This past Sunday, Nov. 12, the International Student Organization (ISO) hosted the annual Food Bazaar. Each year, students sign up to cook around 40 servings of a dish from their home country and share their unique recipes with the community. This year, they had 57 recipes from all over the world. Deqa Aden ’18, president of ISO, stressed the extensive planning that went into organizing the event and the logistics of readying the ingredients for the cooks.
“The work that really went into it was us trying to figure out a system. Like how can people submit their recipes? … [Then we moved on to] dividing the work … to communicating with [the cooks] about their dish for more information. … Then we just basically moved into the idea of bringing all the recipes into a master list …Then [we went] shopping and then we [had] to sort everything out. … [Then we spent] all Friday night … distributing their ingredients to them, … so it took weeks and weeks of planning,” Aden said.
Despite the work involved, she felt that it was all worth it to see the event succeed.
“It’s all for the fun of it. It’s all for the people. … I feel good. Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s tummy is filled with interesting food.”
During the weekend, kitchens all over campus were occupied by students preparing their dishes for the event.
For her first year participating in the Food Bazaar, Avery Barnett ’21 chose to cook a popular dish from her home country, Jamaica.
“Me and my friend Caleb, … we made jerk chicken and festival, which is one of the most known dishes that comes from Jamaica,” she said. “We chose it because … it just embodied Jamaica more so than what our national dish is.”
Yawen Zhang ’20 from China made a dish that especially reminded her of home.
“It’s just like a homemade dish that you just cook at … home and it’s not like super fancy,” she said. “It’s really famous [in] my hometown and … when you’re cooking [it,] the whole floor will have the smell. Actually, there [were] people who [were] following the smell and [coming] to the kitchen [to] ask me what I [was] making.”
David Chang ’18 and Ana Segebre ’19 created a fusion dish.
“Ana is Honduran and so we wanted to make a dish that sort of represented both Korean and Honduran cultures. She’s also half Mexican, so what naturally came to mind was some taco but with like a Korean marinated beef,” he said. “We were conflicted whether we should just make and devote our time to a purely Korean dish or a purely Honduran dish and I [said] let’s have fun with this and that’s the whole spirit of ISO right?”
