Project Name: Happiness Within Baking: Healthy Recipes and Combating Food Insecurity

Guiding Questions: How can I make food more accessible to people in poverty? How can I work to improve the lives of homeless people? How does food improve lives?

These are important to me because I started to bake during quarantine last year, and it made me truly happy. I want to see if I can make others happy with my baking, or if I can help others find happiness too when baking. I will work on accessibility through food by volunteering. I will address these questions through the lens of food. I want to address what it would take to change what baking looks like for people who don’t have the same resources that I do. I recognize that there’s a lot of inequity within buying ingredients for cooking and baking, and I want to do research so I can learn about the reality of baking with restrictive access to ingredients. There is a lack of accessibility to food for people in poverty, and I want to address this by doing research, volunteering, and being hands-on baking on my own to establish more accessible recipes.

Challenges the Project Will Address: Improve my baking skills by learning about health, substitutions, scaling recipes down, problem solving, critical reasoning etc. I will learn about food accessibility in NYC by doing research and doing site visits (if covid allows). I will also improve my noticing/writing skills (with my blog posts). For example I will learn how to structure recipes, making easy steps to follow, the clarity of instructions, using pictures etc. (I will take inspiration from smitten kitchen, maybe do research on other food blogs.)

My Plan: Make healthier baked goods in my kitchen to distribute at senior class events/homeless people directly on the street because shelters don’t accept outside food because of covid. I will create a blog for the healthy/easy recipes that I create and will do at least 3 blog posts (3 recipes) each week. I will do a lot of research on inexpensive/healthy ingredients, places to get these ingredients such as bodegas and dollar stores. This is so that I can find what is feasible for families in poverty to cook or bake for themselves (if they can). Lastly, I hope to volunteer at the Bowery Mission at least twice a week maybe even three times if I can manage that. I would help them package and distribute food to the homeless community. For this I would probably need to get a covid test at least once a week to make sure I am safe to volunteer.

My potential schedule:

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for baking/research/blog posts

Tuesdays and Thursdays for volunteering (I can also write blog posts on my experience each day volunteering)

I will continue Jazz ensemble on Wednesdays, as well as the BC2M x-block.