Teen Bakes His Way to Award
By Emmett Gartner
Food equity and baking have been joint passions for Bowie teen Michael Platt since he was in elementary school. Now, at age 16, Platt has won a $10,000 service-award to take his efforts to new heights.
The annual award, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, recognizes 25 youth that have an exceptional impact on their community or the environment.
“We were just overwhelmed with excitement,” says his mother Danita Platt, “especially for the initiatives that Michael would now be able to do with the prize money.”
He first started baking in his grandparents’ kitchen as a young child. He would help his grandmother make simple sweets like s’mores and ice cream, and enjoyed the careful process of measuring and mixing ingredients.
“It was like science,” said Michael, “it was really cool to learn the fundamentals about why things work.”
Eventually, he was handed the reins for baking a chocolate cake with his grandmother. The newfound responsibility made his love of baking flourish and he took his skills home to his hesitant parents.
“I was not super thrilled about [Michael’s baking] at first, because I was thinking there was gonna be flour and sugar all over the kitchen,” said his mom. But after apprenticing in his grandparents’ kitchen, Michael proved to be a proficient baker, and Danita passed on her knowledge, too.
At age 9, Michael’s baking was picking up steam when he was diagnosed with epilepsy. The diagnosis sidelined him from sports and other activities as he began medication to control his seizures. Baking, however, was still an option, and Michael threw himself into the craft more than ever before.
Around this time, too, Michael added a new purpose to his baking: food security. “I was working a lot around homelessness [at the time] and giving food to help people experiencing homelessness,” Michael said. “So the first thing that I did was pretty simple, and that was just giving cupcakes out to people in parks.”
His work towards food security at such a young age caught a lot of people by surprise, and Danita recognized it.
“I think one of my favorite things, is when people ask him, ‘Why? Why are you passionate about people getting enough food?’ And Michael says, ‘Because food is a right. Not a privilege.’”
Danita still remembers how Michael would phrase the problem. “‘There’s no reason that people shouldn’t be eating,’ Michael would say, ‘food is laying around everywhere.’”
By age 11, Michael knew that he wanted to start a bakery business to broaden his food equity work. A pair of TOMS shoes as a Christmas gift inspired him to emulate the company’s mission of donating a pair for every purchase. He founded Michael’s Desserts and began working with local charities to distribute his decadent donations in a similar one-for-one strategy. Some of his first collaborations included Shepherd’s Cove, a domestic violence shelter in Capitol Heights, and No Kid Hungry, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending child hunger.
Michael formed P.L.L.A.T.E. (Power, Love, Learning, and Access To Everyone) to help tackle food insecurity outside of the realm of baking. His delivery of non-perishable snacks to underserved youth carried on his mantra to “make sure that everybody has equal access to healthy food” and the knowledge to acquire and cook it.
When the pandemic struck, Michael felt compelled to take that mission a step further. “I wanted to teach people how to bake because we were all stuck inside,” he said, so he went to Instagram Live, filming himself as he baked desserts like chocolate mousse and carrot halwa.
For a young baker as multifaceted as Michael, the $10,000 Barron Prize will go a long way towards any one of his diverse initiatives, including a recent plan for a pay-what-you-can grocery store that builds off of the work of P.L.L.A.T.E.
“The Barron prize will allow me to do many more things that I’ve been wanting to do with my nonprofit,” Michael said, “as well as fund donations to other people that I work with, like No Kid Hungry.”