‘We Need to Rethink What Healthy Means’

Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence andrea bennett ECW Press (2024) In their new essay collection about cooking and eating, andrea bennett offers an incisive, necessary response to the many questions about food that don’t often receive rigorous attention in contemporary food writing. The essays, which blend memoir with journalism, offer a meditative, lived-in antidote to the aspirational yet inaccessible-for-many appeal of mainstream food and restaurant writing. Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners Behold! The Tyee’s 2023 Impact Report Our annual report back to our readers is hot off the presses.

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, where they are a talented baker and cook. It also takes us back to their childhood in Hamilton, Ontario, where their father would engage in a Saturday morning ritual of making them baked beans on toast. The essays respond to critical questions about the role of such rituals in the production of sustenance, pleasure and family.

Elsewhere in the book, bennett considers what it means to make a living working in a kitchen of a restaurant whose menu items its workers can’t afford. And they offer needed reflections on what we can all do to make our food systems kinder, more ethical and inclusive of everybod.