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Fall 2024

Food

Spring 2006

Cooking is its own reward

Betsy Rogers ’89 had her eureka moment while sitting in a cooking class.

It was 2000, and the Seattle-based public relations specialist had recently lost her job in a downsizing. Instead of jumping back into a new job, she decided to freelance and take her time in deciding what to do next.

“I did like being self-employed, but I didn’t like what I was doing,” she says. What she really enjoyed was food, though. With some extra time on her hands, the Washington State University public relations graduate signed up for a cooking class.

“So I was thinking about what things really get me … » More …

Spring 2006

Cool, Soothing, Lucrative Mint

If you drive through Central Washington’s mint-growing country in mid-summer, you’re likely to be overwhelmed by the scent of mint rising like an exhalation—at once delightful and inescapable—from the surrounding fields. In fact, your senses might deceive you into believing that not much has changed in the last 30 years or so. But during that time Rod Croteau, professor at the Institute for Biological Chemistry at Washington State University, has been doing research that has helped make Washington mint plants produce more and better peppermint.

Peppermint plants produce menthol, which is a terpene, as are all the other compounds Croteau researches. Terpenes are chemicals put … » More …

Fall 2002

Keeping our food safe

If you’re worried that our food supply might be the next target of international terrorists, you probably needn’t be, says Barbara Rasco, associate professor of food science and human nutrition. Rasco’s research centers on bioterrorism and the safety of our food and water supply.

“I don’t think the events of September 11 mean there’s any increased risk to our food supply,” she says. Domestic ecoterrorists and bioterrorists are more likely to target our food supply than are foreign entities, she says. “The risk from them hasn’t changed.”

A lawyer as well as a food scientist, Rasco has worked on the prevention of international terrorist incidents. … » More …

Spring 2002

Better chow

As anyone who has stir-fried vegetables knows, quickly cooking foods at high temperatures makes for crisper, fresher-tasting foods than using slow-cooking methods.

So it is that over the past six years, associate professor of biological systems engineering Juming Tang and his associates have been working on new technologies to produce high-quality, ready-to-eat military rations (MREs) and “humanitarian daily rations” like those recently air-dropped in Afghanistan.

With conventional methods, lengthy processing times are necessary to kill harmful bacteria that can thrive even in hermetically sealed packages. Depending on package size and type of food, traditional  processing can take anywhere from one to two hours. By the … » More …