Zavoir Global

19/06/2025

Dear Throwback Thursday,
🇦🇲
In 2017 I flew to Yerevan, Armenia to meet with the lovely - in my quest to meet other dietitians and nutritionists around the world and to learn about them and their food culture. I got more than I expected out of that trip, including a family dinner and private concert at the table. I am always so grateful for Vardanush and her kindness 🙏
🎶
My updated article about this venture is up on Medium, linked in bio. ✍🏻

30/01/2025

Throwing back to le marché in Aix en Provence.
November, 2022
I never scrubbed a mushroom with such precision before, and the work was worth it. I remember during French class in high school the markets were one of the first French cultural things we learned about. I never imagines at that time that I would be living in France and the French market would be part of my lifestyle (and also a French lesson). Nor did I imagine I would be eating leeks as much as I do now or that bread and cheese would be so sacred they should come with a manual (break the baguette with your hands like this… cut the cheese like this…).
You don’t have to live in another country in order to enjoy some of the cultural foods from that country. Leeks are grown and sold around the world. Curious about that weird looking mushroom you see at the local grocery store or market? TALK to an employee and see if they have suggestions on how to prepare and cook it. Instead of sliced bread opt for une baguette, or trade cheddar for Camembert on Friday night. 🥖🧀

18/09/2024

“The more books I read, the more conversations I have, and the more places I travel to, the more my vocabulary bank has blossomed into a more powerful vault than my 401K. The words deposited into my linguistic investment account contain within their syllables definitions that flutter hearts and tingle brains. Often one non-English word will translate into an entire phrase, or better yet, there is no translation, turning the word into a secret language, a souvenir to talk about.”

18/09/2024

https://www.zavoir.com/little-word-big-feelings/

"The words deposited into my linguistic investment account contain within their syllables definitions that flutter hearts and tingle brains. Often one non-English word will translate into an entire phrase, or better yet, there is no translation, turning the word into a secret language, a souvenir to talk about."

Quote: "Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure." —Edward Thorndike There's a word for that The more books I read, the more conversations I have, and the more places I travel to, the more my vocabulary bank has blossomed into a more powerful vault than my 401K.

09/08/2024

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’......That drug is the news.”
~Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019

19/07/2024

“Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
~Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, 2021

10/07/2024

Pulling self-care out from under the rubble of a billion-dollar wellness industry and restoring the essence of what it truly is.

10/07/2024

https://www.zavoir.com/self-care-or-self-scare/

New article is up!

In a world where we are constantly being told how burnt out and unhappy we are as a nation, and where fear-mongering news is dinging for our attention 24/7 why would we not turn to self-care rituals to help "fix" ourselves?

04/07/2024

“In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there isn’t anyone to make them for you.”

13/06/2024

How writers thread food into their stories, granting the food to tell a story of its own.

13/06/2024

"Food is art, it is science, it is purposeful and just for fun and nurturing and please do not say it is clean because it is not dirty. Writers across the globe have made food, meals, and cooking symbolize something else, and it is up to our interpretation."

Food is art, it is science, it is purposeful and just for fun and nurturing and please do not say it is clean because it is not dirty. Writers across the globe have made food, meals, and cooking symbolize something else, and it is up to our interpretation.

07/06/2024

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of ourselves–wherever we go.
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.
Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.
I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.” -