Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live by Husain, Amber
Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live by Husain, Amber

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live

Bustle's Most Anticipated An intimate and expansive exploration of how and why we eat, and the relationship...
$48.00 USD
$91.99 USD
$48.00 USD
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Author: Amber Husain
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $48.00
Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live by Husain, Amber

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live

$91.99 $48.00
Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live by Husain, Amber

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live

$91.99 $48.00
Author: Amber Husain
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description
Bustle's Most Anticipated

An intimate and expansive exploration of how and why we eat, and the relationship between food and empowerment, through the historic feasts and fasts of radicals and tyrants.

Inspired by writer Amber Husain's unorthodox route to healing from anorexia, Tell Me How You Eat examines not just how society views the refusal to eat, but how we understand the meaning and power of food. Suspecting that the standard courses of treatment--as disempowering as they are ineffective--might in fact be part of the underlying problem, Husain took part in an experimental psylocibin treatment study. Where the medical model typically tries to fix the difficult non-eater, this trial opened her mind to the idea that there might be more to fix beyond the self--that our relationship with food might be closely entwined with our outlook on the world.

Through five chapters taking in hunger, restriction, gorging, feeding, and the making of political demands, Husain turns away from thinking about how people are shaped by food to think instead about how food can inspire people to reshape the world. Each chapter searches for reasons to eat and live through histories ranging from pus-drinking medieval nuns to Black Panther breakfast programs; from 1950s lesbian dinner parties to modern-day Gazan food bloggers.

In a culture that insists "you are what you eat," and makes every bite a fraught moral choice, Husain argues that we will only feel truly nourished when we can eat in the spirit of restoring a collective right to food, long eroded over centuries of systems and narratives that have normalized deprivation.

Author: Amber Husain
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 02/24/2026
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781668060315


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 12/01/2025
Library Journal 01/01/2026 pg. 67
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author
Amber Husain is a writer based in South London, UK. She is the author of Tell Me How You Eat, Meat Love, and Replace Me. Her essays on politics, literature, and art have been published in Granta, The New York Times, Baffler, and more. She has a PhD from UCL in the history of art and mind-body medicine in late-20th-century Britain. She teaches history of art, creative writing, and criticism. Visit AmberHusain.com for more information.
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