The Joyful, Punk World of Plant-Based Eating

In 2011, the Long Island–born writer Alicia Kennedy went vegan. By the following year, she was running a vegan bakery; four more years, and she was working as a freelance food journalist, covering her beat from an explicitly meatless perspective. Kennedy is no longer vegan—she eats oysters, as well as local dairy and eggs—but she still writes about life without meat. Her newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, was one of Substack’s early hits. It is, essentially, a one-woman magazine that mixes cultural criticism, food writing, and food-world interviews with personal meditations, recommendations, and recipes that Kennedy develops in her home kitchen in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she moved in 2019. Her catholic, roving approach to writing—wide-ranging interests, vivid sensory descriptions, and a briskly explanatory style—is a manifestation of not just her palpable curiosity but also her focus on how to live a rich, enjoyable, and ethical life.

Kennedy’s first book, , is more streamlined than her newsletter, though still plainly the work of a mind that needs to rove. It is a tour through meatless eating in the United States, starting with Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 hit, , which made the case for vegetarianism as a solution to global hunger, and ending with contemporary debates over lab-grown meat of the emissions causing global warming. Eating it regularly, Kennedy argues, is unsustainable. Yet for many in the United States, meat has long represented security and prosperity; in the 1920s, Republicans promised voters “a chicken for every pot.” When Kennedy quit eating animals, she immediately started searching for “new way[s] to create abundance” in the kitchen. Now, she writes, “this has become my life’s purpose: showing people life without meat is still a beautiful life, a filling life, a satisfying life.” achieves that goal.