Wow!
The search for food safety Students from Aalto and the University of Nairobi are examining food’s value chain from maize fields to the milk glass. Text: Outi Puukko Photos: Laura Silvanto “LET’S START with the cow video!
How many had milk today at breakfast,” asks design student Hilda Ruijs, who is taking part in Aalto University’s IDBM (International Design Business Management) programme. The next morning, a team of students from Aalto and the University of Nairobi intends to ask 120 food security professionals the same question at Nairobi Innovation Week. The Slush-inspired event is being arranged for the fourth time now, and it will be attended by a broad group representing Finnish businesses, organisations and university actors. Just this dress rehearsal to go, and then Ruijs and Nairobian engineering student Duncan Mageto will be prepared to hear what final feedback the client, the Natural Resource Institute Finland LUKE, has to give. They need to fit the best bits about working together for three weeks into a 15-minute presentation. The sitting room wall is dotted by seventeen A3 sheets filled with colourful Post-it notes. The team has studied each link of the food value chain, and the field work component took them to meet with small farmers, milk producers, feedstuff suppliers, street food vendors and researchers. “We met with all these people and tried to put ourselves in their shoes,” Hilda Ruijs tells a practice audience consisting of her teammates.
Student team visiting the Jasho Feeds company. Aalto student Loi Tran (l.) and University of Nairobi student Unelker Maoga discuss feed production.
“Aflatoxin cannot be removed from the milk – even processing will not change this. A large portion of the milk we here in Kenya consume contains these toxins. People are just unaware of this,” says social scientist Benjamin Atika from University of Nairobi’s team. The team has ascertained that maize traders, who also store maize and influence its resale, are of key importance to finding a solution. Toxic maize sells well because of its low price. “One packet of it is right there in our fridge,” Loi Tran, a student of entrepreneurship at Aalto, says and points to the kitchen. Often, only bigger farms have the negotiating power and ability to test for aflaTracking a hidden toxin toxins. Smallholders are in a challenging LUKE has given the students free hands situation because the tests are expensive, to utilise the results of the FoodAfrica in addition to which their entire crop is research project: the team’s goal is to at the mercy of an increasingly unstable identify fresh ways to tackle aflatoxins, climate. The rain is torrential right now carcinogenic compounds that can lie hid- – the rainy season is starting early, while den in staple commodities. Aflatoxins there was barely any rain at all one year are caused by certain moulds, and they earlier. can occur in, for example, maize that has “Farming is wholly dependent on rainbeen stored in damp conditions. Using fall and the people are dependent on spoiled maize as fodder for dairy cattle farming. If you have sowed seeds to gerwill lead to toxic milk. minate and the rain comes at the wrong 44 / AALTO UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE 22
time, you have to start the whole thing over. There’s not many factors in this chain that farmers can influence,” says IDBM student Maaria Tiensivu. Her service design background has helped Tiensivu to articulate even the more complex issues. “This has been eye-opening for me. Everything I ever knew about plants – that they require sunlight and watering – got replaced. You never water plants, just let the rainy season handle it,” she laughs. There have been plenty of fresh insights, as the ten-strong team includes people with backgrounds from many different scientific disciplines. “This project has helped me understand they way in which others think, which will benefit me in working life as well. It has, in fact, been more like work than studying – in a good way,” Tiensivu notes.
Learning in a new way
The Aalto team has been engaged in background work for this project since November 2017, while the Nairobi students got involved through a new course this February. “Field work in particular has been very