to eat oysters after his death, which was my way of sort of getting back at him, because he hated seafood. But also, it was faltering for me because I really am a person who does think that we should be eating regionally. I intentionally use the word regionally, because people will say “local,” and then get frustrated they can’t get everything they need from right down the street. The point is that we should be prioritizing things that come from the regions where we live.

And this thinking comes from having written about and thought about Puerto Rico for so long. If you're on an island, you're really dependent on imports. And if you live anywhere dependent on imports, you're not going to be able to withstand ecological disasters. And so how do we create robust systems that will support us through whatever hurricane or flood or catastrophe befalls us? How can we eat in a way that will create the sort of abundance that will take us through what we need to be taken through? It just wasn't making sense to use cashews and coconuts from the other side of the world. The origins of my thinking about food systems in the first place were about how agribusiness in the Global North is exploiting the Global South.

And so my brother's passing, and the eating of the oysters, it sort of gave me permission to loosen up a little bit. I decided that I could eat with the regional ecosystem in mind and not necessarily be vegan, and I could eat with my own pleasure in mind again, too, and not have to think about being the most picture perfect vegan who ever lived. I actually could choose myself again, in a way.

Do you think people willfully misinterpret the saying “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism"?

Yes, they willfully misinterpret it. Because all of these systems are made up of us. It's made up of people making choices in their daily lives. But I think we might be getting to a point where people are thinking about things a little bit differently. It has woken people up, maybe, to see Jeff Bezos sending people into space for no reason. Mark Zuckerberg and all these other oligarch dudes who look like tools are sucking up so much money and so much air, and the rest of us are hustling our asses off to to enjoy our lives in any way, if we even can get to the point of enjoyment and not just survival.

It's like, “Oh, if I just shop on Amazon, and I order from DoorDash, it doesn't matter, because the big guy should be [caring about] this.” Hello, the big guys are never going to care. We have to act as though we already live in the world we want to live in. And of course no one's perfect. I will go to Sephora. There is plastic in my house. But at the same time, I do think it's interesting when people can find their thing that they make conscious choices about, and they talk about it, and they help people around them understand it. I don't think these are things that happen in a vacuum. We don't exist in vacuums. We exist as social creatures.

I'm thinking about food this way. Other people are thinking about fashion this way. Other people are thinking about beauty this way. Other people are thinking about agriculture this way. It's about all of us finding the lane that isn't too heavy a burden for us to bear, and making our choices around it, and trying to be happy and communicative about those choices and why we're making them. Because, again, if you're waiting on billionaires to decide “enough with the fossil fuels,” that's not going to happen.

I think a lot about that Upton Sinclair quote “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” and how the novel was supposed to be about immigrant labor abuses, but instead it ended up sparking a conversation about food safety. Why do you think it is so hard to hit peoples’ hearts and get them to think outside of themselves? How do you reach hearts in your writings?

What I took from Upton Sinclair was just aim at their stomach and see if you can get to the heart. But it's hard. It's been over 100 years since “The Jungle,” right? And so little has changed. In terms of scale, things have only gotten more extreme. But I do think that if you can reach a heart, it's through the craft of writing. Like when you say “On Eating" feels like a prequel to “No Meat Required”—I do think of them as very entwined. One is sort of all of my political ideas about why these things are meaningful, and the other is all of my personal ideas about why they're meaningful.

“On Eating” will have quite enough political stuff for the people who want it, but it's mostly driven by a personal story and a personal narrative. And the way in which I have tried to follow not just my appetite, but also my curiosity toward places that people would prefer not to think about. For me, thinking about them has been inescapable; it's impossible for me not to.

If folks come away from “On Eating” being like, “I would like to eat a new mushroom,” or “I would like to try a new bean,” I’d like to think it would have something to do with the people in the book. One thing I wrote in “No Meat Required” that I think about a lot, and that people bring up to me a lot, is that our appetites are rooted in nostalgia, and our personal stories are very influential in terms of how we eat.

And so I think it's about trying to enact that in the book, and trying to make it as engaging as possible. And also bringing in other things that aren't necessarily about food, in terms of domesticity and gender, and grief, and all these things. The ways we desire food and the way our appetites are formed—these things are so connected and rooted to the way we've lived our lives. Hopefully, it’s aiming at the heart, rather than the stomach. And I do think “On Eating" is aiming at the heart, certainly more than “No Meat Required,” which is probably actually aiming at the brain. The hope is that it will successfully aim at both.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.