Books in Conversation
Our summer book club is around the corner!
Greetings Gorgeous,
For May/June/July, we’ve been reading Alicia Kennedy’s On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites. Books, like most people, are not meant to exist in isolation and this brilliant book is no exception. As I make my way through I’ve also found myself revisiting M. F. K. Fisher’s translation of The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and the Venezuelan classic Mi Cocina, a la manera de Caracas by Armando Scannone. Where the latter is a cookbook in the classic sense, the former is a very old-school French treatise on all things edible and gustatory. One book connects me to my family home that I’ve never known, Caracas, while the other activates the part of my brain that holds Ms. Frizzle, Bill Nye and Plato all in equal degrees of esteem. Adding Kennedy to the mix with Fisher’s translation and Scannone’s recipes has led to a wonderful conversation in my mind where the dinner spread if quite fabulous.
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Just like the author’s palate On Eating is an expansive text. In writing about food Alicia is writing about life, which makes sense as there is no life without nourishment. There is also no nourishment without this planet, our collective home. Home is a core thread woven throughout Alicia’s writing, both in this book and in her stellar newsletter. There’s the home of the mind; the home as a domestic system where public and private contestations play out across negotiations of labor, belonging, and lineage; a home lost through migration and found again through reclamation; all leading back to the home we all share and how our need to be fed does not have to cost us the planet. All of that plus more is dexterously woven throughout a work that is equal parts a love letter to past selves, to food and drink, Patchogue, Puerto Rico, and beyond.
On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites is the perfect summer read. What I most admire about Alicia’s writing is the skill with which she crafts the personal and dispatches it to the reader in a way that makes one sense the world anew from both within and outside of the self, much like an unforgettable meal.
I’m excited to gather with you next month to savor the book again and guess what — we’ll be joined live by the author herself!
Zoom link with July meeting date and time below.
Happy Reading!
All roads lead to beauty.