Student Interns:
Samuel Cho
Drexel University College of Medicine
Jennifer Zhang
Drexel University College of Medicine
Academic Preceptor:
Emily Spengler, MD
Drexel University College of Medicine, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children
Community Preceptor:
Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, CRC, CHE
Drexel Food Lab
Rachel Sherman
Drexel Food Lab
Community Site:
Do good. Feed better. Keep going. The Drexel Food Lab is a faculty-mentored interdisciplinary food product design and culinary innovation research lab solving real-world problems in sustainability, health promotion, and access. Its members apply culinary art and science to improve the health of people, the planet, and economies. In doing so, they not only develop new food products and menu items with entrepreneurs and industry, nonprofit, and government partners, but also develop the Food Lab’s flagship “product”: graduates across disciplines who are poised to improve the food system.
Team’s Experience:
The Bridging the Gaps student interns were actively involved in multiple areas of the Food Lab, including product development and focus group testing, client meetings and presentations, and nutrition curriculum development. This year’s focus concerned value-added food product recipe development as well as product sensory survey analysis. The former involved testing multiple rounds of recipes in a commercial kitchen, while the latter involved data parsing and organization from Qualtrics. Interns also volunteered with some of Philadelphia’s community food and garden organizations, such as Las Parcelas, to gain a better understanding of food resources and needs in the community.
Reflections
“Our time at Drexel’s Food Lab offered us a chance to step back and seek clarity from the many lectures offered by Bridging the Gaps. In this political climate, it seems like everything we knew to be stable has come undone; it is a period in history where hope often feels lost. As medical students and aspiring physicians, the act of creating food and finding nourishment during our summer break afforded us a strangely indispensable opportunity for meditation upon the state of the world and its repercussions for our futures. The art of cooking, which offers challenges and pleasures alike, helped to ground us in this strange new world.”
Samuel Cho & Jennifer Zhang