Amber Husain: On the Politics and Power of Food
In this interview, author Amber Husain discusses how participating in a clinical trial helped inspire her new book, Tell Me How You Eat.
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, and follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Amber discusses how participating in a clinical trial helped inspire her new book, Tell Me How You Eat, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Amber Husain
Literary agent: Alison Lewis at Frances Goldin
Book title: Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live
Publisher: Atria Books
Release date: February 24, 2026
Genre/category: Autobiography/Literary Essay/Social Science
Previous titles: Replace Me (2021); Meat Love (2023)
Elevator pitch: A radical reappraisal of the importance of food and eating to our health, our love of life, and our political horizons, revisiting the stories of great and terrible figures via their stomachs.
What prompted you to write this book?
This is the book I wish I had read before several frightening years of finding it very difficult to eat. It was prompted, in part, by my experience on a pioneering clinical trial where I was fed large doses of magic mushrooms as a potential anorexia treatment. The thoughts and insights I had while doing that sparked a long period of investigation into how different ways of eating might transform the way a person sees the world, and that was a process I came to find both healing and politically empowering. This is sadly not the typical outcome of eating disorder treatments, or of our food discourse in general, which are very much focused on the individual—on who you are rather than how you see the world—so it felt urgent to put my discoveries into writing.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Once I had the initial impulse to write about “food, power, and the will to live”, the shape of the book came to me almost fully formed. But it still took several months to work up a full proposal, then a year to write the manuscript, and another year until publication. The central idea has stayed solid the whole time, but I did find myself becoming more stylistically imaginative as I was moved by the subject matter itself. The book is full of poets, cooks, and other inspired people whose ways of making food and life feel irresistible really informed the ways I experimented with telling the story (and making a point!).
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I am surprised by how long the whole process can take! But I think it’s been helpful, in many ways, to work with a publisher that uses long lead times. It’s given me a chance to make sure the ideas in the book really stand the test of sitting still with them, and to see that I’m just as excited by what’s in the book as I was when it first came to me.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I was surprised by how much work can be involved in articulating what you think you already “know.” So much so that it feels completely new by the time you’ve got it right on the page. Like you’ve been staring at something head on and then suddenly it smacks you on the butt.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
A totally new way of thinking about eating—one that gives them hope in challenging times and helps them stay in love with life. But also, pleasure, fun, and a chance to laugh at themselves.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Write about something you are really, really desperate to understand. It’s too easy, otherwise, to write in bad faith. You have to be willing to look at an incomplete—or incompletely expressed—thought, and accept, again and again, that it isn’t quite right.
