Now that I am halfway into my senior project, I am feeling very comfortable with my work. I have a heavy focus on my family, the recipes and the cookbook but have started to answer the second part of my question how does food’s culture impact society.

I am going to continue to cook and work on the recipes while also researching and documenting the ideas on society. For example, yesterday I spent my day researching the gentrification of food and found myself immersed in a completely new topic that ties very close to mine, yet I had no idea what it was about. My essential question has stayed the same as I have learned a lot.

I have defiantly added sub questions to my topic but I have had a strong focus on my essential question for the most part. I have learned about the ties between comfortability and culture in food. Also, through cooking my grandmother’s recipes I have really seen how food gets passed on. Having such multicolored roots, and diversity in my family, until now, I did not really see how food has shown that. But in cooking the recopies I see it very clearly now.

I also have learned how food can be removed from a culture. For example, my grandmother who is Romanian escaped the holocaust and left Romania behind het (other then her appearance). Yet, when I asked her for ha recipe she gave me Romanian cheese balls even though she lives in Colombia. I found this to be very interesting as she spoke about them with so much joy and has pride over this recipe.

The ability to reclaim a part of her identity that was stripped away in the 1940s is extremely fascinating especially because she is choosing to hold onto her identity through good. No matter where you make the cheese balls, if using the same ingredients and following the same recipe it will taste the same.