May 9, 2025
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CAS and our sister center, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the University YMCA embarked on a large project with support from Illinois Extension to conceptualize and produce short cooking videos by immigrant cooks in our communities who hailed from African and Latin American countries. We started this project during the COVID pandemic, and it has taken us a while to bring it to fruition, but we are happy to share the fruits of our labor with you now. We were a big cross-campus team that conducted research, recruited cooks, did training, shot the videos in a university facility, and did the video editing and production.
The hope is to bring the richness of local immigrant cooking traditions to local audiences with information about nutrition and new ingredients. You can find links to the videos of the African dishes here and the Latin American dishes here.
Thanks to everyone, especially our cooks, who worked on these videos!
Enjoy watching! Happy cooking!