Some work is, well, work. Other projects are labors of love. When you talk to Sue Hoss for just a few minutes, you quickly realize that Look, Cook, and Eat is definitely the latter. She's bringing years of culinary education, editing, and production to her latest project, an instructional digital magazine for people with developmental or intellectual challenges.
Hoss, a partner in Main Dish Media in Des Moines, Iowa, knows first-hand what an impact learning life skills such as cooking can have. Her sister Jo has developmental challenges and lives on her own in an apartment.
And when Hoss helped open Plymouth Grounds coffee shop in Des Moines, Iowa, with the backing of her church, she knew it was the perfect setting for developmentally challenged people to learn to cook. "They are eager to do things and want to do them on their own," she explains. Her students worked as baristas, making coffees and smoothies, as well as baking and then selling the muffins and cookies they made.
Seeing her students being captivated by the process of baking and enjoying such immediate results led to the idea for Look, Cook, and Eat. "I was intrigued by how interested they were in cooking," she says.
Hoss is confident that people who use the new magazine will both learn from and enjoy the experience. "They'll take great pride in inviting someone over for dinner," she says.
"This is an audience that's vastly underserved," she says. When she researched the availability of cookbooks for people with these challenges, she only found one. It had too many words, she says, and while it featured healthy food, it listed ingredients such as bulgur that would probably be unfamiliar to people with learning disabilities.
"We're trying to create a visually interesting and visually helpful resource for students who might learn a different way," she adds. "It becomes a design challenge," she says. "You want the same format on each page, the same buttons. You want everything to be very familiar and repetitive, and repetitive work creates memory."
Look, Cook, and Eat will be a digital issue that users can subscribe to and then download every month. It will feature clear step-by-step videos and images, as well as voice-overs to guide the cooks. "We'll not bombard people with recipes but will have some, as well as nutrition tips and stories to incorporate health and wellness," Hoss says. She hopes to add sections on etiquette, such as setting a table and dinner manners--information that will help people with the skills of daily life.
"I'm struck with how much students of different abilities help each other out," she adds. "They are very encouraging of each other." She plans to use a peer-to-peer format for the cooking videos, putting people of all abilities in the spotlight.
Hoss has shown the demo issue to people who work in agencies that help people with learning challenges, and the reaction has been positive. "They've mentioned that it will help their staff to teach cooking skills, too," Hoss says.