Fit To Eat S2E33 Owen Bartlett, Abraham Armah And Melissa Hamilton by Ivan Emke

When we are inclusive in our definition of research, we see that there is research on food happening all around us. Maybe you’re a farmer or a beekeeper or a backyard gardener or an urban forager, and you watch your operation closely and make alterations and keep note. That is certainly something that can fit under the term “food-related research.” And other such research may be done by students and researchers in the field and in laboratories, like the folks you’ll meet in a moment.

Today we head to the Lab. A Functional Foods Lab, to be more precise. We'll chat with three Graduate Student Researchers who are working on issues from increasing the production of food by using new amendments, to the complicated dance of finding ways to market new foods and new tastes to consumers. So our topics will range from rock dust to eels to modernization to KFC in Ghana, and lots in between.

We're on the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University, where you'll meet Owen Bartlett, Abraham Armah and Melissa Hamilton. Given their different backgrounds and origins, we were able to have lots of intercultural discussion around food, here in NL and in their home regions. And as this province continues to see immigration as the best hope for population growth, we also need to look for how to integrate new Canadians into our particular food systems. Such inclusion is good for them, but (more importantly) there is great benefit in access to new tastes, new foods, new styles of preparation. For all of us. Pull up a lab stool and join us.