Community News
FIND HALAL FOOD IN YOUR AREA
www.qns.com I LIC COURIER I SEPTEMBER 2018 27
Photo courtesy of Sage Music
THE HUNGRY4HALAL APP
HELPS
BY EMILY DAVENPORT
A group of students at Queens Col-lege
that allows users to learn about
and find Halal food in the area.
The app, which is called Hungry-
4Halal, launched on Aug. 19 and was
developed by five students who were
enrolled in Professor Gina Keatley's
International Cuisine class.
During one of the class's "Eat and
Tell" session, Keatley noticed that
when her Muslim students spoke about
Halal dishes to their classmates, it
sparked wider conversations about
culture and religion and allowed the
students an opportunity to act as cul-tural
ambassadors.
“This is how the Hungry4Halal idea
was born,” Keatley said. "The app fills
a need for the user, as well as its
creators. Users have an easily ac-cessible
way to learn about and enjoy
Halal food, and the creators have an
opportunity they might not otherwise
have had to educate others about
aspects of their culture.”
The Hungry4Halal app offers
a dine-in and eat-out option. The
dine-in section offers recipes and
a search function so users can find
recipes by title or ingredient while
the eat-out section uses a mapping
function to locate the user and pin-point
the nearest eateries offering
Halal selections.
The app also features a video li-brary
of the team presenting cooking
demonstrations as well as videos from
around the web.
“When I think about the best ex-periences
I've had working on teams,
what comes to mind is the feeling of
satisfaction and a sense of accom-plishment,"
said Afroja Mustofa, a stu-dent
working on the app. "I was very
motivated to work on the app because
I gained valuable tech and business
experience. It's also something I did
for my community. By working on the
app, I was able to share my knowledge
of and experience with Halal food. I
think our community will see long-term
benefits in sharing aspects of
our culture with the world.”
The app is available for free on iOS
and Android.
The student team that developed
the app includes Afroja Mustofa, Kashfi
Fahim, Sharmin Joya, Christopher Al-modovar
and Rumana Rumman. The
students involved are a part of the
school's partnership with Simmer, a new
tech and food collaboration program
between the Queens College Tech
Incubator (QCTI) and the school’s Food,
Nutrition, and Exercise Sciences De-partment
(FNES) that unites students
from multidisciplinary fields to create
food- and health-related technologies.
“What an extraordinary demon-stration
of learning through diversity,
something that we are well acquainted
with at Queens College,” said Félix V.
Matos Rodríguez, president of Queens
College. “A vital component of a di-verse
learning environment is a faculty
skilled in bringing students together in
ways that demonstrate there is more
that unites than divides us.”
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