Issue 95: The Reading Life of... Alicia Kennedy

Substack's favorite food culture writer tells us how she reads

My mother is a chemical engineer that was trained to work in nuclear power plants. She valued her career and treated cooking as the site of political fallout. She saw in every pot stirred a woman's subjugation; in every meal served, a feminist battle lost. She bequeathed me her politics and not many of her recipes. It was 2009 when I arrived in Memphis — a sprawling testament to American contradictions, where food access divides neighborhoods as surely as railroad tracks once did. Here, in a city where abundance and scarcity share zip codes, I finally learned to chop an onion.

Today I will be introducing you to

Alicia Kennedy

— a Substack mega-star whose insightful writing on the intersection of food culture, media and politics has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, New York Magazine and basically any place on the internet that showcases original, intelligent writing. I follow Alicia’s work for very personal reasons, her writing recognizes something of my own fragmented inheritance: the ta…