The From the Desk Index
A guide to navigating this newsletter.
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy—my essays on subjects in food culture, politics, media, and more—come out on Mondays.
Paid subscribers receive Friday bonus posts, including: From the Desk Recommends…, collections of links, as well as giveaways and playlists, on the first Friday of each month; The Monthly Menu, chronicling my eating and cooking, on the second Friday; and take part in The Desk Book Club discussions on the third Friday (with Zoom discussions to follow). On Monday afternoons, we have the Weekly Salon in the chat.
Monthly, I run The Desk Salon Series, where I invite writers, editors, and other culture workers for an hour-long discussion that is recorded and transcribed. Paid subscribers have free access to the live conversations as well as the recordings.
Paid subscribers also have access to commenting and The Desk Cookbook, an ongoing collection of pantry-driven, plant-based recipes.
Personal
On Myself
Who even is Alicia Kennedy?
On Flavor
and questions of identity.
On Long Island
Or, on being a writer from a scorned place.
On Grief
and its metamorphoses.
On Marriage
and why I'm engaged.
Popular
On Martha
Stewart in the cultural imaginary.
Both Joyful and Killjoy
Everything is bad and good, all at once, and we have to navigate this together.
On Martinis
Six years of one chic drink to rule them all.
On Selling a Lifestyle
The food content ouroboros.
On Online
A meta note to start 2021.
On Brothers
and 'The Bear.'
The Culinary Tourism Series
On Culinary Tourism
The first lecture in the class I'm teaching this semester.
On Food Destinations
The construction of desire.
On Acceptance
Thinking through traveling via flavor.
On Gloss
Can travel magazines tell the truth of a place?
On Perception
Puerto Rico, from without and within.
A Puerto Rico Itinerary
Where I took my Culinary Tourism students during their week here.
On Place📍
Seeing somewhere as home versus destination.
On Cookbooks As Culinary Tourism
What can we learn from them?
A Culinary Tourism Bibliography 📚
Everything we read in class, as well as what we didn’t.
The “Food Is Political” Series
What Could ‘Food Is Political’ Mean?
The start of a 4-week series on food politics.
A Foundation for Food Politics
Why I return to these three books again and again.
On U.S. Cuisine
All-American food is corporate food.
On Mixing the Personal and Political in Food Writing
A conversation with 'National Dish' author Anya von Bremzen.
Of Recipes & Resistance
Thinking through the question of "what is a leftist recipe?"
On Women’s Work
A personal note, and a reading list.
No Meat Required Publishing Series
On Publishing a Book
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is out on August 15, 2023.
On Blurbs
I’m obsessed with my book’s blurbs—but do they mean anything?
On Book Design
Or, specifically the design of my book.
Interludes
My dispatches from the road.
Bloomington
No Meat Required Tour Part 1
No Meat Required Tour Part 2
Maps
Google Maps lists of recommendations from trusted sources in cities I’ve visited during the last few years. My specific New York City guides are in the works.
Montreal
Quebec City
San Juan
The Culinary Tourism Trip to Puerto Rico
Philadelphia
Atlanta
The Desk Cookbook
Recipes are for paid subscribers only. This also includes pantry guidance and tool recommendations. Consider it a never-ending cookbook.
Dang-- I need to learn how to do this with my newsletters. It changes the experience in a really interesting way.
This is a cool idea - and also helpful to reader and writer - well done!