By Satya Dunning, Healing Diets Consultant and Facilitator at Stepping into Life

During my time at the SCAF writing retreat, I planned to explore and reflect on personal themes of food insecurity, grief and emotional eating, alongside child development and child nutrition, community gardens, and community care.  

This was a tall order to complete in three days. I prepared a structure ahead of the retreat to help me launch into writing from day one. This meant I could focus on writing about my food memories and journey while researching the links between child development and child nutrition.  

This was such a luxurious opportunity to write in detail about my experience of homemade whole foods in my formative years. I found a rhythm and a surprising bubbling pleasure and joy in the routine of writing. I discovered the writing process as immediate, simple, and without fuss.  

Writing in a dedicated group setting, with intent and without distraction, gave me the freedom and space to nurture the skill of writing to structure the intimacy of my thoughts without the need for perfection. The surrounding beauty and peace of Loch Lomond was resourcing and grounding.  

People sitting in table groups in a room looking towards a screen A grassy path through the woods

As I wrote, I was struck by the richness of the recipes and foods from Senegal, former Burma, Benin, Vietnam, and France that I had been exposed to thanks to my mixed-race heritage and multicultural background. I received the intergenerational knowledge about food making passed on from my father and mother, which they had in turn inherited from their parents. Unexpectedly, writing about positive food memories led me to recounting the positive adult figures I was surrounded by as a child. Perhaps by having access to food preceding a period of household food insecurity contributed to a certain emotional resilience, which drew links to positive adult figures present at that time. 

As the retreat progressed, I realised that the task of writing daily, several times a day, was clarifying my practice as a recently qualified Healing Diets Nutritional Consultant. Recounting my food memories revealed a potential blueprint for working in a community setting alongside the traditional one-to-one nutritionist/client model.  

The writing programme also offered a number of opportunities to connect, network and buddy up for the purposes of reflecting and feeding back to one another.  

Group of people sitting on a rock and posing for a group photo

My various conversations about research and methodology with retreat participants, some of whom were SCAF’s senior members of staff, taught me the elementary practice of formulating a clear question about what I wanted to find out and understand. In my writing, I kept coming back to how much I wanted to collaborate with women of colour and women experiencing marginalisation, while also building social capacity and improving health.    

Questions concerning the authoring of public health and community health were taking on a new light in my process of understanding how I wanted to support people with health issues seeking transformation through food and behaviour change. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that my mission of supporting people’s health could be effectively mediated through their food stories and the creation of new culinary narratives rooted in heritage and health and backed with robust evaluation.  

On a personal level, writing about my childhood memories of food and food insecurity were a means for me to give a voice to what had stayed silent and to begin to process those personal experiences consciously.  

By writing, I was celebrating and bringing into the foreground an awareness of the rich cultural heritage and influences woven in my identity. Writing was becoming my act of resistance to repair and acknowledge the difficulties, and challenges in my life. 

 

About the author

Satya Dunning is based in Glasgow. She recently took part in the SCAF's June Residential Writing Retreat. She is a Community Activator with GCFN, Freelance Movement & Emotional Literacy Facilitator, and Healing Diets Nutritional Consultant (trained at the School of Natural Medicine).

 

This blog is authored by a SCAF member and may not reflect the views and opinions of the wider SCAF membership. 

First published: 30 July 2025

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