Your Name: Miles Friedman

 

Your Project Title: Food and Culture in the Tri-State area.

 

Overview: 

For my project, I will be making a food and culture review blog. I came up with this idea because, throughout COVID, a way for my dad and I to pass time when we couldn’t do anything was by driving around the Tri-State area and trying foods that we had seen get good reviews all over social media. Through going to all these places I realized that almost all of them are in neighborhoods that are predominantly run by immigrants and that the restaurants are also run by Immigrants. When thinking about possible ideas for a senior project my mind kept going back to the excursions I did with my dad trying food. 

When I came up with the basis of my project I knew I wanted to write a blog about the places I went to. I also realized that the blog can’t just be about the food. I needed to include the aspect of culture and the people that run these establishments in my blog. This led me to come up with the format that I plan on using and my essential question. My essential question is, “How does culture affect and create the food landscape in the Tri-State Area?” I landed on this being my essential question because I knew and wanted this project to be heavily focused on the cultural aspect of food and how much of the food we eat is owned and run by immigrants.

 The blog will be a three-step plan. Step one is researching and writing about the neighborhood, people, and food I will be trying and visiting. In this part, I plan to really focus on culture and answer the questions of why this food is where it is and how did this group of people get where they are? Step two is actually going to the place and trying the food and meeting the people. Step three is where I write about my experience and the food I tried. My senior project will also fill three different buckets. The first bucket is experience. The experience aspect of this project is actually going to the places and trying the food. The next bucket I am going to fill is academic because of all the research I will do about the neighborhoods and people I visit. Lastly, I will be filling the service bucket by volunteering at a Gods Love We Deliver stay in the theme of food. 

This project will challenge me in many ways. One way that stands out to me is that it will force me to get out of my comfort zone of food and places I go. This project will make me visit and explore all different places around the Tri-State Area. Another challenge that applies to me and probably many other seniors is that this is one of the first times I will be without a concrete schedule. This will force and challenge me to stay on task and continue working on my project. Although there are a few challenges that I will have to overcome, overall I think this senior project will help me build my knowledge of the food scene in the Tri-State Area and really learn about what type of people really create this food. 

The success of this project to me will be measured by how I truly know what the food scene in the Tri-State Area is created by and how hundreds of years of history and culture are built into the food scene. This knowledge will be shown in my blog. My blog will be successful if it is able to convey a full representation of the different types of food and people that build the food scene.