Social media helps local foodie Sarah Carleton gather and savor
Sarah Carleton moved here from “the boony-sticks.”
She doesn’t mean that in a bad way. The small town of Northport, in Stevens County, will always have a special place in her heart. She grew up there and started her own family on a 20-acre plot outside of town.
“We had neighbors. But they were across the field,” Carleton said. “It’s not enough to just say ‘sticks.’ It’s not enough to just say ‘boonies.’ We call it the boony-sticks.”
And that’s a difficult place to be a self-described “official foodie.” Dining options were pretty limited. “Typically, we’d go to Canada if we wanted to go out.”
These days, Carleton doesn’t have to cross an international border to go out to dinner. Since moving to Spokane four years ago, she’s been in a kind of dining oasis – exploring options, finding favorites and discovering a desire to share her recommendations with others.
Carleton started her Instagram account last August under the name Prodigious Eats. She’s since changed the name to Gather and Savor and, last month, launched a complementary website with the goal of connecting people and sharing stories.
“It’s about the food, but it’s also about more than the food,” said Carleton, 37. “The food is a vehicle. This is really what it is: people coming together in a meaningful way.
“The more people can come together in this city, the more sense of community. That’s what the core of what I want: connections. I love food and I love people and I love connection, and I know that they somehow go together.”
Her followers were growing – she has more than 1,100 – and she wanted a chance to meet them in real life. So, in April, she organized her first meet-up, inspired by the similar events hosted by the blogger and social media maven behind Seattle Bites. She’s busy “exploring Seattle one bite at a time” and holding “Instameets” for Seattle foodies.
“I thought, ‘Golly, why isn’t anyone having these here? I want to go to these,” said Carleton, who likes to “always tell people we’re the non-Ritz-Carltons.”
About 30 people attended her first event, held at the 1898 Public House at the Kalispel Golf and Country Club. “Ninety percent of us had never met,” said Carleton, who deemed the gathering a success and is looking forward to organizing more meet-ups. “It really is my heart to promote people getting together in this fast-paced world.”
Eventually, she would like to turn Gather and Savor into a business. She’s still in the process of figuring out how to monetize it while “staying true to myself and staying authentic.”
She only posts about food and restaurants she really likes. And, “So far,” she said, “I’ve paid for all of my own food. I plan to keep that integrity. Integrity and authenticity are at the top of my priority list.”
To that end, she said, “I will never buy followers.”
Carleton started partnering with local restaurants in December to offer giveaways to followers and has other plans in the works. “I have lots of ideas to implement,” she said. “I want to keep growing.”
On the to-do list: reviews and stories about restaurants and chefs to her newly launched website.
Carleton isn’t a trained photographer or journalist; her website and Instagram feed grew out of her hobby and genuine interest. Her family helps with research and development.
“We call ourselves a family of foodies,” said Carleton, who has three children, ages 2, 8 and 12. “My husband’s a foodie, too. When we go out as a family, it gets really expensive.”
Baked goods are her weakness.
She started her Instagram account as Prodigious Eats.
“I love the word prodigious,” she said. “It means ‘in excess’ or ‘abundance.’ I thought, ‘OK, that’s perfect.’ But, I’d have to repeat it three or four times. I’d have to spell it. People didn’t know what it meant.”
So, about three months ago, she rebranded as Gather and Savor to embody the community she hopes to form and the connections she wants to make as well as the food and stories she wants to share.
Food, she said, “is a universal language. It equalizes us. It creates memories that we’ll carry with us forever.”