MediaDiet: Ella Yarnton
Ella Yarnton is feeding minds, playlists and dinner guests.
In case you haven’t heard of her, Ella Yarnton is a freelance creative producer who’s worked for the likes of Nike, Estée Lauder and Amazon Music. She’s a food whisperer, lowkey radio star, and the founder of Gather Berlin, a dinner series turning meals into cultural diplomacy.
We’re lucky to have her as our COMMPRESS: MediaDiet guest, fresh from a summer of eating her way through Australia and exceeding her Instagram screen time limit before lunch.
From mindfulness apps to noodle-fuelled brainstorms and unsolicited production advice to Lucinda Price deep cuts, Ella’s media consumption is exactly what you’d expect from someone who believes in the connective power of food and a well-timed SoundCloud set.
So, scroll on. It’s a feast.
Wake up
My New Year’s resolutions have officially started after returning to Berlin from a long stint back in Aus over summer. This week I’ve been happily riding off the jetlag that has hit my morning routines like a duck to water. So far, so good. Getting up at 6.30am isn’t so bad in the midst of a dark Berlin winter. Part of the resolution has included a 20-minute limit a day on the Gram (which I keep pressing “one more minute” on as I’ve exceeded my limit by lunch).
However, I’ve adopted a new morning routine where the first app I open is actually one called Open, a mindfulness app founded by the incredible Manoj Dias, an old yoga teacher of mine from my Melbourne days. At this point I’m on a streak of 10 days in a row and feeling good about that. I opt for a five minute breath-work session, because I reckon I didn’t breathe enough from the past eight hours of peaceful sleep. Once I’ve done this, I have a quick flick over on LinkedIn and a refresh on emails since I’m officially in year one of full-time freelance work and desperately looking for my first opportunity to pay back my gluttonous days spent back in Aus consuming anything and everything!
Morning
There’s no work for me today, so expect a day of hustle! At this point I would usually be scrolling my Strava to get the motivation to run, but instead I head to the gym with my partner while listening to a set from Fred P and Molly from ReSolute in NYC on SoundCloud.
After this my breakfast time consists of a smoothie and an English breakfast tea usually accompanied by a recorded show from Refuge Worldwide or the Breakfast Show with Flo from NTS. I flick between the two.
I have a coffee meeting about a potential job in Mitte so after I finish breakfast and head over there. After this, I’m meeting my new “mature” friend who I’m now calling my mentor, someone I met over Instagram and have become dear friends with as we’re both from the same industry (except she has 20+ years more experience in the game than I do). She also runs a print publication called Famous for my Dinner Parties, so we spend the next few hours brainstorming world domination and how to host an epic food pop up together. We opt for spicy noodles for lunch.
Afternoon
Following the spicy noodles, I find myself cycling round to pick up some flowers for my friends who are opening a restaurant on the weekend. I drop these over to said restaurant only to be interrupting their press shoot (which, of course, I happily join in on and start flexing my production experience by providing unsolicited advice on angles and vibe etc etc to anyone who will listen). I have a brief chat with the photographer, who is off to Switzerland to shoot for Holiday Magazine. I check out his IG (@surrealjamesnelson) and give him a follow.
Between breakfast, lunch and the afternoon, I’ve checked my emails a number of times, flicked through LinkedIn and now been banned from Instagram after exhausting my “one more minute: limit. Oops.
I then receive an invitation from MUBI for an event called “Queer” which consists of an exclusive reading of William S. Burrough’s novella, Queer.
I accept.
Evening
I check out a potential venue for a pop up event for my community-led dinner series called Gather. I drive over and dive back into a compilation of Refuge Worldwide’s recorded shows. Jetlag is already kicking in, so tonight no TV and instead a quick few pages of Lucinda “Froomes’”Price’s debut book, All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot, which I picked up in Sydney on my last few days in Australia. I bought it after being introduced to Lucinda herself and hearing she has, in fact, written a book that I’m sure many women from our generation can relate to.
Here’s to getting a job soon so I may have some more material for things like this!
Ella’s Picks & Recs
SCREEN TIME: 3 hours (mainly Google maps and Googling things).
SUBSCRIBED TO: Open, AppleTV, Netflix, Strava.
SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: RA Exchange with Patrick Mason. I was really inspired by this recently and his beliefs in the power of visualisation.
SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot!
AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Belle Gibson”. I only just learnt about this SCANDAL of a woman, plus there’s the Netflix series (Apple Cider Vinegar) about how she scammed people with a wellness app with advice to help cancer survivors. Very bleak. Very scary.
INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: I want to be more like @samyoukilis
A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: A 30-day free trial of Open, just for you, here!