A Message From Recipe Rescue's Founder

Welcome to the Recipe Rescue website! Thank you for taking the time to check out this project and see what we are all about, I'm going to give you a bit of background for the project and what we are aiming to do.

My name is Jason Hu and I am currently a senior at Hagerty High School in Oviedo, Florida. Recipe Rescue was started with the help of my amazing executive board of Elle, Euri, Noah, Nathan, Jordina, Tyler, Syunta, and Kaylie near the end of July 2024. With this project, we are seeking to create and publish a cookbook filled with the recipes and stories of our friends, family, and community members to share the unique identities of our diverse communities.

The idea for this project actually came from our first contributor, my Dad. My Dad, John Hu, fun enough attended culinary school in China years ago when he was still in his twenties. My parents moved from China and to Canada and then to Florida over the last 30 years. Though he learned traditional Chinese cooking he didn't cook much when I grew up as he was often at work so my Mom cooked most of the time. However, around 2022 my Mom traveled out of state for work and my brother had left for college so home would just be my Dad and I. This is when he started cooking again and I was dumbfounded. I never really thought of him as a cook but the food he made was muah amazing. Beyond the food, he would always give a long random story of some dude or person who made the food. He was eye-opening really and taught me a lot about where he grew up and where I'm from. This realization sparked the connection that the meaning of food is often beyond eating but holding stories, culture, and more. The more he cooked the more I learned about the culture and myself. Extending from these experiences I found the importance of food and culture to understand other people, and after doing a project on the oral histories of food business owners I realized I wanted to explore this topic more.

And so the idea for Recipe Rescue was created. After attending a program over the summer of 2024, I got the chance to take part in a micro-grant program dedicated to starting a new project. Two and two came together and the work for Recipe Rescue began. Currently, we just started our collection of recipes with my Dad and we hope to collect upwards of 15 in total. Working with my executive board has been the most fulfilling leadership experience that I've had in high school and has ultimately become a culmination of the work I've done. We are continuing to collect recipes and hope to complete, publish, and print our cookbook by the end of October.

Beyond being a fun little activity to create a cookbook, we really wanted to capture the meaning of food and the goals we are trying to achieve in the cookbook. I won't give any sneak peeks yet but the cookbook combines the recipes and diverse backgrounds of our contributors to create a playful but expressive book. Though not complete, this project has been a great experience that I hope to expand and build. Thank you to everyone who has worked with me and those who will continue contributing. I doubt anyone will really be reading this but this project represents the pinnacle of the work I have done throughout highschool so thank you for being a part of this journey.

Sincerely,

Jason Hu