Tell Me How You Eat

In Tell Me How You Eat, Amber Husain’s witty, unsparing voice wraps her story around those of historic and contemporary figures in surprising and rich ways. The book reframes the way we eat not just as an embrace or refusal of the world, but as a plea for a better one – Alicia Kennedy, author of NO MEAT REQUIREDA deeply researched and original exploration of the nature of our appetites. Tell Me How You Eat is refreshingly thoughtful on the question not just of what we eat, but the under-explored how. Connecting matters of desire with literature, cultural history and social change, Husain shows us that eating is a personal and a political act and – sometimes – even radical. – Ruby TandohTell Me How You Eat rewrites all received narratives of disordered eating, evading the binary of pathology entirely. Beautiful, confronting, and invigorating – Asa SeresinHyperintelligent… omnivorous, Tell Me How You Eat shows that food is more than fuel. Husain’s captivating treatise galvanizes as much as it illuminates, making you hunger for true nourishment from a better world. – Alexandra Kleeman author of YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINEEnviably elegant, stunningly profound and politically rousing, Tell Me How You Eat offers us a way of thinking about eating that eschews individualism, moralism, and health all at once. Unforgettable. – Sophie Lewis author of ABOLISH THE FAMILY: A MANIFESTO FOR CARE AND LIBERATIONA defiant and original inquiry, written with an intelligence as inviting as it is uncompromising. Husain’s insistence that every person who eats (or doesn’t) should be recognized as a complex and dignified individual is indeed revolutionary. – Charlotte Shane, author of AN HONEST WOMANA deeply personal and political search for a reason to eat that takes readers on an enlightening and radicalising ride through historical and contemporary examples, from Eleanor Marx to the Black Panthers to the Right to Food Movement. A vital and compelling investigation of eating – and a profoundly original analysis of some people’s inability to do so. – Rebecca May Johnson, author of SMALL FIRESWe don’t know how to eat anymore. Maybe we never knew, but now we certainly know that we don’t know. Must we rely on medications to save us, curbing our confusion about appetite or its absence? Amber Husain has other ideas, even an entirely other sensibility. One that put us back in our body. We need this book. – Jamieson WebsterWhat a treat it is to read and be so compelled to turn the page. It’s a true rarity to so deftly combine the personal and political, traverse large scale and small, and in doing so sate the appetite of the reader so completely. This is going to be a book I turn to for reference and inspiration for a very long time. – Lottie Hazell, author of Piglet

Amber Husain is the author of Replace Me (2021) and Meat Love (2023). Her essays have been published in Granta, New Left Review, The White Review, The Believer, Bookforum LA Review of Books and New York Times Magazine. She has a PhD in art history from UCL and teaches critical and creative writing.