Ravenous

Book excerpt: What should I eat? How much should I eat? What does it mean to be nourished? How can I, a food lover and lifelong overeater, learn to be satisfied? These are the questions Dayna Macy asks in her debut memoir, Ravenous. Like many of us, Macy has had a complicated relationship with food. In order to transform this relationship, Macy embarks on a year-long journey to uncover the origins of her food obsessions. From her childhood home in upstate New York, and back up the California coast, Macy travels across the country, meeting with farmers, food artisans, butchers, a Zen chef, a forager, a chocolatier, and others—to understand where her meals come from, why she craves certain foods, and what food means to her. She looks at how nostalgia is deeply embedded in food, and how the powerful forces of family and tradition shape our food choices. Rather than head straight for the diet manuals, she chooses to change her relationship with food from the inside out. She delves deeper into the spiritual underpinnings of eating, examines what it means to be satisfied, and ultimately forges her own path to balance and freedom.