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Tell Me How You Eat

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

By: Amber Husain
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

If you are what you eat, what does that make you? Virtuous? Cool? Immortal? Or deviant, pitiful, ill? Is it useful to make these judgments? Do they help us improve our lives?

In a world where it feels as though the value of your life can be gauged by the goodness in your dinner, it is possible, even easy, to lose the will to live. This became particularly obvious to writer Amber Husain when suddenly, despite almost thirty years of practice, it seemed she had forgotten how to eat.

Medical wisdom tries to fix the problem non-eater by teaching them the rules of Good Diet. But what if the problem is precisely the narrowing of life to questions of personal goodness? Suspecting there might be more to her stand-off with food than matters of identity and diet, Husain embarked on an enquiry into the special role of eating in our relationship with the world.

Combining a personal account of modern eating-disorder treatments, from the disturbing to the sublime, with a sprawling collective history of eating in hard times, Tell Me How You Eat unearths the astonishing effect of how we feed ourselves and others, not just on who we are, but on how we perceive our own political power. In doing so, it marks a bold and inspiring confrontation with our very understanding of food.

© Amber Husain 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critic Reviews

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 REQUIRED)
A 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 Tandoh)
Tell Me How You Eat rewrites all received narratives of disordered eating, evading the binary of pathology entirely. Beautiful, confronting, and invigorating (Asa Seresin)
Hyperintelligent... 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 MINE)
Enviably 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 LIBERATION)
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