Food provides nutrients and sustenance that are essential to life. Humans rely on food to fuel our thoughts and actions. However, food isn’t just a source of energy; it’s a fundamental part of culture and connection. Simply sharing a meal with someone can build teamwork and create a bond. Throughout this short memoir, I explored the ways in which food creates a connection across language and cultural barriers through reflection on specific experiences that I had in India, Uganda, and South Africa. While my experiences in each of these three countries were vastly different, there was one defining theme that brought them together: food. This memoir uses mixed media (personal reflection, research, recipes, and photos) to connect the three different international experiences. Reflection on my own family traditions and history bridges the gap between my upbringing and my interactions with people while spending time abroad. Popular recipes from each of the three countries are mixed into the personal reflection, showing how preparing food in a different geographic location can change the experience of preparation and eating. In addition to personal experience, included is a synthesis of research done on the effects of sharing a plate or a meal on negotiations tactics, how eating the same food increases trust, the ways in which food sharing is an act of social intimacy, and how it can build community. Food is an important part of family connection, a tool in many rituals such as Sunday dinners or breaking bread, a critical aspect of many religions, and is tied to the celebration of both birth and death in cultures around the globe. We all need to eat; food is the great commonality among people.

The goal of this creative project is to document my grandmother’s traditional Gujarati recipes with the hopes of preserving her life and passion for cooking. This process included library research to investigate the history of Indian and Gujarati cuisine, spending time in the kitchen documenting the recipes in their entirety, practicing them on my own, writing the cookbook and including passages that weave in the history, my grandmother’s stories, and techniques and tools. After completing this process, the significant findings related to my grandmother’s life and her journey from birth to now. Her marriage to my grandfather at a young age, her journey and those who influenced her ability to cook, and her impact on my family were all effects that I had understood and known during my experiences with my grandmother. In this journey, I learned more about her thoughts and experiences that I never knew before. Our relationship has deepened ten-fold and while she may not be with me forever, I now have a tangible part of her that I can keep with me for the rest of my life.

A key component to American weddings is the wedding cake and the number of customs associated with it. The History, Evolution, and Development of Wedding Cakes is a creative project that hopes to answer why the wedding cake is such an iconic item and what it represents. A historical study details the evolution from its origin to present day while a comparison of wedding cakes (or wedding cake analogs) from other cultures explores their role(s) across the globe. It was found that while little regard is given to the symbolism of the wedding cake today, its presence persists in some shape or form as it continues to evolve. Cultural variations were recreated to reflect personal interpretations of contemporary designs in addition to an original design of a contemporary-rustic American wedding cake.

Sexual health education varies in its delivery, efficacy, and comprehensiveness throughout each of the fifty states of the United States of America. These differences at the state level in the sexual health education curriculum lead to varying health outcomes for students during their time in school, as well as impact their future experiences. This study examines the sexual health education curriculum of two states located with very different perspectives on how sexual health education should be taught, Arizona and New Jersey. This study analyzes the efficacy of curricula mandated by each state by looking at the average age of initial sexual encounter, the teen pregnancy rates, abortion rates, and cases of sexually transmitted infections. The goal of this study is to show the necessity for comprehensive sexual health education in order to reduce risky behavior in adolescents' sexual encounters, increase awareness surrounding an individual's health, and improving health outcomes for all individuals, from adolescence into adulthood.

I argued that the development of the Anterior Inferior Iliac Spine (AIIS), an entirely novel trait unique to the hominin pelvis, signaled a critical transformation from facultative (occasional) to obligate (exclusive) bipedality. The species that were considered included Homo sapiens, Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi) and Pan troglodytes (chimpanzee); Ar. ramidus is believed to have been a facultative biped while both A. afarensis and H. sapiens were/are obligate bipeds, a stark contrast from the upright Bent-Hip Bent-Knee gait seen in chimpanzees, an organism that lacks an AIIS. It was found that the AIIS served a significant function in the advent of bipedality from Pan to Ardi because it allowed higher attachment for the rectus femoris muscle, a crucial knee extensor; however it is not heavily implicated in the transformation from facultative to obligate bipedality. Moreover, the appearance of the AIIS, first seen in Ardi, likely occurred following the lumbosacral changes that positioned the hominin body in an upright position so that the body's center of mass remained balanced over its supporting base. This provided the framework necessary to further select for organisms that had the AIIS and could walk upright, which perpetuated this change in the hominin lineage.

A plant based diet may seem intimidating and unwholesome, as it restricts major food groups, such as meat, dairy, and eggs from a diet. The foods restricted are, undeniably, major sources of protein in a diet. However, focusing mainly on four categories, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains, I have tested out plenty of recipes to create a cook book that is comprised of nutritious, protein filled, plant based recipes. The cook book is attached to a well-researched "guide book" for new vegans. The guide book contains answers to many asked questions, tips, and tricks to follow a plant based diet with ease. I have written a supplemental paper that includes and explains my blood work from before and after my plant based diet that ties together, and proves, that most nutrients, namely excluding vitamin B12, can be found through a proper and balanced plant based diet. A proper plant based diet can help regulate irregular balances and deficiencies, as I found through my own blood work. Through the research of different texts and scientific journals, I am able to conclude that a proper plant based diet can provide the same, if not more, nutrients that an animal based diet can, as well as provide a sustainable way of living. With an increase in the worlds population, planet Earth must be able to provide a home and food for 2 billion more people. A vegan diet is sustainable for the environment, in comparison to an animal diet, as it cuts down exponentially on the space, water, and food necessary to sustain animal meat.

Previous studies showed that rats preferred and also ran faster for multiple pellets than a single pellet of food. Here, we manipulated the rewarding effects of surface area occupied by food pellets on preference and running speed of rats trained on a T-maze. Twenty-two male adult Sprague-Dawley rats were trained to prefer one T-maze arm containing 30 food pellets scattered and the other arm with 30 pellets clustered. There was a significant preference for clustered food pieces over the scattered ones. The choice of the clustered food pieces may be explained by the optimal foraging theory to maximize energy gain. Therefore, larger surface area occupied by food pieces may be less rewarding when unnecessary energy is expended.

Thirty six percent of Americans are obese and thirty three percent are overweight; obesity has become a known killer in the U.S. yet its prevalence has maintained a firm grasp on the U.S. population and continues to spread across the globe as other countries slowly adopt the American lifestyle. A survey was compiled collecting demographic and body mass index (BMI) information, as well as Tanofsky-Kraff’s (2009) “Assess Eating in the Absence of Hunger” survey questions. The survey used for this study was emailed out to Arizona State University students in Barrett, The Honors College, and the ASU School of Nutrition and Health Promotion listservs. A total of 457 participants completed the survey, 72 males and 385 females (mean age, 24.5±7.7 y; average body mass index (BMI), 23.4 ± 4.8 [a BMI of 25-29.9 is classified as overweight]). When comparing BMI with the living situation, 71% of obese students were living at home with family versus off campus with friends or alone. For comparison, 45% of normal weight students lived at home with family.  These data could help structure prevention plans targeting college students by focusing on weight gain prevention at the family level. Results from the Tanofsky-Kraff (2009) survey revealed there was not a significant relationship between external or physical cues and BMI in men or women, but there was a significant positive correlation between emotional cues and BMI in women only. Anger and sadness were the emotional cues in women related to initiating consumption past satiation and consumption following several hours of fasting. Although BMI was inversely related to physical activity in this sample (r = -0.132; p=0.005), controlling for physical activity did not impact the significant associations of BMI with anger or sadness (P>0.05).  This information is important in targeting prevention programs to address behavioral change and cognitive awareness of the effects of emotion on over-consumption.