Graduating Project: Kristen Shelly’s Recognition of Novel Colors in Fruit-Flavored Beverages
by Kristen Shelly
When a banana with vibrant yellow skin and mottled age spots sits in the produce section, it sends a clue to the shopper that this banana is best for baking or immediate gratification. This banana will decidedly not wait for breakfast in three days. Without color, such snap decisions to eat, store, or toss food would be nearly impossible. Appearance is the first thing consumed during a meal, and anyone who has sat down to an otherwise delicious dinner of white rice, baked chicken, and cauliflower knows the added value of herbs or the pop of a carrot.
Vision as a sensory complement to taste first interested me in Experiencing Food through the Senses (MET ML 715). What most caught my attention was how oddly colored foods could captivate or disgust consumers. This led to a final paper that situated and deconstructed the myth of blue food. While writing this, sensory studies formed the bulk of my research: scientifically designed tests and surveys that tease out how color influences flavor. I was struck by how many studies disregard the potential importance of these novelty colors. With all of the food products congesting grocery shelves that boast “fun” colors such as blue-raspberry and pink lemonade, couldn’t these color and flavor pairs form an acceptable response in these studies?
Some more recent work has taken an interdisciplinary focus, looking at culture and age rather than assuming that all participants share the same experiences. For my thesis project I folded this approach into a taste test and survey of common fruit flavors to ascertain color and flavor pairings between a younger and older population. My hypothesis was that a younger demographic with more exposure to novel-colored foods would classify these color and flavor pairs as acceptable or appropriate, despite the labeling of such pairs as inappropriate in many studies.
Well, my hypothesis was wrong! But it raises so many more interesting questions. The younger group more often chose conventional colors for their responses, and with more strength than the older group. For some flavors, the older group lacked cohesion in their replies, with color selections all over the map. Surprisingly, the only novel color pair to take the spotlight was pink with lemon, in the older group. Was pink lemonade more popular in the past? With the semester coming to an end, someone else will have to tackle that. What’s certain is that I will be overanalyzing food colors long after finishing the program.
Student Profile: Emily Olson
Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
What did you do before enrolling in the program?
In a former life, I was a corporate communications specialist for FedEx Services at the headquarters in Memphis. I managed strategic events and initiatives (involving employees, executives, or customers) for the corporation and enjoyed the benefits of travel throughout the United States.
After five years, I decided to turn in my badge and move to Chicago to attend culinary school at Kendall College. For my internship, I joined Frontera Foods, a specialty Mexican foods company owned by Chef Rick Bayless and business partners. I assisted the culinary director and marketing manager with quality assurance testing, recipe development, and flavor research projects. I also spent several weeks in the kitchens of Topolobampo and Frontera Grill learning the fine art of mole, picking up "kitchen Spanish," and understanding the complexity of the Mexican cuisine. Upon graduation in 2008, I assumed the role of associate culinary and marketing manager for six months due to the marketing manager's maternity leave. Managing the portfolio of Frontera's salsas, frozen pizzas, and cooking sauces in addition to developing private label products (from concept to hitting a store's shelf) for national retailers was a huge task, but I learned a great deal about the specialty foods business and the inner workings of food manufacturing.
After Frontera Foods, I joined a boutique consultancy, Food Marketing Support Services, as a project manager and later was promoted to operations team leader. The company uses sensory science and consumer research to develop or tweak foods and beverages for Fortune 500 companies. Having no prior experience in sensory science, the learning curve was uphill and shed some light on a whole new way of viewing food R&D. After a turn of events due to a job loss, I dusted off the application I'd been eyeing for a while, decided it was time to apply to BU's Gastronomy program, hope for an acceptance, and move to the East Coast.
Why are you studying Gastronomy?
I always wanted to know how food connected cultures and why we eat what we eat. The Gastronomy program offers coursework in areas that fill in the blanks from my undergraduate and culinary school studies. Exposure to a liberal arts education was new to me, and it's opened my eyes to theories, frameworks, and writers that I didn't know existed.
What would you like to do after you graduate?
There are 57 things I would like to do, but its difficult to project what that picture will look like in May 2012. A PhD interests me, but I would prefer for that to be fully funded. Furthering my wine education would be stellar as would working for a start-up specialty food company or creating my own company from scratch. I've always wanted to combine business with food. It's just a matter of putting the pieces together.
Favorite Gastronomy course so far:
This might be an easy way out, but all of my classes have been my favorite. Each course connects to another or introduces a new idea. For example, the Theory and Methodology class provided a foundation and basic understanding of ethnography which lead me to enroll in Carole Counihan's ethnography course for a deeper dive.
Practicing Gastronomy rescheduled for May 4
In order to allow people to attend Neil Coletta's going away gathering before Wednesday classes, we have rescheduled the Practicing Gastronomy discussion. Our chat with Chefs Collaborative program director Leigh Belanger will be held the following Wednesday, May 4, from 4:45 to 5:45pm.
Please drop in on Neil in room 117 from 5 to 7pm on Wednesday, April 27 and wish him well as he prepares to begin graduate studies in Buffalo, New York.
Food news roundup: April 22
From around the web this week, a few bites of food news. Feel free to to share thoughts, reactions, and other items of interest.
Farm-to-table-to-farm: Restaurants and composting
Ethical tomatoes: A new curriculum for migrant workers
Wild and free, but is roadkill safe to eat?
Republican budget includes overhaul of food stamps
Why food is still cheap in America
Outside of the Classroom: Kristen Richards and Cooking Matters
by Kristen Richards
In 2004, my friend, an Americorp VISTA for the Eastern Massachusetts chapter of Share Our Strength, asked if I would be willing to teach the cooking skills I had learned in professional kitchens on a volunteer basis for Cooking Matters, a sub-organization of Share Our Strength. She explained what would be expected of me: I’d teach a group of people at high risk of childhood hunger and malnutrition (including low-income parents and their children) healthy cooking on a budget. My interest was immediately piqued. Although this seemed like an ideal non-profit venture for me given my love for food, I had no idea how much this organization would come to mean to me.
After seven years, I have taught the Cooking Matters (formerly known as Operation Frontline) course to eight groups of parents, teens, and children. During the courses, a nutritionist and I travel to a Boston neighborhood (Chelsea, Roxbury, Charlestown, and East Boston, to name a few), teach a group of 10 to 16 participants basic nutrition, and then demonstrate how they can cook healthy, tasty, and culturally appropriate food on a limited time and dollar budget. Throughout the course of the six weeks, the participants’ understanding and appreciation for their health seem genuinely transformed. In week one we get to know the participants, most of whom declare that they “hate cooking” or “only like fried foods,” but by week six, almost all of them are excited about cooking and are proud to show their families what they have learned from Cooking Matters.
While the mission to end childhood hunger in the United States can seem hopeless at times, Cooking Matters chips away at this problem by improving the nutrition of smaller communities across the country. Additionally, by providing participants with knowledge rather than food supplies, those in need are better equipped to make a positive change in their diets and lifestyles. They’re also more likely to do so when they understand that fresh and healthy food can be enjoyed by all, even with limited time and funds.
Cooking Matters is constantly looking for more volunteers to fill the chef and nutritionist roles for their courses. If you’re interested, or have any questions, feel free to contact me at kricha612@gmail.com.
Practicing Gastronomy with Leigh Belanger
Practicing Gastronomy is a series of informal discussions with professionals from all corners of the food and drink world. Here’s a preview of our next guest.
The intangible benefits of Leigh Belanger’s work for Chefs Collaborative aren’t too shabby. She gets to work for something she believes in, striving to expand the sustainable food landscape by sharing knowledge and forging relationships among culinary professionals. But she admits she doesn’t mind the occasions on which they get to celebrate their efforts. Working with chefs, she says, means good eating.
Chefs Collaborative is a Boston-based nonprofit network that connects chefs around issues of food sustainability. Leigh’s been their program director for four years, overseeing and implementing the organization’s educational and community building efforts. Before joining up with Chefs Collaborative, Leigh served, managed, and cooked in restaurants, and also worked as a freelance food writer. She’s kept up the multitasking. She’s close to finishing her MLA in Gastronomy, and she recently submitted her first cookbook manuscript. She runs a holiday cookie business, too.
Leigh will be the next participant in our Practicing Gastronomy discussion series. Please join us for a conversation about her work with a food-focused nonprofit, plus her array of other culinary pursuits.
EVENT INFORMATION:
Wednesday, May 4
808 Commonwealth Avenue
Room 122
4:45 - 5:45pm
Food news roundup: April 15
From around the web this week, a few bites of food news. Please feel free to comment with thoughts, reactions, or other news and events of interest.
LA Times editorial ponders the 'fat tax' and other options for tackling medical costs
Gulf seafood deemed safe but still under scrutiny
Chicago school bans lunches brought from home
Could 'BPA-free' products be just as unsafe?
Food policy think tank announces National Food Day in October
Alumna profile: Irene Costello
by Khalilah Ramdene
What does it take to grow a successful food business? Ask Gastronomy alum Irene Costello, and she’ll tell you it requires dedication to an idea and not being afraid to ask for help.
Costello is one half of Effie’s Homemade, a successful packaged food company that has garnered a list of impressive accolades over the past year, including a gold sofiTM Award in the cookie category, and the title of Best Sweets in Massachusetts from Cooking Light. Recently, Costello and Effie’s co-founder Joan MacIsaac, a fellow graduate of Boston University’s Culinary Certificate program, were featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, in an article that profiled seven female food entrepreneurs. The growing list of accomplishments is evidence of the company’s steady success and a sign of good things to come.
Costello made the switch from a career in finance to food and has never looked back. She credits the BU Gastronomy program with allowing her to earn her degree in the evening at her own pace, as well as offering her the opportunity to learn professional kitchen skills without enrolling in a four-year program. Her favorite class in the program? Food History, a course that parallels the nostalgia associated with Effie’s Homemade. Their first product, an oatcake that’s both a cookie and cracker, was inspired by a fourth-generation recipe from MacIsaac’s grandmother, who made the oatcake for her family on special occasions. Costello is also a contributing writer for Edible Boston, where she often adds a historical bent to her writing, pulling from the knowledge she gained while at BU.
Up next for Effie’s Homemade is a line of savory crackers inspired by the flavors of the Mediterranean. And Costello’s got a word of advice for Gastronomy students with dreams of owning their own food company: “You now have access to the network. It opens doors that you come from the program. If you want to take a product to the market and you’ve never done it before, it’s huge learning curve. Find someone who’s done it and ask for help."
In Celebration of Civic Fruit: The Boston Tree Party Inauguration
by Mayling Chung
At the Boston Tree Party’s inauguration this past Sunday, somebody from the crowd shouted, “Live tree or die!” and many people replied with laughter. The person’s play on words and its reception really fit what we were gathered there for: the ceremonial kick-off of the Boston Tree Party, a project that creatively uses language and metaphor around apple trees to promote positive changes in social health. Their goal is to have self-elected delegations plant 100 pairs of heirloom apple trees across greater Boston in the next couple of months. The Boston Tree Party will then place all the trees on a map and collectively create a decentralized urban orchard, in the hopes that the people involved will come together, across boundaries, as parts of a whole.
Through a combination of urban agriculture and conceptual art, this multilayered campaign engages people in activities centered on the heirloom apple trees. The Inauguration was such an event, in which the first pair of whips, or 1-year old single stem trees, was planted at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston. First, the youngest children were asked to help break ground as a symbol of the long-term investments being made. As the tree’s roots were placed into the ground, we learned about apple trees, apple tree planting, and the significance of apple trees in Boston history at a site just off the Boston Harbor, near where the Boston Tea Party took place hundreds of years ago. There were 80 to 100 people in attendance, many of whom plan to plant and care for a pair of apple trees, so the physical planting served as a demonstration of what’s to come. Volunteers from the crowd participated in a playful toast, which involved putting a piece of toast on the tree, pouring sparkling cider on the ground and in cups, and wassail, which involved a sequential cheer and banging pots and pans while moving around in a circle. Note: For those of you wondering what wassail is outside of this context, it typically takes place in the winter, involves lively and noisy festivities, and drinking a lot of alcohol!
Both Inauguration trees, a Grimes Golden and a Golden Russet, are American Heritage varieties, and were planted as a pair because apple trees must cross-pollinate in order to produce fruit. Cross-pollination is one of the ecological principles that the Boston Tree Party uses in reference to the partnerships they hope to foster. On that note, stayed tuned for the details of a BU planting party next month, as the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies has generously welcomed us to be involved with their pair of apple trees. Additionally, there is still a bit of time before the sign-up deadline of April 15, if you or anyone you know wants to join the party! For more information and to see what fruit this project has to bear, visit the Boston Tree Party’s website.
Graduating Project | Barbara Rotger’s How to Read a Recipe Box: A Scholar’s Guide
by Barbara Rotger
Both my grandmothers’ recipe boxes sit on top of the bookshelf in my office, and the first paper I wrote as a student in the Gastronomy program was an analysis of these, plus I few others I have acquired as a result of an eBay habit. More accurately, this first paper was an attempt at such an analysis. Looking back at it, I see that it was not my best work. The truth is, recipe boxes and their kin — manuscript recipe books and recipe scrapbooks — are not easy sources to work with, if you can find them at all. They usually lack any kind of organizational structure, including indexes and page numbers, and often feature crumbling newspaper clippings or illegible handwriting.
You might ask, “Why not just use cookbooks?” After all, a number of scholars have done very interesting work in this area, especially with community cookbooks. There are some very good reasons to look at recipe collections instead. To me, this difference can be summed up as follows: cookbooks say, “This is who we would like you to think we are” while recipes collections say, “This is who I am.”
Working my way through the program, I periodically returned to the idea of using personal recipe collections as sources and developed my own informal methods for approaching them. As a student in Professor Glick’s cookbook seminar I realized that there was a need for a more structured approach. My thesis project represents an attempt to do just this: develop a comprehensive methodology for analyzing personal recipe collections as historical, cultural and gendered artifacts. More