Literary Appetites Book Club: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Literary Appetites is a food-focused book club for readers hungry to critically engage with the act of consumption. Centering stories and theory at the intersection of food, sex, gender, power, and sustainability, the club explores eating as an intimate, political, and ethical act.
For our May read and second book of the year, Literary Appetites Book Club will gather to discuss Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica — a visceral, unsettling novel that forces us to confront the moral limits of consumption and the systems that normalize violence.
Set in a dystopian future where animal meat has become toxic and cannibalism is legalized and industrialized, Tender Is the Flesh follows Marcos, a worker in the human meat processing industry who begins to grapple with the emotional and ethical consequences of his role. As language, labor, and desire are reshaped to accommodate this new economy, the novel interrogates dehumanization, complicity, and the commodification of bodies, offering a stark critique of contemporary food systems and the fragile boundaries between human and animal.
We will meet in the private room at Cordelia Wine Bar, a woman-owned wine bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for an intimate discussion over dinner and drinks curated by Chef Kendal Mitchell. Join us for the first gathering of the Literary Appetites Book Club, where pleasure and critique coexist, and where reading becomes a way to reimagine more just, sustainable, and embodied ways of living and eating. Come hungry. Leave changed.
🎟️ Ticket includes wine, amuse-bouche and guided programming