Get ready to EAT IT: A new anthology about women and food

 

Like most women, my relationship with food is complex, sometimes delightful, and often a little fucked-up. It fuels my soul and makes me strong, but it also makes me feel ridiculously anxious and often, quite guilty. There are rituals related to food preparation that I find creative and inspiring, and in other ways find totally frustrating. And my ability/inability to cook sometimes feels irrefutably entwined with my ability to be a good wife, a good future mother, a good caregiver to family and friends, a good whatever-society-thinks-I-should-be-at-this-present-time – as silly and as irrational as that might seem. These concerns are real. They exist. I can’t shake ’em.

Brianna Goldberg and Nicole Baute get this.  During an exchange of emails a couple of years ago, the two writers discovered that they had a common preoccupation with the “tensions between women and food.” They decided to put together an anthology of pieces by talented women exploring these ideas and preoccupations. It’s called EAT IT: Sex, Food and Women’s Writing.

Amid the sea of cutesy cookbooks that float atop the sea of foodie culture, EAT IT is super refreshing: it’s a thoughtful, inventive and often hilarious-sounding exploration of some weighty topics.  Here’s some of the writers and explorations on the table:

Writer/comedian Rebecca Kohler explains how to order sexually suggestive items from her cheeky butcher (“One sausage? What are you going to do with ONE sausage?”);

Julia Kilpatrick ruminates on the roles of hunter and prey as she stalks and field-dresses a baby deer;

Comedian Evany Rosen takes us through “A Sexy Yom Kippur Slimdown”;

Writer Amy Jones talks emotional eating in a digital age;

Maya Reid ruminates on being single in a Chinese restaurant that serves animal penis.

Trish Hennessy unpacks what feminists ate through history, from suffragette bathtub gin to GOOP cheeseboards (oh, Gwyneth)

EAT IT will be on sale at Canzine this Sunday! You can pick it up at the Feathertale Books table (the publisher.) It is $15, which is an absolute steal.

You can also pre-order this lovely book through Feathertale Books‘ online store.

AND you can come pick up a copy in person at the launch on Tuesday, October 22 in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, starting at 8pm. There will also be performances/readings by some of the book’s contributors, including Jessica Westhead, Sara Hennessey and Samantha Mehra.