Published February 2026 via Washington Square Press
★★★
Struggling to find the key to recovering from anorexia, Husain set about looking at some of the meaning that has historically been ascribed to food: food as power, food as rebellion, starvation as power, starvation as rebellion.
I was and still am rather unsure of what to make of the book. Husain traces various political movements (women's suffrage, etc.) and the weaponization of food—whether something to be forced upon somebody (e.g., in response a hunger strike) or withheld (e.g., Israel's starvation tactics in Gaza). It's interesting material, but while the book description says "Each chapter searches for reasons to eat and live", I wondered whether at times Husain was looking less for reasons to eat than for justification for not eating (not eating enough to sustain life, not eating animal products).
There's a depth of curiosity and research here that I appreciate, and Husain is for the most part careful about what details she shares about her illness (I wish more authors writing about eating disorders were so circumspect). I think I ended up not being quite the right reader for this book—the connections were not entirely there for me, though I suspect that some of that is at that some point I lost track of the magic-mushroom context. This may be something to come back to at a future point in time; therapy with substances usually associated with recreational use has been cropping up more often in my reading (e.g., Amy Griffin's The Tell), and I'll have to keep an eye out for more.
Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.
