Food science team puts food to the test
Who knew Saccharomyces cervesea and Saccharomyces carlsburgensis are the two micro-organisms used in beer making? What about the fact that carbon dioxide keeps the thin wall of pop cans from crushing?
These are some of the questions the Utah State University food science team answered in the annual College Bowl two weeks ago in Sacramento, Calif. The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) held the College Bowl for food science teams from seven universities in the Western region of the United States.
According to the Web site, www.ift.org, the IFT Student Association College Bowl Competition has tested the knowledge of student teams from across the United States since 1985. They have been tested in the areas of food science and technology, history of foods and food processing, food law and general IFT/food-related trivia.
One team is selected in regional competitions to compete in the finals at the IFT annual meeting. General Mills and IFT have sponsored the competition since it first started.
USU competed against the University of California Davis (UC-Davis), California Polytechnic State University of San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), University of Idaho, BYU, Chapman College and Washington State.
Team members representing USU included graduate students Bradley Taylor as team captain, and Balasubramanian Ganesan. Mihir Vasavada, also a graduate student, and seniors Weston Johnson and Clayton Pehrson, rounded out the team. All the team members are studying food science.
Taylor said food science is not dietetics, but rather the technology around food safety. Food scientists analyze food, how it works and the bacteria that grows in food.
“You can have two graduate students and two undergraduate students,” he said. “There’s four competing students and one alternate. Mihir was the alternate.”
“It’s actually a really big deal for the schools,” he said. “Teams practice throughout the year for the competition – it’s just one day in a year and then the qualifying teams go on to the national competition.”
Johnson said, “We practiced once a week, all semester, since January.”
Taylor said, “We just try to use it as an opportunity to review from the undergraduate and graduate courses that we’ve had. You never know if your preparation is actually getting you towards helping your performance, but it’s a good review of what you’ve learned and I think that’s the way we approached it.”
Johnson said, “According to Bala [Granesan], the purpose of our study sessions is to get depressed.”
Taylor said, “He thinks depression is a good motivation for us to study more, so the worse we feel about what we know then the more we’ll study.”
He has competed twice with BYU as an undergraduate student and three times with USU.
“I have been involved with the competition for five years in a row,” he said.
In the culinary combat, Taylor said each team was given ingredients; some they had to use while others were optional. The USU team had to use strawberries, avocados and spinach.
The object of the event was to use the ingredients in a meal, he said. The strawberries were used as part of the dessert and the team made a white sauce out of the avocados and spinach.
Taylor said the competition was like an exam with multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, definitions and lists.
“The competition was fun, a lot more fun than I thought it would be,” Johnson said
The score was 50-26 in the final round with USU as the champions.
Taylor said, “We actually beat them pretty good.”
June 17, the team will travel to Anaheim, Calif., to compete in the national competition. He said if the USU team wins there, they can retire.
When a particular team wins nationally, they retire with nationwide recognition and $1,000 awarded to their club. A USU team also won the competition in 1991.
“We honestly believe that our department is one of the best kept secrets about Utah State,” Taylor said.
USU was selected to be the university that has the dairy research for the whole Western United States.
“We have opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research because we’re home of the Western Dairy Center,” he said. “We want to encourage people to at least investigate it as a major – if they’re interested in [medical] school or dental school, or if they have a science interest – this is a good major they could check out as an option. We love it over here, but we just wish people came to visit our building more often than just to get ice cream.”