Writing prompt: Focus on a meal

Feature image: [Min Lee]

For this writing prompt, let’s focus on food. Tasting new foods, sharing meals in foreign place, and missing tastes from home are all part of traveling.

Think about a positive meal you have had in the past and write about the first one that comes to mind. Why does it stand out in your memory? What stands out to you as important in the memory? The food? The location? The company? Zoom in on each of those aspects and build a full scene on one meal.

A short piece from my example is below. I wrote about a Thanksgiving dinner that immediately came to mind. What is important to me in that memory, is the group of people and the circumstance that brought us together so I focused on that.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, so the first time I celebrated it away from my family should have been a sad day. But it wasn’t.

Fifteen of us brought chairs and wine glasses and side dishes from our houses and set them up in Mat and Jenna’s backyard. Most of us were new to San Diego and it didn’t make sense to fly home, wherever home was, for the weekend. The guys there were Navy SEALs or Navy EOD techs, good with machines, good with their hands, so they should have been able to fry a turkey quickly but it took all day and it was dark by the time it was ready and I had two slices of cheesecake before I ate any turkey. It was a dark, clear, warm night and our long table and loud music filled the backyard…

If you try out this writing prompt, leave a comment below with your work or a link to where you have shared it.