Cookin' the competition

In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 90 percent of food waste occurs after harvesting, during packaging and at distribution. To combat this waste, the Institute of Food Technologists’ Developing Solutions for Countries Competition made the theme for their 2019-2020 competition, “Create a nutritious food product that helps to reduce post-harvest fruit and vegetable loss in Sub-Saharan Africa.” MSU’s Promoting Agricultural Transformation Holistically team (Team PATH), a group of graduate and undergraduate students working in food sustainability, took home several awards in the competition.

Team PATH is made up of students in agroecology, nutrition and dietetics, restaurant management, sustainable food systems and organismal biology. The team focuses heavily on creating sustainable food products for indigenous communities, currently focusing on Kaffrine and Dakar, Senegal.

Doctoral student Edwin Allan and undergraduates Haley Darlinton, Amber Clifton, Emily Raber and Cullen Kinnare won first place at the competition for their peanut nutrition bar. The team worked alongside female Senegalese farmers to create the nutritious and sustainable snack bar. “It felt great to win against schools like Cornell and McGill who are world renowned for food science and have won the competition in previous years,” said Allan.

Graduate student Sharon Li also won first place in the sensory science division poster contest for her work on sensory texture evaluations and the carbon-footprint impact of Montana-made lentil crackers. Along with the esteem of bringing home first-place awards for MSU came financial compensation, and the team plans to donate a portion of their winnings to help women in Senegal build new ovens.

For the students and their faculty advisor Wan-Yuan Kuo, who holds a doctorate in food science and human nutrition from the University of Illinois, the most significant part of their work lies in what they are able to give back to the communities in Senegal. “Using food science to support indigenous food sovereignty” is the mission of the team’s work in Africa, Kuo said. The peanut bar allows the women to use wild and domesticated plants like baobab fruit, cowpea, corn and peanuts that grow in abundance in Senegal. This allows the women to turn a better profit for their crops. Kuo said the bar, “...not only serves the purpose to gain economic value, but also serves as a vehicle to deliver healthy nutrition, food identity and a care for the wild land and indigenous crop diversity.”

Continuing the work after winning first place at the international competition is the second generation of Team PATH. Undergraduate student Ed Shaw outlined the team’s next steps. With a primary school in Dakar, Senegal, the PATH team hopes to “develop a curriculum… giving the kids access to food education and giving them the means to produce food that the kids can take home or eat,” Shaw said. The team’s goals are to provide nutritional enhancement and knowledge and to teach school-age children the value of sustainable food systems. “We realized that working with adult farmers solves their immediate needs, but working with younger children has the potential to implement a more sustainable solution in their future,” Kuo said.

For this new team of students, limited funding and the coronavirus pandemic are obstacles when looking at travelling to Senegal. “The future is definitely going to depend on funding, that’s the biggest thing,” Shaw said. The team turned in a large grant proposal on Sunday, Sept. 20, to fund their work in Dakar. Even if the team secures grant approval, they worry if travel to Senegal will be safe during coronavirus.

Despite global setbacks and a push for funding, Team PATH has immense goals for their work in sustainable agriculture and indigenous food systems. While the world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic, communities in both America and countries like Senegal remain desperate to find nutritional and profitable food sources. For the award-winning students of Team PATH, achieving food security for the indigenous people of Senegal is the top priority.