“When you were growing up,” the docent at the Vanderbilt Museum in Centerport said to me, “Patchogue was dead.” I’m quite aware: I’ve written about the strange resurrection of my hometown for Still Alive (2023) and Hazlitt (2018).

Now I’m sitting here writing from the cool coffee shop writing you the Digest, and a dude has walked in with Prada sunglasses, a Carhartt beanie, and AirPod Maxes. The spot down the block has been transformed from a workaday brewery into a fine dining restaurant. This, indeed, isn’t the place I grew up.

On Tuesday, I had a conversation with Jerusha Klemper of FoodPrint at Archestratus. It was really fun and hearing from more folks who attended has been really gratifying. I loved this recap TikTok from TonyTastes, whose videos I’d already been enjoying when they were hitting my FYP.

And onward to the Digest of it all: Quite a few of my 2024 essays have cracked my overall top posts, including a couple that I published just this past month, which tells me I’m giving folks my best.

I’m thinking already about the essays I’ll be returning with after Labor Day: hurricane pieces I wrote after Fiona in 2021 that went unpublished but feel more urgent now as the world is getting hotter each day; considerations of food-as-luxury when cost of living is making necessities prohibitively expensive; and re-visitations of some of my earliest food writing, much of which I’ve had to revisit to write On Eating. But I’m also excited to give folks a chance to catch up.

Next month—when I’m ostensibly off in order to finish my first draft of my next book!—I’ll be sending out on Mondays four more comprehensive digests:

The first one will be free; the rest will have a paywall. I’ll repeat this in December, another off month, with the full year, to once again allow for a catch-up or a reference. Indeed, my reading lists will serve as my gift guides. I don’t want to tell you to buy anything but books—my promise.

I invite folks to join the fun for the Book Club—2025 selections just announced—our weekly salons, which will resume in September; and general conversation among a really brilliant cohort of folks who are equally invested in good eating, equitable and sustainable food systems, and culture more broadly.

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“‘Business culture becomes human culture’—this is what I was thinking about when everyone was suddenly referring to the change of seasons by financial quarters. My Q1 photo dump… It’s what I’m always thinking about when people are told to continue to “slay” by promoting terrible vegan cheeses or pans that are going to end up in the garbage. At least they’re getting their bag! It’s what I’m thinking about when people thank a brand for inviting them to dinner. Corporations are people in this land, after all.”

Monthly roundup of recommendations for reading, watching, and listening.

“No one has broken out in the wake of his death as the new standard-bearer of the food-travel genre, but it’s not for lack of trying.”

Monthly roundup of eating out, cooking, and recipe links for vegetarian lifestyle inspiration.

“One of the many unfair aspects of losing a sibling is that their habits get solidified as theirs: No longer a shared quirk but a remnant, a haunting.”

I am excited to announce the books I’ve selected for 2025, a mix of fiction, memoir, and food studies, and the schedule for when we will read them.

“Information didn’t flow as fast then. This was how connections were forged: over years, over mediums, through begging my mom for trips to Borders, through the spending of every dollar earned on magazines and CDs.”

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.

Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir by Lola Milholland

From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.