Marissa Pelino

Hello! My name is Marissa Pelino, and I am a sophomore in Champlain's Degree Design Lab program. My current threads are Data Science and Mobile Applications Development, but my academic interests extend to psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. For my contribution to this project, my focus was on nutrition, specifically around the affordability of nutrition in crops. In my research, I aimed to answer the following questions. What do specific nutrients do and why do we need them? What local crops are the most nutrient dense? What produce items are our most affordable sources of nutrients? What I ultimately found were that some of the most esteemed nutrient dense crops were rather expensive, while unexpecting foods proved themselves to be the cheapest sources of essential vitamins and minerals.

As a Burlington local, a lover of good food, and an aspiring chef, this project means a lot to me. I believe that food is medicine, and that everyone deserves the right to eat with the purpose of maintaining both their physical and mental health and wellness without financial repercussions. By sharing the results of my research alongside my classmates', I hope to make eating for wellness as doable as possible for the Burlington community and beyond.