#nest
nesting
settling in, getting comfy
making home
nesting with food
nested foods and layered foods
I could never get the Danish ‘y.’ Cross between the Germanic ö and the French e, the Danish pronunciation of y always confounded me.
One year ago, I was living in Copenhagen, living amidst the very stuff of hygge-- a term like schadenfreude and terroir that does not have an adequate English equivalent-- which loosely relates to the comfort and warmth of a home. But hygge extends beyond the home in a more general form of coziness. I remember cafes and bars suddenly celebrating outdoor seating this time last year, with any threat of chill quickly precluded with sheepskin throws and wool blankets. Raybans, check. Mikkeller, check. Now, a little something to throw on my lap…
But hygge resonated with me beyond just blankets and candles. One aspect of hygge is to surround oneself with things that one loves. In other words, nesting.
“Nesting, then, isn’t just home; it is making home.”
Having lived in 4 countries (across 3 continents) in the past 2 years, I’m realizing that I relegate nesting to a lesser priority. I quickly settle for the basics: a bed and a wall socket to recharge my physical and virtual selves. Case in point, 9 months in and the walls in my current apartment are still bare.
For both humans and fowl, nests are hodge-podge exercises in making the most of our surroundings. It’s the repeated attempts at looking for meaning in unlikely places, so twigs and strings transform from debris to building material. A bricolage of a home is made up of that mug from the local diner, that contraband pint glass, that revived plant you found on the sidewalk last trash day. Nesting is both extremely particular yet also predicated on what’s nearby and obtainable.
Nests and all of its parts reflect back a particular time, place, and identity. Reacquainting with items you’d kept in storage, for example, may no longer reflect who you are, your values, or in what you carry meaning. Nests of yester-times may not fit in with who we are today. Nesting, then, isn’t just home; it is making home.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I noticed that the first areas with which I acquaint myself is the kitchen. Maybe my lizard-brain is to blame here, but I make home through kitchen shenanigans. Nesting in the kitchen orients me and gives me a sense of belonging. My nesting is through cooking, grocery shopping, and cooking some more until I’ve felt my way through this kitchen-nest called my home.
How do we use foods to nest and ‘make home’ for ourselves? Which foods, in particular, are part of your nesting reflex? Extending the proverb, “home is where the heart is,” how or what defines and locates your kitchen? What was the process by which you nested in your most recent kitchen?
Taking the idea of nested/nesting in all it’s meanings, this prompt explores the process of making home, how one surrounds oneself with the things one loves, and finding meaning in the unlikeliest of places while nesting. What is the art of nesting and how does nesting define who and where we are?
Some other things to think about:
We are nested organisms, in a Russian doll sense. We are bodies within bodies. We’re made up of microbial and human cells at a ratio of one to one. How does that impact your concept of eating?
This is the time of year for artichokes and onions. Building on the nested doll idea, how are foods already inherently nested? Think also about nested food containers or nested mixing bowls: what are other foods/kitchen things that are layered and nested?
How does food change in/out of the nest? What foods are associated with phenomena like ‘empty nest syndrome’ and what are foods associated with having left a nest?
For all you linguists out there: what are other food nouns that are made into verbs? Generic examples like googling something or friending/defriending have become commonplace. But what about words specific to food and cooking? Could ‘eggify’ become shorthand for ‘to put an egg on it’?
How else do foods, nests, and nesting intersect?