As parts of our planet continue to experience extreme heat waves, it is more urgent than ever for human-food interaction research to examine climate-resilient and sustainable food practices. Our work, conducted in the hottest city in the USA, focuses on solar cooking as a set of creative DIY activities that use extreme heat and mitigate human impact on the environment. We report on a summer-long study whereby 7 enthusiasts built solar ovens from scratch and experimented with solar recipes ranging from slow-cooked pork and chicken to bread, kale chips, brownies, jerky, and fruit rollups. Our findings depict solar cooking as a form of iterative DIY, which, through its challenges and creative workarounds, serves as a point of engagement with both food and extreme heat. We reflect on solar cooking as a climate-resilient food practice and conclude with design considerations for HCI to support solar cooking as a habitual community practice.

Focusing on food as a platform for everyday science, this paper details our fieldwork with practitioners who routinely experiment with preserving, fermenting, brewing, pickling, foraging for, and healing with food. We engage with these at-home science initiatives as community-driven efforts to construct knowledge and envision alternatives to top-down modes of production. Our findings detail the motivations, challenges, and workarounds behind these practices, as well as participants' hybrid lay-professional knowledge, and the iterative mechanisms by which their expertise is scaffolded. Our paper contributes to CHI's amateur/citizen science research by examining how social, digital, and physical materials shape scientific literacy; and to sustainable HCI by presenting habitual practice as an alternative (bottom-up) form of food production and preservation.