Ninos / Time To Cook!
The following letter sent to Stop & Shop, a grocery story located in Providence, Rhode Island, best explains the details of this week long project.
Dear Mr. Roland Vachon, We are two graduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design interested in sharing a little bit of nutritional information with customers at your store. Currently, our theses are about promoting healthy eating habits among the Hispanic community in the Providence area through graphic design. We could not think of any better place to go than Stop&Shop. It has a diverse clientele, great visibility, and healthy but affordable food options. We are contacting you to seek permission to engage customers outside the doors of your facility. We are proposing to stand outside your doors where we will distribute single recipe cards with nutritional information. The project details are as follow:
We will create fun recipe cards that would take a meal that a Hispanic child of about 11 would be familiar with and excited by, and break it down into healthy ingredients and easy steps. We want to hand out these cards to families (and specifically children) walking into Stop & Shop with the hope that the kids would then be able to pick out the correct ingredients right in the store and prepare that dish that week at home. The cards will be double-sided, with Spanish on one side and English on the other, reflecting the duality of identity of Hispanic immigrants, as well as making the cards themselves accessible to a wide audience.
Texas State Senator Leticia Van De Putte, R. Ph. has noted: “According to recent studies, Hispanic children are nearly twice as likely to be overweight than non Hispanic children. The reasons for this are complex, with cultural factors playing a strong role. For example, within the Latino culture, having a “heavier frame” is more acceptable socially than among other cultures. Also, education can contribute to families who may be less informed about matters of health and nutrition. As our immigrant population grows, we also see many bilingual children new to the United States rejecting lower calorie healthy foods in favor of higher calorie foods promoted in America’s fast food culture”
