It’s a newsletter launched in March 2020 that looks at food as an essential aspect of culture (like music, art, literature, or film) as well as labor, sustenance, craft, and business. The work consists of essays, interviews, media criticism, and blogs.

Alicia Kennedy (me) is a bestselling author and an essayist (the NYT once emailed me to fact-check this as my profession and I said “sure that works”).

Since 2024, there has also been a book club focused on food-related fiction and nonfiction, ranging from translated novels to academic studies. It’s a space of open conversation to make thinking about food beyond consumption accessible.

In 2025, I launched the Salon Series—a live podcast in which we talk to culture workers about their work and making a living (or not) through it. Because I’ve spent so much time in San Juan, PR, but am used to an NYC number of cultural events, I launched this to make writer events available virtually to anyone around the world.

In 2026, I expanded the Desk Universe by launching Tomato Tomato, a digital food magazine featuring writers from around the world. It includes long-form reportage, dreamy essays, dispatches from Bulgarian mountains and Peruvian tabernas, fiction, and glossaries for specific menu-reading occasions. “The Review” is its new vertical for irregular book and bottle reviews, reports from food happenings, and more. 

Tomato Tomato is also the name of the Discord where readers can congregate, converse, and share on everything from the latest news to new movies to weird canapés they were served at a fancy event.

“On Luxury,” August 17, 2020
“Luxury in food and beverage works on those two levels: something prized for its fleetingness, others for their cost. Both levels are present in, say, a truffle or chanterelles. These things emerge from the earth, and that emergence is generally respected. Such cases in food, where industrialization and efficiency have been overvalued and globally enforced, are rare specimens themselves.”

“On Lionfish,” October 4, 2021
“I ate a little piece, felt sad in the soul, and simply slurped up a bit of the leche de tigre. I want to accommodate the world; I want to actively eat what needs to be eaten to maintain equilibrium in the ocean… but it’s strange and hard to do so after years without. I still feel very strongly that it’s violent while understanding why others would not feel that way. I understood why I rationally thought it made sense to eat the fish; I still could not eat it. ‘You can eat a whole piece,’ my friend said, with a light tone of mockery. ‘I can’t,’ I replied, frowning at my plate, then mumbling, ‘It was alive.’”

“On Selling a Lifestyle,” September 12, 2022
“I accept more that my presence in the digital space, which was for so long where I felt more free to be myself than in the ‘real world,’ is now a representation of what I seek to represent. I’m there somewhere, under the layers, shouting about eating more vegetables. My presence is a commercial for my brain.”

“On Culinary Tourism,” January 30, 2023
“His Italy myth doesn't match reality, manifesting most poignantly in his inability to order what he has grown up believing to be Italian food and being mocked by his companions. Our interactions in travel with food can often be the most frustrating as well as the most telling.”

“Both Joyful and Killjoy,” January 1, 2024
“The grief, my burnout, the need for life to go on despite everything culminated in a weeklong illness through which I took necessary meetings that would allow me to keep working: I was sick in bed, ice on my sinus cavities to keep the swelling down, taking the meetings I’d long dreamed to take while feeling my brother’s absence more acutely and watching a genocide unfold that I was powerless against—I signed letters; I re-committed to boycotts; I shared the work of journalists on the ground. It was a disorienting time. It was, at a very heightened state, exactly everything that life is, that the world is, all at once. The things we want most; the things we fear most: happening simultaneously.”

“On Food Media,” May 12, 2025
“Food is feminized in the home, made masculine in the workplace, but in both cases, it is not broadly thought to be pursued for intellectual reasons. The visceral nature of eating means that it can never be serious in the common imagination, and this might be key to mainstream food media’s anti-intellectualism: too necessary, too everyday. The writing, thus, isn’t finding its foundation in behavioral studies, the labor conditions of the global agriculture’s 1.3 billion workers, or climate change reporting: It’s just vibes and appetites, like a baby. I think this is why people working in other cultural spheres think they can dip in, dip out of the subject.”