Good Eats features a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, chefs, farmers, activists, educators, and journalists, inviting readers to think about what it means to eat according to individual and collective values. These essays are not lectures about what people should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.
A wide array of themes, topics, and perspectives inform the selections within Good Eats, contributing to an enhanced understanding of how we humans eat as individuals and in groups. From factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and how gender and sexuality affect eating practices and embodiment, the topics featured in this collection describe the wider context of sustenance and ethical choices.
Good Eats encourages readers to become more mindful of what and how they eat—and to consider the larger systems and cultures that shape that eating. These essays turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we humans live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.
Jennifer Cognard-Black’s own essay within the collection, “My Body, Our Body, Her Body,” grapples with the ethics involved in raising another human being–particularly one who is female-identified–and asks what it means not just to feed a child as they grow, but to manage and control what they eat. In this essay, Jennifer also writes for the first time about an eating disorder that she’s had since she was sixteen, and her own daughter, Katharine Cognard-Black, provides an “Afterword” to this piece.
Particularly exciting is that Will Becker, a 2020 alum, has also published a piece in Good Eats called “Men & Meat.” Will’s essay examines how meat is masculinized in the U.S. and the effects of this masculinization upon the writer himself, especially since Will identifies as queer.
Copies of Good Eats are available here: https://nyupress.org/9781479821778/good-eats/
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