Working on perfecting a recipe at home.

Author: Katie Felkins | Major: Food Nutrition and Health

Hello! I am Katie Felkins, a student in Dale Bumpers College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. I am finishing up my degree this semester in Human Environmental Sciences majoring in Food, Nutrition, and Health. My mentor Mrs. Buckley, an instructor in the Human Environmental Sciences department, worked with me to finish my thesis titled Food Bank Foods: Creating Diversity with Food Bank Staples. Following graduation this fall, I will continue to work at a wellness club in Bentonville, AR and then go to nursing school in the summer of 2022.

The project that I did was not a typical research project. I was able to combine community service and a creative project that has a lasting impact on the community in Northwest Arkansas. The end goal of this project was to provide a diverse set of recipes to the food banks to hand out with their food. In the initial research stage of this project, it became clear that the foods that come into the foodbank often limit patrons on what they can cook. Many recipes do not consider that some people do not have the funds to go buy special ingredients or buy food at all. I wanted to make sure that patrons had a set of recipes that they could refer to, recipes that made them feel included and allowed them to make nutrient dense foods. In the spring of 2021, I spent a lot of time working in the food lab creating recipes that only used the foods that come into the food bank. This semester was full of trial and error, taste tests, and reworking conventional recipes. When I started back to work this fall, I had thirteen complete recipes that focused on using foods from the food bank.

Since the work in the lab was done, this semester I spent a lot of time working on turning the recipes into graphics and writing my thesis. I got to work closely with the food bank manager, Nena Evans, as we talked back and forth about the best format to give to patrons, making sure all of the recipes had ingredients patrons had access to, and providing a Spanish translation for all of the recipes.

This project brought me really close to the impact of food banks, and the importance of food banks in communities. While working on this project, I was inspired to be more involved in the community. When the restrictions on general public are released, I plan to volunteer with the food banks. I was not aware of how many people in our community rely on food banks to live every day. There is a lot that goes into running programs like this, and volunteers are a large part of that help. This project opened my eyes to the value of food banks, and the importance of community involvement in these projects.