From working to improve the taste of grocery store tomatoes to combating killer pathogens in red meat, UGA's food science department plays a vital role in America's food industry. And students in this hot-button major are virtually guaranteed a job after graduation

B Y - D O U G - M O N R O E - (A B J '6 9)

ob Shewfelt is handing out a class assignment to 15 first-year students seated around a conference table. As the assignment is passed from student to student, they immediately begin to eat it.

"This tastes like cheap Easter chocolate . . . it's waxy," says Brittany Day, who votes thumbs down on Newman's Own Organic Milk Chocolate. But others feel differently about the treats Shewfelt has provided for today's lesson.

"I liked the Organic bar better than the Ghirardelli," says Arlene Perez.

Welcome to Chocolate Science, one of the University's most popular freshman seminars. The chocolate theme extends to both the text, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, and to the irrepressible Prof. Shewfelt, who changed into a Hershey tee from a vegetable-themed number he wore to a food groups class earlier in the day.

Shewfelt uses Chocolate Science class to recruit students to food science and technology, a hot-button major that provides graduates with almost certain employment. "They're swamped with offers," says Shewfelt, who notes that one of last year's B-average grads interviewed with six companies and received five job offers.

Recent food science grads who have enjoyed immediate success include Rob Brannen (MS '94), who designed a new Thickburger for Hardee's; Joy Dubost (MS '01), who created Brisk lemonade for Lipton; and China Reed (MS '98), who designed a Mardi Gras cheesecake product for Popeye's Chicken.

Everybody likes food, but Shewfelt, the department's undergraduate coordinator, is on a mission to clear up widely held misconceptions about the field of food science. The department's mail is sometimes addressed to the University's campus meal provider, "Food Services," and its students are constantly being asked if they're learning to be nutritionists.

"People just don't know what food science is," says Shewfelt.

An exception to that rule is freshman Kathryn Acosta of Savannah, who decided on her career when she was 9 years old and watching a Discovery Channel show about cool jobs. No. 6 on the list was "flavorist."

"That's food science," says Shewfelt. "A food flavorist needs to know a lot of chemistry. You're taking chemical compounds and putting the right ones in. That's what food scientists do."

Shewfelt stays busy as a recruiter because department head Rakesh K. Singh would like to increase undergraduate enrollment by 50 percent. Currently, food science, which is part of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, has 82 graduate students and 28 undergraduates. To aid in the recruiting process, Singh and his faculty have new attractions worthy of the attention not only of chocolate-loving freshmen but of serious food researchers from around the world. A tall, gregarious scholar, Singh leads tours of these new facilities with the enthusiasm of an upbeat rental agent. He has plenty to show off.

This fall, the University unveiled a new $4.2 million food science building addition (see photo above) and a $2.4 million renovation of existing facilities on South Campus. The addition was funded by FoodPAC, the Georgia Food Processing Advisory Council, a consortium of state agencies, colleges and universities, and private food industry groups. The links between UGA and the food industry are extremely strong, with food companies constantly coming through Athens to work with graduate students on highly secretive projects. Singh's department receives about $1 million per year in extramural funding. The Griffin-based Center for Food Safety, also under the CAES umbrella, receives three times that amount.

Singh leads visitors through the new addition, which includes four new state-of-the-art microbiology laboratories for food safety research. Three are also biocontainment level-2 labs in which researchers work with such serious food-borne pathogens as Listeria, E. coli 0157:H7, salmonella, and campylobacter. A single biocontainment level-3 lab has even tighter controls that will enable researchers to work with the bacteria that produce botulism.

The $4.2 million addition plays an important part in the historic agricultural college outreach function, providing meeting facilities for food industry groups, small businesses, short courses, certification classes, even individuals interested in such ventures as community canning.

As he crosses back into the four-decade-old facility, Singh is equally proud of the recent upgrading of food labs, kitchens, and 8,000 square feet of pilot plant facilities—which serve as miniature factories where students and industry groups can duplicate the conditions of a large food preparation plant while making smaller batches for research and taste tests. Much of the equipment has been donated by industry.

Singh walks past a modern smokehouse in the basement, where Food Science Club members will prepare the popular beef jerky they sell as a fundraising project. The pilot plants can produce anything from cheese to ice cream to smoked or marinated meats to snack food to canned goods to baby food.

"The main thing we are working on is value-added food processing, where we determine what the consumer wants and work with industry in applied research," says Singh, who grew up on his family's vegetable farm in India. "We do fundamental work as well as the applied work of the industry."

Singh came to UGA in 2001 from Purdue, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He says every place he goes has a mascot that begins with "B"—Badgers, Boilermakers, and Bulldogs. But UGA alumnus Rick Hull (BSA '79, MSA '81) corrects him.

"Don't worry about it . . . you're a Dawg here," says Hull, vice president and general manager of World Technology Ingredients, Inc., a marination technology company. Hull is a frequent visitor to campus who does a great deal of research with Romeo Toledo, who has written the text used around the world for food process engineering. Toledo and Hull present a short course each year on marination that is considered the benchmark for the industry. Hull thinks Singh has infused the food science department with a new spirit.

"He's a breath of fresh air who brings a different perspective," says Hull. "He is very, very progressive. In Dr. Singh, you can see someone who genuinely enjoys what he does and is looking for ways to improve upon it."

Hull is actively involved in recruiting new students to UGA, touting the school even when he teaches at Kansas State and Texas A&M. While most everyone associated with the UGA program seems to be having great fun, Hull cautions: "Food science is not an easy major. It ties together multiple disciplines: engineering, microbiology, the chemistry of the food product, and livestock production. We're the guys who understand what the ingredients are."

Undergraduate students take a heavy load of biology and chemistry and must decide between two paths—a science-and-engineering option or a business-and-industry track. The department's high academic standards were stressed during the new building's dedication, when graduate student Beth Bland, president of the Food Science Club, pointed out that UGA's food science grad program ranks No. 1 nationally among such programs in GRE scores and also No. 1 among UGA's graduate programs.

Bland, who grew up in Tifton, is exploring one of the most talked-about food questions in the South: Why have grocery store tomatoes lost their taste? For her thesis, she's comparing heirloom tomatoes grown from seeds with store-bought tomatoes in taste tests with scientific research panels.

"When the food industry selects tomatoes for their packing ability and shipability," says Bland, "inadvertently some of the flavor is selected out. Bland will help develop the language through which panelists can describe the tomato tastes they like or dislike so, perhaps, scientists can one day select the right qualities that will return taste to tomatoes in stores.

But improving the taste of tomatoes isn't the only important food work underway at UGA. The Center for Food Safety, which shares some faculty with food science and utilizes the labs in the new building, is trying to save lives and protect the nation from food-borne terrorism.

Mike Doyle, the center's director, is one of the world's superstars of food safety. The center is based at the CAES experiment station in Griffin, where its operations are strictly for research, with more than 60 personnel, from graduate students to postdoctoral scientists to faculty researchers.

Largely supported by the food industry, the center and its researchers received more than $3.1 million in grants, contracts, and gifts in 2002. It has an impressive board of advisors, including representatives of Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and PepsiCo.

Sitting behind a desk piled high with papers, Doyle has just returned from a meeting in Argentina, which leads the world in cases of hemolytic uremia syndrome—kidney failure in children caused by E. coli 0157:H7. One of the problems is that some parents put undercooked beef juice in their babies' bottles. They also let babies chew on undercooked beef while they're teething.

"I was asked to go down and talk about E. coli 0157 and what we know about its epidemiology and how to isolate it," says Doyle, who has been called in as an expert to help with such crises as the E-coli outbreaks at Odwalla juices and Atlanta's Whitewater Park. While Doyle is in Griffin, Joseph Frank and Mark Harrison oversee the new labs in Athens that focus on food-borne microbial illnesses.

Doyle chairs the science committee of the Food and Drug Administration and his center recently received a $600,000 FDA grant to work on pathogens that could be used by terrorists. The grant specifically funds research by Doyle's group and scientists at Georgia Tech to develop a rapid test for detecting a pathogen that causes the plague. Doyle can't discuss details of the terrorism threat because of government confidentiality requirements, but he notes that a former faculty member at the Center for Food Safety, Robert Brackett, now heads the bioterrorism program for the FDA as director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Doyle has many rising stars on his food safety staff, including Tong Zhao, a postdoctoral scientist who has worked on a promising process that greatly reduces the carriage of E. coli 0157 by cattle. UGA holds the patent. Larry Beuchat oversees more than $1.5 million in research projects in the field of fruit and vegetable safety—especially sprouts. Ynez Ortega won international acclaim for her work on a parasite found on imported Guatemalan raspberries. Doyle also chairs a food forum committee for the National Academy of Sciences that brings high-level government officials together with executives from the food industry to talk about current issues.

"The No. 1 issue is obesity . . . it's an epidemic," says Doyle. "We've got to get people to do more exercising, but beyond that it's eating fewer calories. You've got to combine the two. The industry has gone to great lengths trying to cut fat out of foods—and I'll tell you, people don't eat that stuff. It doesn't taste good. Most people won't buy it. So the solution isn't just to eliminate fat, but to reduce calories. Maybe not just fat, but sugar and fat, and not just eliminate it but take it in gradation so people can adjust to it."

The day after the food forum met on the obesity issue, Doyle was invited to join a discussion on obesity with nutrition experts and U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. Like most of the scientists who study food and the diseases that it can bring into the home, Doyle gives practical advice about what to avoid.

"I do not eat raw oysters and I wouldn't recommend anybody else eat them either," he says. "And alfalfa sprouts have a big problem with salmonella and E-coli 0157."

Despite his trip to Argentina, Doyle still recommends beef—but with certain precautions: "With ground beef, it's got to be thoroughly cooked. With steaks, you can cook the surface well and still eat the inside medium rare."

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