Award-winning author Roxane Gay hosts this book club, where we read books by underrepresented American writers, talk about those books, and, when we’re lucky, talk to the writers of those books.
Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live - Hardcover by Amber Husain
In her second book *Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh*, Amber Husain writes about John Berger’s 1979 book *Pig Earth*, a work of fiction that he wrote after spending time living in a peasant community in France. Berger, notes Husain, chronicles the story of a pig who has been fed “like family” until the day he is slaughtered. That visceral moment of slaughter details the pig’s transition from living being to meat that will supply the family with food: “One moment his head is attached to a recently animate being, the next it is a thing – a manufactured theatrical prop,” writes Husain.
Husain connects the visual culture of meat in western theater, using examples such as Euripides’ tragic drama *The Bakkhai*, to peasant life in France and emphasizes that those connections forged by both love and survival: the Greeks through an act of revenge, and the peasants through feeding an “unwieldy economic system.” Those acts, notes Husain, are manifestations of genuine human urges and desires but also feed broader social and cultural patterns of pain, manipulation, and misuse:
“Indeed, with the intensification of capitalist production comes the intensification of both human and animal exploitation. The early needs of industry led to the mass displacement of peasants; later the needs of industrial agriculture led to the mass expropriation of their land, cheap labour, and food. The present agricultural order, equally driven by growth, must find ever more technologised ways to destroy the planet, human wellbeing, and animal life…Modern capitalism’s separation of life from nonhuman nature, recruiting animal and land into the process of profit-driven manufacture, has culminated in a fossil-fuel-dependent, land-hungry, chemically fertilised frenzy of animal cruelty, organised by a corporate class with relatively little motive to care.”
*Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live,* Amber Husain’s third book, carries echoes of the existential thrust of her first book *Replace Me* about human replaceability in the workforce and how that has filtered into our relationships and personal lives. But this new book also extends *Meat Love*’s meditation on the flesh and the culture that informs it. *In Tell Me How You Eat,* however, Husain’s focus is less on our practices of eating animal flesh and more on humans and our broader relationship with food. In five distinct chapters addressing the ways in which we do and do not eat, Husain examines not how food shapes our bodies but more how our relationship with food may be a reflection of how we see and understand our surroundings.
Husain’s examination of the politics of food is both meticulous and comprehensive: her chapters explore a wide range of examples. From a World War II starvation experiment to analyses of veganism and vegetarianism; from the decadence and excess of Rome to early modern stories about witchcraft and food; from her own experience with an eating disorder to the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, Husain considers how our relationship with food both challenges and articulates our relationship with the world.
Tell Me How You Eat is an evocative and deeply researched book that asks us to examine the narratives we cling to and the ways in which we have weaponized food and it has been weaponized against us, and it asks us to consider what a collective right to food looks like through the ethics of pleasure and care rather than systemic mechanisms of violence and deprivation. I’m looking forward to discussing this excellent book with you throughout the month of March. We will be in conversation with Amber on March 21 at 4 p.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. You can register here.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
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Explore compelling sapphic fiction and memoirs that center queer women’s voices and experiences. From heartfelt romances to powerful personal stories, this club brings readers together around books that inspire connection and conversation.
