Our Inspiration 🌸
As environmentally-conscious women of color, we enjoy looking for vegan recipes on social media, but we often come up short when trying to find authentic new recipes from our own cultures. And, even when we do find a recipe that might seem authentic, it’s usually from a white influencer. In fact, the vegans with the largest followings on social media, who are offered the most sponsorships and deals, are overwhelmingly white. Thus, we wanted to create this site to bring attention to vegan recipes and foods that come from unique cultures around the world!
What VeganValued Does🌱
VeganValued has three different components to it. First, it informs users of the dangers of white veganism, which is a type of veganism that excludes people of color. Then, it introduces users to grocery stores that carry ingredients from their own communities and cultures using a map encoded within the website. Finally, it inspires users with recipes for cultural cuisines that were created by women of color.
How We Built VeganValued 💻
We used HTML to build the website, CSS to style it, and Javascript to ensure that the site functions efficiently and effectively. Additionally, we used the Google Maps Javascript API to smoothly incorporate an interactive map into our site. This map is crucial to helping users visualize grocer locations, as we marked and provided descriptions for various South Florida grocers on the map.
Challenges We Ran Into ❌
Our greatest challenge was figuring out how to incorporate the Google Maps API into our site. Although one of our team members had prior experience with this API, we are all quite new to both web development and programming in general, so it was quite difficult to make the map appear, and especially hard to mark the map with grocery locations.
Accomplishments that We're Proud Of 🏆
We are extremely proud of using our computer science skills to create a website that promotes a recreational activity we love––cooking––in an inclusive way. To be honest, none of us are very proficient in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, but through collaboration and research, we are very proud to say that we created a visually appealing website that has useful functionality, even if it is simple.
What We Learned 📖
The most useful skill we learned is how to create a functional––not just aesthetically pleasing––website by using JavaScript to allow the user to interact with our site. However, due to our lack of experience in web development, we also learned a fair amount about CSS properties that can be styled (such as border styles and gradients) and CSS classes/IDs. Overall, this was an incredibly enriching experience and we really enjoyed working together on this project!
What's Next for VeganValued? 📈
We would love to incorporate a login system that allows people to save the recipes and locations they enjoy and add their own. We would also like to make the map include grocers all over the world, rather than only in the area where we are from (South Florida). We want to continue spotlighting women of color who create such exquisite meals for us to enjoy!
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