BEYOND THE PLATE

From biochemistry and nutrition to history and anthropology, UNT food scholars are carving out new paths of discovery.

As an expert in plant biochemistry, UNT professor Ana Paula Alonso (top left) knows a lot about plant behavior, but she’s learned throughout her career to expect the unexpected.

“Plants don’t stop to amaze me,” Alonso says.“Tey are these little chemical factories that produce our food, produce our oxygen — they do so much for us that we don’t even know.”

In the UNT BioDiscovery Institute’s Environmental Science Greenhouse, Alonso’s team of researchers spend hours each week documenting a collection of novel soybeans as part of a project that could one day prove soybeans as a viable protein alternative. In UNT dining halls, chefs and administrative staf are designing menus and operations to be more environmentally sustainable and opening their spaces for research about food literacy and choice. And across academic disciplines at UNT — the only comprehensive Tier One research university serving the North Texas region research is developing food as a lens to be more inclusive in public planning and access, better understand human behavior and build deeper perspectives of culture, collective identity and history.

Te plants UNT biochemists are examining aren’t typical soybeans found in the top-producing felds of the U.S. upper Midwest or Central-South region of Brazil. From seed to maturity, they are monitoring soybean plants that have been modifed in a United Soybean Board-funded research project focused on increasing the seed’s oil content and nutritional value.

Soybeans may not be a common vegetable consumed directly on American dinner plates, but they play an important role in the

U.S. food supply as a primary component of poultry and livestock feed. And in the future, soybeans could be more regularly consumed by humans as a healthful protein alternative based on the research underway at UNT and other institutes around the country.

“Our team wants to improve the oil content without afecting the yield for farmers and protein because soybeans contain all the essential proteinogenic amino acids that are indispensable for health,” says Alonso, who is associate director of UNT’s BioDiscovery Institute.

Alonso is co-principal investigator on the project, and along with former UNT research scientist Cintia Arias (top right) and research assistant Duyen Pham (bottom right), they are part of the nationwide team of interdisciplinary researchers studying soybeans. Alonso’s lab is one of the few in the world that uses metabolic fux analysis, which is a way to quantitatively examine the processes cells undergo to sustain life, to study the biochemical composition of plants, a leading reason Arias chose to work at UNT following her doctoral studies in Argentina and Austria.

“Transgenic plants — those whose DNA have been genetically modifed — take a really long time to grow and to analyze,” Alonso says. “We want to learn from the process along the way.”

UNT biochemists are following the fow of carbon in each plant. Teir results can help inform soybean breeders on how to further tweak their plant cultivars to reach the goal of improved oil content and nutritional value. Long-term applications of their research could introduce a soybean fortifed with the same Omega-3 fatty acids found in fsh.

Alonso’s colleagues in the BioDiscovery Institute also are making new discoveries in plant science that will lead to future breakthroughs in more sustainable crops such as wheat, corn and cofee to meet the market needs.

“Te world’s population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050 and global climate change is expected to reduce agricultural productivity,”Alonso says.“Tese factors will only increase global issues related to food security, making research solutions vital for our future.”

Living Laboratories

Food is more than sustenance. UNT Dining Services, the largest self-supported food service department in North Texas, is dedicated to making food as fresh, local, delicious and healthy as possible — without compromising its environmentally sustainable practices. Tat commitment takes continuous innovation such as opening the nation’s frst all-vegan collegiate dining hall and frst collegiate dining hall in Texas to be free of the “Big 8” food allergens — as well as staying up-to-date on the latest best practices in the industry like it has done with the hydroponic garden, Mean Green Acres, that reduces the university’s carbon footprint. UNT is helping set industry standards and collect insight to inform changes as a member of the groundbreaking Menus of Change University Research Collaborative.

Launched in 2012, UNT was one of the early members of its research collaborative in 2014, which is co-led by Te Culinary Institute of America and Stanford University. Menus of Change is working to realize a longterm, practical vision integrating optimal nutrition and public health, environmental stewardship and restoration, and social responsibility concerns within the food service industry and the culinary profession.

Tis past October, UNT hosted the annual meeting of the research collaborative, which includes a membership of 69 college and university food service and academic programs across the nation.

“We are cultivating the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet one student and one meal at a time,” says Peter Ballabuch, executive director of UNT Dining Services.

Additionally, the collaborative is studying food choice and behaviors right on campus. Priscilla Connors, registered dietitian and an associate professor in the College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism, leads Menus of Change-tied campus studies.

“Menus of Change has opened up our dining halls as these living laboratories to collect data in real time,” says Connors, whose other research includes a USDAfunded study on food choice and waste in school cafeterias and upcoming studies on consumer literacy of food labels.

Past research includes how food label language impacts food choice and student understanding of unhealthy versus healthful fats in foods. An upcoming project will focus on students’ knowledge of cafeine content in commonly consumed drinks. Dining Services has hired hospitality management student Nancy Hinojosa to serve as an undergraduate research fellow helping manage future Menus of Change studies at UNT.

Lessons Of The Past

Other scholars are taking lessons of the past to help inform the years to come.

“Food history is really at the core of food studies research at UNT,” says history professor Michael Wise, an environmental historian of food and agriculture in modern North America with the forthcoming book Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. “Much of the research is looking at the past as a sort of reservoir of alternative models and solutions to current problems.”

Wise and history professor Jennifer Jensen Wallach, a historian of African American food, identity construction and racemaking, are leading eforts to grow UNT’s food studies program, which ofers an interdisciplinary food studies certifcate for undergraduates as well as a $5,000 graduatelevel food history fellowship funded by Te Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

“Food is a building block to all human behavior,” says Wallach, who has been both author or editor for a number of books that use food to talk about broader cultural, economic, racial and social issues. She’s currently studying food and disabilities, especially for people with autism.

Te fruits of engaging a multidisciplinary focus on food research at UNT is evident in a project Wise is working on with his history colleague Sandra Mendiola García and faculty members Nathan Hutson and Laura Keyes in public administration. Tey are planning to turn underutilized green spaces on campus into micro gardens growing historically relevant food crops to the North Texas area following the ancient Mesoamerican concept called milpa.

“Using the milpa system on campus will serve as a bedrock for understanding diferent ways of seeing our landscape as well as fuel inquiry about the intersection of food, identity, community and environment,” Wise says.