Alicia Kennedy Has Thoughts on the Martini

Alicia Kennedy is always reading, always researching, and always eating kimchi straight from the jar before chasing it with a Girl Scout cookie. As she tells me, it’s “a very private-feeling behavior that one probably shouldn’t share with others.”

But sharing is what Kennedy’s built an entire career upon. As the author of No Meat Required and the voice behind the long-running newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, she spends most of her time interrogating food as culture, identity, and power. In her recently published memoir, On Eating, that same sharp lens becomes a mirror. From downing lamb as a kid on Long Island to savoring Puerto Rico’s vegetarian fare, the deeply personal work uses female appetite as a way to explore grief, control, desire, and the illusion of “right” choices on and off the plate. 

Where No Meat Required harnessed the personal to illuminate the cultural, On Eating reverses the equation, tapping critique to make sense of her own experiences. With candor and lyricism, Kennedy deftly invites readers into her fractured ethnic identity, her grief over the loss of her brother, and the ways women are rarely allowed to openly hunger for things. Through it all, she’s also funny as hell. I snorted coffee out my nose as I read Kennedy’s direct address to the non-food-obsessed among us: “These are the people to whom I have nothing to say.”

Here, she tells me about her biggest fears in putting the book into the world, the challenges and rewards of writing from a place of vulnerability, and her strongly held opinions on the martini.