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

Essential Question(s): 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?

Statement of Purpose: I will find my own happiness through baking new things and record my recipes on my blog as well as volunteer at a homeless shelter/soup kitchen and also write about my day on my blog. I will also do interviews with food activists and bakers about their experiences and write about the interviews on my blog.

Overview:

I will tweak the same recipe that I create at least twice to see if I can improve what I’m baking. I will do research on activists/urban farm groups that I could potentially interview as well. I will also do research to find places to volunteer which will happen at least twice a week if covid allows. I will create my own blog using blogger.com that follows my progress during my senior project. I will most likely title it the title of my project. I will blog about people/companies who are activists for food, my volunteering days, and I will write down recipes that I create/modify. I will bake at least 3 times a week which I will distribute potentially at senior class events and to people directly on the streets.

How will you measure your success?

I’m going to create my own separate blog from the LREI blog to document my research, interviews, volunteering days, and recipes that I modify. I will do 1-2 blog posts a day during the week, whether they be a reflection of an interview I do, a reflection of a day volunteering, or a recipe that I create/modify. I will hopefully end up with lots of amazing baked goods!

Learning goals: I want to learn about how people are being activists about food for people in need. I also want to learn how food is connected to people’s happiness and stability. I also want to learn about how to structure a blog and write my own modified recipes.

Resource List:

• Smitten Kitchen blog
• The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (No-Nonsense Guides) by Wayne Roberts
• Joy the Baker blog

Interviews I will conduct/people I will reach out to:

• Eric Baer
• Ellen Cosgrove
• Carol Adams
• Jesus the baker at my dad’s restaurant
• I will reach out to the Bowery Mission about volunteering.

Daily Plan & Schedule:

I will bake at least 3 times a week, and each day I will write 1-2 blog posts on recipes or interviews or my volunteering experiences. I will meet with my cohort group twice a week, take calculus which meets twice a week for one hour each time, and I will continue with the Jazz Ensemble on Wednesdays from 12:00-1:00. My interviews will probably be once every other week, for up to an hour. (I might find more people to interview so I can do an interview once a week.) I can also spend time shadowing the baker at my dad’s restaurant Yuca Bar once a week for a couple hours.

Backup Plan: If the volunteering falls through, I will conduct more research to find more food activists/companies that I can interview, and I will bake more often.