“Dishes full of everything that still felt good about the beautiful, wounded world we were living in.” “They were golden-hour salads,” she says. Part of Nunn’s inspiration for the newsletter were the salads she began building almost every afternoon from the bounty of a North Carolina summer, a balm during the first year of the pandemic. She finished her memoir, The Comfort Food Diaries, which traced her journey of recovery from heartbreak, alcoholism, and the suicide of her closeted gay brother, and then created what has become one of the most popular paid food newsletters on the Substack platform, The Department of Salad.
A Virginia native who had lived in New York City and Chicago, Nunn recently moved to Atlanta after spending the past few years living the solitary writer’s life in a barn in Todd, North Carolina. It’s almost too much, which is why Emily Nunn started tossing it all into a salad. Blackberries and cucumbers seem to never stop growing. For a brief period, everything that makes a Southern summer so delicious seems to peak at once.
