Welcome to the beginning of our next 8-week seasonal writing challenge! Join us for bite-sized prompts and self-reflection.
Spring has sprung (despite the layer of frost on the ground this morning), and so we have a new season of food writing prompts. (You can check out the winter prompts here.)
Over the next eight weeks, paid subscribers will receive a weekly writing prompt that will help you to deepen your relationship with food and eating. Think of it like a process of self-discovery in bite-sized chunks. Take the challenge and give yourself the gift of writing from them every week!
Throughout my life, whenever things have been hard or confusing or full of grief, I often turn to writing as a way to understand and process my feelings. It is such a wonderful practice. Writing about food is a particularly useful way to access our internal world because we have a lot of experiences with food. As a result, the parts of our brains that process memory and emotions are directly linked to the parts of our brains that register food sensory experiences such as taste and smell.
If you would like access to these food writing prompts, or to support Feed Me Figs in general, you can upgrade to a paid subscription here.
If you don’t want to commit to a full year subscription, you can pay monthly for the price of two coffees.
Also, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. If you think you would benefit from these prompts but can’t afford them at this time, email me at ginarae@substack.com, and I will gift you a subscription.
This week, the prompts will explore the idea of nourishment.
It seems like this word is everywhere now. Nourishing foods, nourishing workouts, nourishing hair conditioners, nourishing zoom calls!
The earliest known use of the noun nourishment is in the Middle English period (1150—1500). Looking on Google trends, it seems the word nourishing really took off between June 20, 2021—March 12, 2023 before settling back to its normal baseline. I wonder what happened then? Perhaps we were all looking for ways to nourish ourselves during COVID lockdowns. If we map it by subregion, it turns out New York state is really into being nourished.
Sometimes nourishment isn’t about what we are eating, but the context. A quiche dropped off by a friend, a morning coffee in a mug made by another friend, a picnic with loved ones on a warm afternoon. We feel a sense of nourishment when we are taken care of by others. And indeed, the words nurture and nurse are based on the same root, the Latin verb nūtrīre, meaning “to feed” or “to care for.”
