“Appetite is Kennedy’s driving force and, I think, the most useful concept this book offers to anyone trying to think about how we know what we know and why it matters. Alicia describes it as the hunger that’s not hunger but a greedy voraciousness, and I love how active and momentous that feels. It is restless. It starts in the gut but does not stay there. It is specific to your body and your history and your grief and the particular moment you are living through. And crucially, it is NOT the opposite of knowledge.”

“Alicia Kennedy has become a widely read food writer in part because of the realism in her work. She takes the everyday needs of a kitchen and the common concerns of diet and choice as her basis. What to eat, how to eat, what considerations to take into account, where those choices come from. From those common topics, she crafts writing that shares how the politics and culture of modern life are the politics and culture of the food system.”

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.

Where her first book, “No Meat Required,” examined vegetarian and vegan foodways in the United States, she takes a more intimate and introspective approach in “On Eating,” with a focus on her appetites and how they’ve shaped her life, both personally and professionally.