A Year of Nourishing My Inner Child

What would Little Camille eat?

Trigger warning: lots of talk about eating disorders.

It started as kind of a joke. At the end of April I posted a set of photos to Instagram of foods I’d eaten that month and captioned it “nourishing my inner child.” The food wasn’t fancy: a BLT at a diner, a bowl of strawberries and granola, a grilled cheese at home. But it had all been delicious — foods that fed my soul as well as my body.

I kept it up for the rest of the year, monthly posts dedicated to “nourishing my inner child,” and found myself looking forward to them, those snapshots memorializing the unbridled joy I find in food. Friends told me they enjoyed the posts, too, and together we paid closer attention to the beauty of little food things: a perfect slice of cucumber, a particularly sexy bowl of pasta. I work in food and find myself, as a matter of livelihood, constantly looking for new words to describe it. It’s been nice to let photos do the talking.

I admit that I don’t know as much about tending to one’s “inner child” as some people — there is an entire subset of therapies focused on this concept that I have no experience with, so please do not take me for an expert. What I mean when I say I’m nourishing my inner child is that I am feeding someone who, through the workings of a…