Food, food,
beautiful food
| Illustration by Cynthia Fisher |
The university’s food researchers have come up with a shocker: Canned food is just as good for you as fresh or frozen. Ken Samonds of the nutrition department has found that “it’s the ingredients you choose, not the form of the ingredients” that determine a recipe’s nutritional content. And often, he asserts, canned foods taste, smell and look just as good as home-cooked fresh or frozen items. Sure, some nutrients are lost in the canning process, but they are when we cook fresh foods too.
Farewell to mystery meat. Theme meals, a selection of “grab and go” items, along with a much more diverse menu, including ethnic (pad thai) and vegan (tempeh) foods on the menu – all these have combined to win an award for overall quality for the UMass Dining Services from the National Association of College and University Food Services.
And in another culinary part of the campus, microbiologist Robert Levin is working on ways to use ordinary spices such as ginger, oregano, and cloves to control bacteria in raw fish. So is your sushi going to come up tasting like marinara sauce? No, says Levin, the concentration of spices is so low that most people won’t be able to detect it.
