6.1 Healthy Chefs: Experiencing Healthy Foods Across Cultures
This chapter outlines the creation of a design solution, leveraging on research insights and key design principles obtained from the three research cycles.
For the “final” solution, it was a mash-up between the “Food Chats” and “Community Health Champions” ideas, creating “Healthy Chefs”.
South Asians such as Pakistanis were more prone to diabetes; Africans were more prone to glaucoma. Both diabetes and glaucoma could lead to blindness, but this development could be prevented by health screenings for early detection. The largest ethnic minority group in Manchester was Pakistani (9% of population), followed by African, a group which grew by four times since 1991 (Jivraj, 2013). Therefore eye health would be a relevant topic to both Pakistani and African communities, and through Healthy Chefs a useful way to engage these two largest ethnic minority groups in Manchester, fulfilling design principle 1: “Fun for diverse groups to participate”.
Healthy Chefs are health champions promoting healthy living. They open their home kitchens and welcome guests to visit. Guests visit Healthy Chefs of diverse ethnicities to taste different world cuisines — the Healthy Chefs can teach guests how to cook too. This welcoming of guests and imparting of skills would help build trust and respect, thus fulfilling design principle 2: “Develop genuine relationships through mutual respect and trust”.
But besides trying out healthy food, having meals at the same table would allow the Healthy Chefs to impart relevant health promotion tips, such as encouraging South Asian and African communities to undertake Diabetic Retinopathy Screening. The Healthy Chefs could be locals or immigrants, equipped with the necessary health knowledge to impart to their guests. Over time, the health topics could be widened to include other healthy promotion tips as well, as relevant to each community. This fulfills design principle 3: “Discuss relevant issues holistically”.
And beyond health implications, Healthy Chefs would provide a platform to reach out to both immigrant and local communities and foster connections between them, around common interests of health and food.
To bridge the language gap, guests could also bring friends along to help with translation during the meet-up. Otherwise the Healthy Chefs could also tap on partner immigrant community organisations for support to provide an interpreter for the meet-up. Immigrants learning English and who wished to practise could also use these meet-ups to polish their command of speaking English.
KPI/Measurements
Three measures of success are:
1. Percentage of participants who made more friends of other ethnic heritages;
This would indicate multicultural interactions were building connections across ethnic communities.
2. Annual growth in number of participants in Healthy Chefs;
During the initial phase, it would be important to see that “customers” were being acquired in increasing numbers, to validate the value of the initiative and demonstrate there is demand for service in the community.
3. Satisfaction of participants’ experiences through the Healthy Chefs initiative
This would serve to indicate whether participants enjoyed their time interacting with diverse groups, and the possibility of them coming back for more.
