cook-d

Cook’d helps immigrants and students recreate home meals with affordable recipes, local substitutes, and nutritional tracking, promoting cultural integration and sustainability

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As a team of international students, we are no strangers to uprooting our life and moving halfway across the globe. The experience for many is tough, lonely and tiresome all the while chasing that elusive dream and that chase is enough to keep a glimmer of hope alive. We get homesick quite often and one of the ways we have identified of satiating that feeling is a good home cooked meal that reminds us of where we came from. Reminiscing about the past with a plate of food that you often took for granted that you’d always have is one of our favorite pastimes.

One challenge that we have experienced with this is to source authentic ingredients for these dishes. Oftentimes we’ve had to settle for the unfamiliar ingredients just because they are available and they are cheap despite having no idea how to cook with them. No disrespect to those ingredients, we just had no idea what they went in. Until now.

This idea was developed from the minds of people who have experienced this problem firsthand: An application to suggest dishes from the cuisine of choice from a dropdown menu and provides the user with the list of ingredients and the recipe for the chosen dish. The application also allows for the breakdown of each dish into their individual ingredients and allows for the formation of new dishes with these ingredients. This allows for the smoother integration of immigrants and international students into American society. Many international students are on a tight budget, and the app could offer budget-friendly versions of traditional dishes, prioritizing affordable ingredient options or providing tips for smart grocery shopping. Previously alien and unknown ingredients can slowly become staples in daily diet without losing the feeling of home.

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