A fungus may help create gardens to feed long-distance explorers. Danielle Lamberson Philipp

In January, botanist Simon Gilroy and his lab sent tomatoes into space, their sixth plant-based experiment with NASA on the International Space Station. Nicknamed TASTIE — short for Trichoderma Associated Space Tomato Inoculation Experiment — the project aims to give researchers a better understanding of how plants grow without gravity.

“Plants know up from down, right? They don’t have a brain or anything like that, but shoots grow upward, and roots grow downward. They clearly are using directional information,” Gilroy explains.

But remove gravity from the equation and things get wonky. And stressful. That’s where the team is hoping a common fungus, Trichoderma harziannum, will come in. On Earth, the fungus is known to be beneficial for plant growth, making plants hardier in the face of stressors. In space, it may help grow food for long-distance explorers.

“The moon and Mars — where I think we’re going to go — they’re a long way away,” Gilroy says. “You’re going to have to be able to be self-sustaining at a significant level.”

A photo taken circa 1973, when the McDonald’s was five years old. Today, it’s a post office. Wisconsin Historical Society

For almost four decades, the corner of State and Lake was home to a beloved institution where UW students could get a quick bite. No, not the lunch counter at Rennebohm Drug Store, though that had its fans. Across the street and one door down, at 441 N. Lake, stood McDonald’s, offering those in need a quick infusion of all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, and sesame-seed buns.

This McDonald’s franchise appeared on the campus scene in 1968, the same year that the Big Mac was added to the menu at all of the chain’s restaurants. Ray Kroc himself — the man who turned, ahem, Scottish cuisine into an American phenomenon — made an appearance at the opening of the company’s 1,031st outlet. Between then and 2006, the spot served the campus community with uncounted tons of beef, one quarter pound at a time, as well as McMuffins, McNuggets, and the famed french fries that were invented by Edwin Traisman, onetime administrator of the UW Food Research Institute.

By the 21st century, the Lake Street McDonald’s was showing its age, and its owners felt it was too expensive to renovate. They sold the site to the U.S. Postal Service, which has operated a post office there ever since.

The departure provoked mixed emotions. Then-alder Austin King ’03 told the Badger Herald that he wouldn’t shed any tears over the loss of McDonald’s. But Charlie Burns ’09 responded that losing it was upsetting. “That McDonald’s used to be my pre-football game meeting place … to get breakfast,” he said. The McD’s on Regent Street was too far away.

The post office still stands at 441 N. Lake, but the area around it is in flux. The city closed the Lake Street Campus Garage in December 2023, aiming to turn the lot into apartments, parking, retail space, and a bus station. The nearest McFlurry is still a mile away — 21 minutes by foot or seven minutes to the drive-thru.

For Adam D’Angelo, encountering the mysterious pawpaw tree sparked a lifelong passion for plant breeding. Courtesy of Project Pawpaw

Adam D’Angelo MS’23 was 10 years old when his older brother took him to visit a research orchard at Cornell University and pointed out a tree with long, teardrop-shaped leaves: Asimina triloba, commonly called the pawpaw, which produces North America’s biggest native fruit.

The younger D’Angelo was confused. “But I know all the fruits,” he insisted. Like most people, he’d never seen, much less tasted, a pawpaw. The roughly palm-sized green ovals are characterized by creamy, yellow-orange flesh. In the wild, the flavor of pawpaws ranges widely, from a blend of mango and banana to marshmallow or even vanilla ice cream.

For D’Angelo, encountering that first, mysterious pawpaw tree sparked what would become a lifelong passion for plant breeding. After completing an undergraduate degree in plant biology at Rutgers, he joined the lab of UW–Madison plant and agroecosystems professor Irwin Goldman as a graduate researcher. D’Angelo worked on crops such as the Badger Flame beet, which bred sweet, colorful vegetables mild enough to eat raw.

“The best advice I got from Irwin is that people eat with their eyes,” D’Angelo says. “Food is such a human experience, and people are drawn to the inherent beauty of plants. So if you can emphasize that, it really helps with people’s willingness to try something new.”

Now, D’Angelo has launched Project Pawpaw, an ambitious effort to breed commercial pawpaw trees to produce more consistent and appealing fruit with a longer shelf life. Wild pawpaw fruit has an especially brief season and goes bad quickly, which makes it impossible to transport long distances and keep in grocery stores. “If we can fix the shelf-life issue and a few other small [plant-breeding] issues, we could have a product that can be grown locally, provide economic viability to small farmers, and provide community members with access to high-quality, delicious fruit,” D’Angelo says.

D’Angelo is preparing to plant 1,500 pawpaw trees this spring at a research orchard in southern New Jersey that he’s been carefully tending and preparing for several years. “We’re really only one or two steps away from having a great fruit crop for North America,” he says. “Pawpaws can be grown using fewer pesticides or fertilizers than conventional fruit crops. They are adapted for life in this climate, meaning we can grow tropical-tasting fruit right here, instead of shipping it from across the world.”

Project Pawpaw is funded by sales of pawpaw-themed merchandise and tree seedlings. D’Angelo also offers reliable, science-backed resources to novice pawpaw home-growers. To learn more, visit projectpawpaw.com.

The thing about being an undergraduate is, you are not usually tuned in to fine dining. Generally, undergrads have neither the time nor the money to be gourmands.

With the money I saved, though, I would reward myself with a slice of fudge-bottom pie or a Babcock ice cream cone from the Union — or better, a hot fudge sundae if I rode my bike out to Babcock Hall. And every so often, I would invest in a glass of good red wine and a slice of Queen of Sheba cake at the then-reigning monarch of State Street dining, the Ovens of Brittany.

My good friend Becky Harth ’82, who waitressed at the Ovens while in school, remembers the restaurant’s morning buns, as well as other local favorites: “Rocky Rococo slices, sprout and cheese sandwiches on grain bread, and tap beer — never from bottles.” It’s a representative selection from the early 1980s. There are beginnings of locavorism side by side with remnants of hippie dishes and the pizza and beer beloved by 20-year-olds everywhere.

Although UW–Madison doesn’t have a dish named after it, the school has plenty of reasons to distinguish it as a unique culinary zone. And besides, who wants to eat Harvard beets anyway?

In the Beginning

The first dining hall on campus was in South Hall, one of the original dormitories along with North Hall. Scott Seyforth PhD’14, current assistant director of residence life, says the kitchen was overseen by the wife of math professor John Sterling.

Many students, however, lived off campus and would have needed to find food elsewhere. Following a fire in Science Hall in 1884, North and South Halls were taken over for classroom instruction, and there were no dorms for men until the opening of Tripp and Adams in 1926. Women continued living on campus in Ladies Hall, which was later renamed for UW president Paul Chadbourne — in a kind of reprimand by President E. A. Birge, who wanted to punish Chadbourne for his lack of enthusiasm for coeducation on campus. While no official menus or recipes have survived from this earliest era of the UW, it’s reasonable to assume students ate meals the way other Madisonians did during the period. Recipes from early residents were collected by Lynne Watrous Hamel in 1974’s A Taste of Old Madison. In the latter half of the 1800s, soups might range from those familiar today, like black bean, to a corn soup made with plenty of venison — or, barring the availability of that meat, rabbit, squirrel, pigeon, or duck.

Hamel includes a recipe for popovers from President Birge’s wife, Anna; cornmeal/pumpkin pancakes from Emma Curtiss Bascom, wife of president John Bascom; and crullers from the wife of Thomas Chamberlin, who followed Bascom as president. These doughnuts would not be unfamiliar to the decades of students who have haunted the Greenbush Bakery on Regent Street for treats fresh out of the fryer.

Desserts tended to be spice and fruit cakes or fruit pies; cookies were likely to be ginger, oatmeal, or sugar. Chocolate, that staple of today’s desserts, was not produced for the mass market until the late 1800s.

Carson Gulley: Influencer

The next era of UW cuisine begins in December 1926 with the hiring of Carson Gulley as head chef of the new Van Hise Refectory, which opened in conjunction with the first lakeshore dorms that year. Don Halverson MA 1918, then director of dormitories and commons, discovered Gulley working in a resort up north and hired him on the strength of his cooking.

Gulley was influential not just in campus kitchens, where he paid special attention to cook training, but in Madison as a whole. As an African American, he fought Madison segregation laws for years along with his wife, Beatrice, in their attempts to buy a house.

The couple encountered so many barriers that the UW built the Gulleys an apartment in the basement of Tripp Hall before they finally managed to buy a home in the Crestwood subdivision.

He and Beatrice had a pioneering cooking show on Madison television in the 1950s, and many area families and UW graduates still use his method for roasting a turkey — no basting required. Still, Gulley is most often remembered as the creator of the UW’s fudge-bottom pie: a graham-cracker-crusted, vanilla-custard-filled, whipped-cream-topped concoction distinguished by a bottom layer of intense chocolate. Some sources claim the recipe came from two chefs at the Memorial Union, and both the dorm cafeterias and the Union have served the pie for years. As its originator, Gulley wins out in popular memory, and his recipe for the pie is included in his cookbook Seasoning Secrets and Favorite Recipes of Carson Gulley.

Celebrity chef Carson Gulley, creator of the UW’s fudge-bottom pie. UW Archives S15057

Gulley, who died in 1962, was honored when the Van Hise Refectory was renamed Carson Gulley Commons in 1966. It’s now called Carson’s Market within the Carson Gulley Center.

The Mysterious Maizo Salad

Since the Memorial Union opened in 1928, it’s been in the business of serving daily breakfast, lunch, and supper from fast student sustenance to fine dining. For much of the 20th century, the Georgian Grill was a table-service, linen-tablecloth restaurant on the second floor, while Tripp Commons was a cafeteria-style gathering place for faculty and students (in addition to the Rathskeller and the Lakefront Cafeteria on the first floor). Ted Crabb ’54, director of the Memorial Union from 1968 to 2000, says the Georgian Grill was a “very elegant dining room” used to entertain visiting guests and was frequented by the public before theater performances. Faculty would bring their families there for dinner in the evening.

Tripp Commons often saw faculty and their students meeting at lunch, pulling tables together, and “discussing the issues of the day,” says Crabb. “There was a sense of community.”

Many Union menus from Tripp Commons and the Georgian Grill from the 1940s have been saved in the University Archives. Lunches usually included a lighter option like a sandwich or creamed chipped beef on toast, but there were also heartier entrées that could serve as dinner.

Dinners included an entrée, vegetable, fruit, roll, and beverage. Meat was the star of the show — veal, lamb, pork chops, steak, roast beef, chicken. There was the occasional inclusion of smoked beef tongue or one-offs like a chicken liver omelet with creole sauce. Global cuisine was limited to chow mein and “Italian spaghetti with meatballs and parmesan cheese.”

Crabb says the most popular meal at the Georgian Grill was steak, and the most requested dessert was fudge-bottom pie.

Salads were also in rotation. Lots of them. In addition to a spinach salad that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s dining rooms, there was “banana and salted peanut,” “devilled cabbage,” many aspics and gelatins, and some whose ingredients are likely lost to time, like a perplexing “Maizo” salad.

1955 cookbooks with recipes for “veal birds.” UW Archives

Most dishes say “1940s America” more than they say “Wisconsin” specifically, although the state’s cheeses are sometimes called out as part of a menu item. “Fresh red plum with Wisconsin cheese and toasted crackers,” “Wis. blue cheese with t. crax.,” “apple pie with Wisconsin cheese,” and “grilled Wisconsin cheese sandwich” all make appearances. The recipe for the mysterious “veal birds,” an entrée that crops up frequently in the 1940s Union menus, is included in both a 1955 and a 1965 version of a cookbook for Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall. It collected recipes “for all girls of Liz who will wish to recapture an important part of dorm life — mealtime,” as the introduction to the 1955 edition puts it. Veal birds are strips of veal steak stuffed with a bread-cube dressing, rolled, and baked.

Another milestone from midcentury was the Babcock Dairy Store, which was an innovation included in plans for the new Babcock Hall in 1950. The small dairy bar on Linden Drive was intended primarily for campus patrons, as the university did not want its product to compete with commercial ice cream producers.

Comfort Food

Campus dining underwent many changes during the reign of Rheta McCutchin ’56, food service director from 1958 to 2002. In the 1970s, McCutchin was instrumental in creating an eater-friendly, à la carte model. She said the other Big Ten schools thought the UW was crazy for going to individual item choice and pricing, but the system served the university well for many years. McCutchin was also instrumental in making food available at a wider range of hours and introducing more global flavors into the menu.

When Julie Luke began working for dining services in 1985, many of Carson Gulley’s original recipes were still in rotation. “Probably up to 1995 or so, there were a lot of remnants of cuisine that started with Carson,” says Luke, who retired in 2017 as associate director.

By the mid-1990s, though, even modifying the old recipes wasn’t quite working. “That older-style food just wasn’t what the students were looking for,” Luke remembers. “But I think the basics of what Carson stood for — the quality of ingredients, his technique, his commitment to teaching students — have stayed.”

Luke says student favorites tended to be “comfort food,” like macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes and gravy. And they were good — made from scratch.

Luke mentions a popular mint brownie from the mid-1980s. The minute the words are out of her mouth, that brownie materializes in front of me like the dagger in front of Macbeth. Dense and fudgy, it had a layer of vivid mint-green frosting. A recipe for “Creme de Menthe Bars” is included in McCutchin’s three-ring binders held in Steenbock Library, with the suggestion that green food coloring and extra mint extract can be substituted for the creme de menthe. It sure sounds like the brownie I remember. The bad news for the from-scratch crowd: its base ingredient is Pillsbury Tradition Brownie Fudge Mix.

I was unable to track down another dessert bar I think I remember from that era. It had a sweet crumb crust so caramelized it might as well have been pure brown sugar, topped with a mix of nuts, dried fruits, granola, and chocolate chips. “It was very sweet,” I tell Luke, probably unnecessarily, but she doesn’t recall the dessert. Anybody?

Personal Kitchens

Peter Testory, the current director of dining and culinary services, emphasizes the attention that his team gives to student suggestions when it comes to recipe development. “First and foremost, we continually gather student feedback,” he says. “What are the flavor profiles that they’re looking for?” This evolves constantly with each new group of students.

In the last five years, Testory has seen students looking for bolder and spicier flavors, but interest in food doesn’t stop at how it tastes. “We’ve seen a huge increase in interest in where the food comes from, what manufacturers we have relationships with, and the practices of those manufacturers,” he says. “How do they treat their employees? What humane practices do they have for animals? The whole process.”

That includes a reusable to-go container program. Students exchange a token for the container, which can then be returned to be cleaned. Upon return, the student gets a new token.

Testory sees the dining halls as being students’ “personal kitchens,” and so it is crucial to “make sure that we are in tune with what menu offerings they want.” That can mean the availability of grab-and-go items as well as plenty of options for what looks like an old-fashioned sit-down dinner. Today, boneless chicken wings are one of the most consistently popular items.

Dining areas are now called “markets,” and the choices available are like a cafeteria times four. Stations serve customizable pastas, pizza, noodle bowls, stir fries, and multiple vegetarian and vegan options like dal, black bean burgers, and tempeh with red peppers and broccoli rabe. There’s even vegan beer-battered cod for a traditional — or maybe not so traditional — Friday fish fry.

“We’re starting to see more and more interest in our plant-based vegan and vegetarian options — grain bowls, Beyond burgers, plant-based chicken nuggets and patties,” Testory says.

Yet even though the markets are full of dishes that Carson Gulley might not recognize, such as a barbecue jackfruit sandwich or imam bayildi, there are, too, daily options that could make Gulley — or most alumni — believe they’d been transported back to the campus of an earlier era. Beef sirloin tips. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Roasted brussels sprouts. Herb-crusted pork loin. Homestyle mac ’n’ cheese. And yes, even a slice of fudge-bottom pie now and then.

How to Make UW–Madison’s Fudge Bottom Pie

Ingredients

Crust:

• 4 ounces graham crumbs
• 2 ounces brown sugar
• 2.5 ounces melted butter
• Pinch of salt

Custard:

• 16 ounces whole milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 5 ounces granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 ounce cornstarch
• 1 ounce butter (note that this is not mentioned among the ingredients in the video, but do include it!)
• 2 ounces high-quality dark chocolate, chopped

Whipped cream:

• 16 ounces heavy cream
• ¼ cup powdered sugar
• ½ teaspoon vanilla

Garnish:

2 tablespoons of shaved chocolate

Making a fudge-bottom pie with Ruthie Schommer, University Housing pastry chef. Photos by Bryce Richter

To Make the Crust

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl, by hand. Pat down into a standard 9-inch pie pan and bake at 325 for 12 minutes. Cool completely.

To Make the Custard

Combine milk, half the sugar, salt, and vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk together cornstarch and sugar in a small bowl, then whisk in eggs. When milk mixture is at a simmer, temper in egg mixture and bring just to a boil, whisking constantly. Remove from heat and whisk in butter until fully incorporated. Strain.

Remove 8 ounces of vanilla custard and combine with the 2 ounces of chopped dark chocolate immediately; the heat of the custard should melt the chocolate.

Cover remaining vanilla custard with plastic wrap, so that the wrap is fully in contact with the surface of the custard, to prevent it from forming a skin. Refrigerate 6-8 hours or overnight before assembling the pie. Cover the chocolate custard likewise and also refrigerate until pie assembly.

To Assemble the Pie

Whip cream, powdered sugar and vanilla in a small mixer bowl fitted with the whisk attachment until light and fluffy.

While the cream is whipping, spread the chocolate custard mixture evenly onto the bottom of the pie crust.

Fold about a quarter of the whipped cream into the vanilla custard, then spread evenly over the chocolate custard layer.

Finally, top with remaining whipped cream. Garnish with shaved chocolate.

UW Marching Band director Corey Pompey ushers in a new era for the Badger Bash at Union South. Bryce Richter

Fifty years ago, Badger Bash — the ultimate pregame festivity for Wisconsin football fans — was born.

When the original Union South opened in 1971, former Wisconsin Union manager Merrill “Corky” Sischo noticed a sea of Badger fans passing through the building for food and drinks before home football games. He connected with Mike Leckrone, then the fresh-faced director of the UW Marching Band, and together they threw the first official Badger Bash outside Union South in 1972.

The event started as a low-stakes opportunity for the marching band and pompon squad to warm up in front of a small audience. But by 1974, more than 3,000 fans were packing Union South’s grounds. They came for increasingly razzle-dazzle performances as well as brats and beer. In the early years, the event extended to after the game, with polkas and jazz by the Doc De Haven ’58 band in the Carousel room.

“As the crowd continued to grow, the performance became more ‘formulated’ but was still very relaxed,” Leckrone said shortly before his retirement in 2019.

Today, Badger Bash’s recipe largely remains the same. The free tailgate begins two and a half hours before every home football game, hosted by local celebrity emcees. Classic Wisconsin tailgate fare is still served, alongside more than 100 food and beverage options. (Bloody Mary bar, anyone?) The marching band, UW Spirit Squad, and Bucky himself take the stage around 90 minutes before kickoff with a preview of the halftime show and a plentiful helping of hip-swinging UW hits. The event is rounded out with kid-friendly activities and rivalry-related competitions. And fans without a ticket to the game can stick around and watch on the big screen at The Sett.

Badger Bash has become so beloved that the new Union South was practically built for it. The southwest plaza is roughly double the size of its predecessor, and architects specifically designed the space to accommodate the band’s staging needs.

In 2019, Corey Pompey made his public debut as the marching band director at the home-opening Badger Bash. The band delighted the crowd with the usual Badger hits, including the “Beer Barrel Polka.” But Pompey also introduced contemporary songs from the likes of Adele, The Killers, and Cardi B. Welcome to the new era of Badger Bash.

Eating less beef helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. diet by more than 35 percent over 15 years. Danielle Lamberson Philipp

Changing dietary patterns in the United States are leading to lower emissions of food-related, climate-warming gases, and half of the reduction can be attributed to eating less beef. The intriguing findings come from a UW study recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Every choice we make as consumers has a climate impact, which is often measured in terms of its “carbon footprint” — that is, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the process of producing a good or providing a service.

“The greenhouse gases of our food system are one of the largest portions of our footprint as a nation,” says Clare Bassi MS’21, who led the study.

Globally, food systems contribute about one quarter of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. That includes emissions associated with food production, processing, transportation, cooking, and waste. Bassi focused on what individuals can most easily control: what they choose to eat. She analyzed eating habits reported by more than 39,000 U.S. adults in a national survey from 2003 to 2018 and calculated the average daily greenhouse gas emissions associated with diet. Different foods have very different environmental impacts: animal products and processed foods are often much more carbon-intensive than minimally processed and plant-based foods.

In just 15 years, the carbon footprint of the U.S. diet fell by more than 35 percent. Lower consumption of beef, dairy, chicken, pork, and eggs accounted for more than 75 percent of the observed diet-related carbon dioxide savings during the study period; beef alone was responsible for nearly half of the drop.

“The trend is quite exciting,” Bassi says. “Over the study period, national greenhouse gas savings from dietary changes alone are roughly equivalent to offsetting emissions from every single passenger vehicle in the country for nearly two years.”

She also examined trends based on demographic factors, such as sex, age, household income, race, and ethnicity. Every subgroup she analyzed showed a 30 to 50 percent reduction in diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.

These positive trends are encouraging, she notes, but Americans are still exceeding our fair share of food-related emissions compared to other parts of the world: the average U.S. diet-related carbon footprint in 2018 was still nearly twice as high as global targets for minimizing global warming.

“People’s actions are making a difference,” Bassi says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

Duke University Press

Curry is the first flavor one encounters in Anita Mannur ’96’s Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. Curry is ubiquitous in Indian cuisine; its popularity is also a product of British colonization. As Mannur writes in her introduction, artist Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, who works in curry as a medium, views it as a way “for colonizers to contain the vastness of empire and consume the difference within it.”

Mannur shatters that container with the explosive defiance of ceramic cookware dashed against terra cotta kitchen tiles, revealing the ways in which the culinary arts can be transgressive and liberating practices for people who have historically been confined. She explores this in communities of color, queer folks, and other marginalized groups by examining the portrayal of food in media. She also considers visual art (including the Bhaumik piece featured on the book’s cover) to uncover the ways in which food shapes social worlds.

Mannur shows how culinary arts can be transgressive and liberating practices. Anita Mannur

Mannur illustrates how these communities turn “private spaces and practices via the culinary into ones that foster sociability, intimacy, community, and belonging,” one reviewer writes. “I want to eat every meal with this book,” adds another.

Mannur is an associate professor of English and Asian and Asian American studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Amin’s RAMCOM helps clinicians guide their patients in adhering to their religious obligations without compromising their health. Layal Fathallah

Every year, nearly 2 billion Muslims observe the month of Ramadan, a period marked by prayer, reflection, and ritual fasting. While spiritually immersive and restorative, the practice can become complicated for people who have health conditions or who take medications that are not conducive to prolonged fasting. When Mohamed Amin PhD’13 started his doctoral studies in the UW School of Pharmacy, he encountered a surprising lack of literature regarding how practitioners can support their Muslim patients during periods of fasting. Today, he’s developed RAMCOM, a tool that helps clinicians guide their patients in adhering to their religious obligations without compromising their health.

Many Islamic religious scholars deem a fast broken by taking a pill with a glass of water. Some individuals believe that eye drops, inhalers, and injections can also nullify a fast. This variation in beliefs makes discussing them all the more important. RAMCOM (short for Ramadan Communication) helps facilitate culturally informed conversations about fasting and empowers patients to broach the subject with providers.

“My research is about giving that voice to someone who hasn’t been very visible in the health care system,” Amin says. “We need to make sure we’re building an environment where a patient feels more comfortable saying, ‘Hey, I’m different, and these are my needs.’ ”

RAMCOM now incorporates fasts from several religions, including Judaism and Hinduism. It made its debut in the School of Pharmacy’s Communication Lab led by professor Betty Chewning MS’71, PhD’73 and run by graduate students Arveen Kaur PhDx’22, Bonyan Qudah PhDx’23, and Marwa Rawy MS’19, PhDx’22.

“Understanding these diverse patient needs and improving our own knowledge on cultural competence and health disparities is an important step for improving health outcomes,” Kaur says.

According to Amin, who is now an associate professor at Egypt’s Alamein International University, RAMCOM is just one example of how pharmacists can serve as accessible points of primary care.

“Pharmacists in different countries underestimate the value of the very brief counseling that they give to patients,” he says. “If we make the best use of pharmacies and pharmacists as resources, we can really take public health interventions to a different scale.”

“One of my students invented a a shortbread recipe that called for lavender and black ants,” Dunkel says, “and it was out of this world.” Montana State University/Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez

The petite Florence Dunkel ’64, MS’66, PhD’69 has a fitting nickname — Ladybug. This associate professor in plant sciences and plant pathology at Montana State studies insects. To be more precise, Dunkel, 79, has spent more than 50 years studying ways to get Americans to eat bugs.

Ten years ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization invited Dunkel (shown above with students at a bug buffet) to consult on edible insects. Later, she served on a global team that organized the first world congress on Insects to Feed the World. Two billion people routinely eat insects, says Dunkel, the former editor of the Food Insects Newsletter, “and they’re not at the poverty level. It’s an upscale thing in Mexico, Thailand, Korea, and Kenya.”

There’s a growing buzz about the insect protein market. The UN calls insects an “underutilized resource” especially in light of the need to combat climate change. By 2030, treats such as hazelnut cricket bread, mealworm wild rice, cheddar-flavored roasted scorpions, and termite chips could be part of an $8 billion market, according to Barclays Bank.

“My all-time favorite is grasshopper,” says Dunkel, who harvests them in her backyard garden, roasts them, and sprinkles them on salads. “I do take off the legs, because their spurs can irritate the throat.”

She says that black ants, which she freezes and dries, make a sublime culinary accent, since the formic acid in their venom imparts a lemony zing. “One of my students invented a shortbread recipe that called for lavender and black ants, and it was out of this world,” says Dunkel, who for the past 34 years has hosted an annual Bug Buffet in Bozeman that draws scholars and executives from food-insect companies.

When she began collecting data in 1991 from buffet attendees, only 20 to 30 percent found such cuisine acceptable. Today those numbers are closer to 70 or 80 percent. Dunkel attributes this to increasing interest in nutrition and environmental issues, as it takes less water, land, and food to raise bugs compared to larger animals.

Dunkel declines to predict when — or if — Americans will add bugs to their diets. “I think the disgust factor is still a big elephant in the room,” she admits. But younger generations might break the taboo. Her six grandchildren share her tastes. “As long as insects have chocolate on them, they’re fine with them,” she says.