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 — 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 taste memories that cross oceans, the choices that echo through communities, the small choices that make us who we are.
We talk about books today, about how reading shapes a way of seeing. In her careful compositions, I find a map for navigating the space between what we consume and who we become. I hope you enjoy this conversation!
Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal life? I’m a writer, so reading is kind of a way of life: as research, as pleasure, as inspiration. I’ve also written books now, so I have a more technical and capitalist perspective on them, too. They’re so difficult to write and complicated to put into the world that it’s a wonder there are so many of them.
PKG: Alicia’s first book is No Meat Required — a bestselling culinary and cultural history of plant-based eating in the United States that delves into the subcultures and politics that have defined the alternative food movement. Her next book is On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, a memoir of food and place, and is forthcoming from Hachette Books.
On an average week, how much do you read and when? I’ve never timed myself, but if I’m working on a piece that requires research, it’ll be 2-3 hours per workday of reading. On the weekend, I focus on reading for pleasure, and will spend about 3-5 hours with a book or a combination of books and magazines.
What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years? I lost a taste for straight-up fiction in my late twenties that I’ve been re-acquiring. I replaced fiction with autofiction and literary criticism-meets-memoir and anything published by Semiotext(e).
PKG: Fellow Semiotext(e) fiend here. At some point we should talk about identifying our favorite publishers. If these guys are not already on your radar, take note!
What's a reading ritual or habit you've developed that's unique to you? I’m not sure anything about how I read is unique to me, but I do unabashedly underline in felt-tip pen.
How do you keep track of what you want to read? There’s no system for me: either I have to read it for work, or it calls to me. I keep picking up and putting down the fifth book in the Knausgaard My Struggle series. I wish I could just finish it.
Where do you get ideas about what to read? Magazines, other writers, often I am interested in a press specifically and a description will catch my eye. I’m one of the maybe few people who reads based on reviews, but there are critics whose taste I trust, and usually their work is in BookForum.
PKG: I really want us to double-click on this answer! I find “proper” book reviews by critics too revealing and even though I do like to read them, I mostly do so AFTER I have read a book myself.
How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner? Always by mood when reading for pleasure. A lot of my life is very structured, so here I keep it totally loose. That’s why I haven’t finished My Struggle.
When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favor of reading? Being social has never been high on my list of priorities, so I suppose it’s that! But reading being part of my work helps excuse the amount of time I spend with books.
Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more? Make time for it. Block social media, put your phone in another room, and set a timer until it comes naturally.
What are you reading now and what is one book that you find yourself recommending to people over and over and over again? Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand, who is a reader’s writer. Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe was the last book that changed me. Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha are two books I return to over and over, but I’d only recommend them to specific people.
PKG: Thank you so much, Alicia! And good luck culling your bookshelves in preparation for your move back to NYC. 🤓📚😬
Some questions for you:
Which of Alicia’s tips and ideas resonated the most with you?
Do you guys read based on reviews? Which reviewers do you like and trust?
Whose reading life do you think I should inquire about next?
I completely agree with her recommendation to put the phone in another room. I turn off the ringer on my phone, turn off the computer, play some soft jazz in the background, and just immerse myself in the words.
I never read based on reviews. In fact, I rarely ever read reviews.
I am not famous and haven't published a single book, but if you are ever in need of someone to interview, I offer myself as tribute.
Petya, thank you so much for this generous interview and engagement with my work!!! You really get it and I hope to read or chat more about your relationship to food. I have actually read a bit about food in Bulgaria in my research of recipes under various political-economic conditions!