A cooking magazine for a special audience

Sue Hoss of Des Moines, Iowa, is designing a digital cooking magazine aimed at an underserved audience: people with developmental or intellectual challenges. Sue, a partner at Main Dish Media, also founded a coffee shop that teaches developmentally challenged people how to be baristas and do some simple baking. There she saw that “the kids demonstrated a real interest in cooking and were quite accomplished at basic tasks.” Spurred by the students’ eagerness to learn how to cook, Sue set out to find cookbooks for people with developmental challenges. However, she discovered that there wasn’t much available.

That prompted Sue and her partners to put their multimedia talents and years of culinary education to use in designing Look, Cook, and Eat. The format will be a monthly, downloadable digital magazine for tablets or computers. “The material will be presented largely as images and videos–there will be very few words (in the event that reading is difficult). There will be audio voice overs of ingredients and tools to help identify items, and the videos will be able to be easily stopped and started for those who want to cook following the video.”

The Look, Cook, and Eat Kickstarter site notes that they plan to roll out the digital magazine in mid-2015. Subscriptions are estimated to be between $20 and $25 per year.

Photo used with permission from Look, Cook, and Eat