This week on The ABR Podcast, Katherine Wilson reviews ‘Fed Up: A chef’s adventures in food, farming and feminism’ by Lucy Ridge. Partially a memoir of Ridge’s disillusionment with a food industry that regards food as ‘little more than vehicles for profit’, the book also seeks to situate itself in conversation with feminist food scholarship. Its strengths, Wilson argues, are sensorial and experiential – vividly immersing the reader in the cultural details of bushfood foraging, for example – but Fed Up requires more exacting research and critical depth to truly trouble the field of studies it wishes to join. Ultimately, Ridge’s brand of feminism ‘narrows the scope for radical collective visions of change’, Wilson writes.

Katherine Wilson is an award-winning writer, journalist, and former co-editor of Overland, whose work focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. Her essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Law Institute Journal, and Eureka Street.

‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson is published in the upcoming June issue of ABR.