A hearty bowl of dal, a shortbread cookie and a Rice Krispies treat make for a pretty typical weeknight meal — if a little heavy on the desserts. With a few key ingredient swaps, it’s also a meal of the future.
On April 1, a group of University of Vermont food systems researchers gathered at the UVM Horticulture Research and Education Center (aka the Hort Farm) in South Burlington to share their work as part of Public Philosophy Week. The talk — “Eating Our Way Towards Biodiversity and Climate Resilience?” — included a tasting of those dishes with the presenters’ ingredients of choice: mung beans, buckwheat and mealworms.
Each of those ingredients has the potential to solve a problem of the current food system. But they’re hardly staples of the Vermont diet, and they come with their own problems to solve, including growing at scale, processing, maintaining cultural relevance and getting over the ick factor. Addressing those problems is the work of UVM’s Climate Kitchen initiative, of which the researchers are part.
As the team of professors and graduate students shared their work, a dozen attendees eagerly sampled the recipes they’d prepared: spicy dal made with mung beans instead of lentils; buttery buckwheat-flour cookies; and marshmallowy treats that were half Rice Krispies, half dried mealworm — and clearly billed as such, despite it being April Fools’ Day.
According to director Amy Trubek, the kitchen part of Climate Kitchen should be part of the conversation about planetary health. It’s not enough to think about innovative, sustainable ingredients when you could be cooking with them.
“If we want to address climate change, we have to think about our choices in relationship to our food practices,” Trubek told Seven Days after the event. From food purchases and cooking to eating and waste disposal, “kitchens are the place where all those choices happen.”
The Climate Kitchen initiative — funded by UVM’s Food Systems Research Center — grew out of the university’s teaching kitchen a few years ago, Trubek said. At first, she and research and pedagogy director Cynthia Belliveau focused on envisioning a new state-of-the-art kitchen full of induction burners, meters to measure water usage, dehydrators, Instant Pots, flour mills and other high-tech equipment — some of which they already use in the Nutrition and Food Sciences department. While they’ve put the new build on hold due to “a variety of factors,” Trubek said, they are still fundraising, and she hopes the “kitchen of 2050” will eventually happen.
Meanwhile, the 20 to 25 faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community members involved in Climate Kitchen are more of a “network of activity,” she said, sharing everything from conversations to hands-on research.
That activity includes a Nutrition and Food Sciences course called Foods for Planetary Health, public outreach events such as demos for students at UVM’s dining halls, a pop-up meal at Waterman Manor on April 28, and the Public Philosophy Week talk. Climate Kitchen is also developing an online course — potentially a nondegree or certificate offering — that would guide participants through cooking at home while teaching them about food agency and sustainable diets.
Trubek and Belliveau, who led the talk, attributed their methodology to the model of emergent inquiry pioneered by 20th-century philosopher John Dewey, himself a UVM alum. Also referred to as “design thinking,” his framework shapes the creative, experimental approach Climate Kitchen researchers use to think about complex problems.
“If it doesn’t work, you keep moving,” Belliveau said.
And, Trubek added, Climate Kitchen’s ethos is all about inviting people in — rather than staying in an “ivory tower of research.”
In her mung bean research, PhD student Alexis Yamashita has relied heavily on the perspective — and taste buds — of the local Bhutanese-Nepali community. While mung beans are a main ingredient in plant-based products such as Just Egg and meat alternatives, they are also traditional in many Asian cuisines. Her project works with Burlington’s New Farms for New Americans to grow the versatile, sustainable legumes, which are usually imported from Thailand and China.
Yamashita’s goal is to offer members of the Bhutanese-Nepali community access to local mung beans that give them a sense of home. That involves conducting sensory evaluations and ensuring that their preferred mung bean varieties grow well in Vermont through a separate seed breeding program with associate professor Daniel Tobin, who also attended the Public Philosophy Week talk.
It’s a lot of relationship building, Yamashita told the audience. But mung beans prove that foods of the future can be familiar, given the right cultural context.
They can also be incredibly unfamiliar and even off-putting. PhD student Patrick Shafer is more accustomed to that sort of response: He works with mealworms.
“The biggest problem is getting over the disgust component,” Shafer told Seven Days in 2021. “But disgust is a learned emotion, and it can be unlearned.”
In his early research, Shafer focused on incorporating the high-protein insects into staple foods such as falafel, which could be distributed to UVM’s dining halls, with low environmental impact and big waste-recycling potential. At the suggestion of another food systems student, he branched out into snacks.
At the talk, Shafer served Rice Krispies treats two ways: classic marshmallow and chocolate. He blitzed the mealworms up for the chocolate version, but they were more recognizable as bugs in the original.
“I like to think of them as chocolate,” Belliveau said, picking up a square to take a bite.
“Sure,” Shafer said with a laugh.
“There’s something to the fun factor,” Belliveau replied.
She seemed to be right. Around the table, everyone at least took a taste, with the exception of those who had shellfish allergies (mealworms can provoke a similar immune response) or were keeping kosher (a question for a rabbi). By the end of the talk, most had finished the sweet, crunchy treats.
Mung beans and mealworms require opposite approaches, Trubek said. One works with ingrained habits; the other asks people to change how they eat.
Trubek’s own research on buckwheat, a gluten-free pseudo-grain that’s edible in groat or flour form, is “early days,” she told the Public Philosophy Week audience. She and graduate student Kevin Markey, a trained chef, have been experimenting with substituting buckwheat flour in the King Arthur Baking cookie recipe she served, or for some of the almond flour in a financier.
For buckwheat, the problem isn’t how it tastes. As the group tasted the crumbly cookie on Tuesday, attendees guessed at its flavorings: orange zest? Lemon?
“No,” Trubek said. “Just buckwheat.”
A surprised murmur rolled through the crowd.
“Buckwheat is magical,” she continued. “It’s got a lot going on.”
In pancake and porridge form, buckwheat was once a staple of New England cookbooks. It’s still grown in Vermont, but almost entirely as a cover crop, and these days, it appears mostly in recipes borrowed from French or Eastern European cooking, or in Japanese soba noodles. But across the border in Québec, buckwheat is still actively grown and consumed.
So, Trubek wonders, “Why aren’t we eating it?”
She believes the issue could be processing, especially at scale. Wheat and other more popular grains are just easier to deal with. Buckwheat grows well in Vermont, but there’s no specialized mill to turn it into something edible, so it gets plowed under.
There’s potential there, Tobin chimed in, and a potentially straightforward solution.
“Could we get a mill?” he asked. “And put it on the Hort Farm?”
Processing buckwheat right on campus would be a big step toward determining its usefulness as a climate-resilient crop. And it would mean a lot more magical cookies.