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/   

To get 30% off the list price, use the code NYUP30 at checkout.

 

The members of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program join to stand in solidarity with those in ​the campus community who are members of minority groups targeted by recent acts of bias, hateful speech and images on our campus. As a program whose central concern is to understand and combat systemic forces that support forms of social injustice, we understand the damage that these acts can cause both to the community we build and sustain together and to the individuals who call it home​. We condemn language and images that dehumanize others and ​that suggest or celebrate racial, sexual, or homophobic violence. We believe that such violent, intimidating, or demeaning language and images are fundamentally incompatible with the values of the SMCM community, and we hope that those responsible will come to realize that their visual and literal rhetoric is hurtful.

We offer this statement with particular concern and support for students and college employees whose identities and affiliations place them as targets for such expressions and acts. We commit ourselves to taking responsibility for our community’s actions, creating safe and constructive environments for engagement, and we look forward to collaborating to address these issues and move the college forward.

Karen Anderson
Joanna Bartow
Betul Basaran
Diana Boros
Adriana Brodsky
Anne Marie Brady
Beth Charlebois
Claire Chen
Andrew Cognard-Black
Jennifer Cognard-Black
Renee Dennison
Angela Draheim
Samantha Elliot
David Ellsworth
Barrett Emerick
Ruth Feingold
Iris Ford
Katie Gantz
David Groupe
Amy Henderson
Rachel Honig
Lindsay Jamieson
Angela Johnson
Andy Koch
Joanne Klein
Emek Kose
Joe Lucchesi
Pamela Mann
Scott Mirabile
Charles Musgrove
Carrie Patterson
Mark Rhoda
Gail Savage
Sahar Shafqat
Amy Steiger
Jennifer Tickle
Katharina von Kellenbach
Libby Williams
Christine Wooley