Whilst cooking can help achieve these goals, we want to shine the spotlight on the enjoyment of cooking, and the potential positives it can have for one’s wellbeing.

#CookingUpHappiness is a one-week online, collaborative social media campaign, gathering “happy recipes”, i.e. comfort food recipes, family recipes passed down, or simply recipes with happy memories, with the aim of building an online community recipe book filled with foods to make you happy. Social scientists will also be sharing their research on the area of cooking and wellbeing throughout the week. All of this can be found under the hashtag #CookingUpHappiness. At the end of the week (Fri 12th) we will pick one of the happy recipe submissions which will be cooked up live by a professional chef for everyone to cook along with online. After the week long event, everyone can access the freely available #CookingUpHappiness recipe book online.

This will be led by Dr Fiona Lavelle and Dr Niamh O’Kane from the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast