Recently, global concerns surrounding food have been headlining in the daily media. Here at the College of ACES, the world's challenges in food, nutrition, and sustainability come as no surprise--in fact, much of the work that goes on in our classrooms and laboratories speaks directly to such concerns, and points to the fact that the College of ACES has a unique role as the starting point for powerful solutions that integrate scholarship, government, and grass-roots efforts. The recent work of Professor Bill Helferich and his team of faculty and students (Dr. Juan Andrade, Dr. Niki Engeseth, Eliana Rosales) is a case in point.
With many children in the remote regions of Honduras suffering from deficiencies in micronutrients, Dr. Helferich is partnering with Zamorano, also known as Escuela Agricola Panamericana (EAP) —a major Latin American university whose motto is "learning by doing" —and Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the First Lady of Honduras and coordinator of the Healthy Schools Program. The goal is to develop an easy-to-prepare, good-tasting, economical, and micronutrient-dense fortification technology for staple foods such as rice.
Initial work on the project took place in ACES laboratories in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. Then, using EAP-Zamorano as a base of operations and Mrs. Zelaya’s support as an entry point to engage with local government officials, Dr. Helferich and his team worked in Honduras—first checking the product’s ease of preparation with the local women who are responsible for preparing school lunches, and then conducting taste-tests with the second- and fourth-grade children at local elementary schools.
The results? The children could not detect the presence of the new extruded product when it was mixed with rice, and the cooks gave it a thumbs-up, too. Now Dr. Helferich is back in his ACES laboratory, engaging with colleagues and making plans for regular long-distance discussion groups between the ACES undergraduates he teaches and their Latin American counterparts at Zamorano when classes resume this fall.
Solutions to challenges as big as world hunger are not easy. But I believe the work going on at ACES is a model for the kind of innovative and cooperative problem-solving that will be necessary for sustainable success.
