The Secret Ingredients of Food Science
by Maddie Bender
Alchemy, the mystical process of transforming metals into gold, has a clear appeal. Imagine if it were possible to unlock hidden value from objects, ensuring prosperity and abundance for yourself and your community.
While the promise of alchemy ultimately did not hold scientific weight, there is a real form of evidence-based transformation that attains some of the same lofty goals that alchemists strove to achieve. This field is called food science.
Simply put, food science is the study of food. It utilizes principles of chemistry, biology, and other sciences to understand the basic components of the plants and animals we eat, in order to enhance certain desirable properties or mitigate undesirable ones. While a traditional food sciences approach may have focused on the qualities of foodstuffs themselves—what nutrients they contain and how to take advantage of soils and fertilizers to maximize their growth—new approaches in food science seek to obtain a balance between creating food and maintaining the environment in which it grows. A sustainable approach also relies on techniques that unlock additional nutrients from a finite amount of harvested food. Now, researchers in Hawaiʻi and around the country are drawing on millennia of Indigenous knowledge to forge a future that is both abundant and tasty.
There’s a good reason for this trend. According to a recent report from The Rockefeller Foundation, Indigenous food systems are often inherently regenerative. Practices like agroforestry, rotational farming, and seed-saving increase an area’s biodiversity and enhance its potential for resilience.
Canoe crops and Indigenous innovation
Born and raised on O‘ahu, Dr. Katie Kamelamela didn’t think twice about the food she grew up eating until she went to college. For one assignment her freshman year, a professor tasked her class with placing Hawaiʻi’s staple crops in chronological order of their introduction to the islands.
“I got like 7 out of 10 correct. The average score was a 3,” she recalled. It was then she understood that not everyone shared the same food references or experiences.
When Polynesian voyagers first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, they came laden with over 20 species of plants. Termed “canoe plants,” each served specific purposes in food, culture, medicine, or a mixture of all three. ‘Ulu (breadfruit), for instance, is packed with carbohydrates and vitamins. The sap of the tree can heal wounds, and the wood can be harvested. ‘Uala (sweet potato), kō (sugarcane), kukui (candlenut), kalo (taro)—the list goes on. Food science is at the heart of why the Polynesians brought canoe plants to Hawaiʻi, and why their natural experiment was successful.
While such canoe crops are examples of introduced, non-native plants, very few are considered invasive, or at risk of outcompeting native plants and affecting forests detrimentally. This is in part due to another food science principle: domestication. Over the course of many generations, humans encourage cultivated crops to evolve in ways that benefit us. Domesticated plants tend to have larger fruits or grains compared with their wild ancestors. They also often lose the machinery to disperse their seeds or otherwise propagate without human help, inadvertently lowering their potential to become invasive. Indeed, lengthy domestication of canoe plants reduces their “weediness,” according to Plant Pono, a partnership between state agencies and local nonprofits.
New research also suggests that the plants cultivated by Indigenous communities may have been selected based on their ability to be tamed by humans. Dr. Natalie Mueller, who studies Indigenous North American crops at Washington University in St. Louis, found in a 2023 study that an early form of buckwheat reliably germinated when it was grown in a cultivated garden, but grown wild, its seeds remain dormant. Techniques like directed evolution to increase seed germination are in food scientists’ toolboxes; this study shows Indigenous food scientists have been using these tools for millennia.
Students of food science can also apply its principles to the scale of entire forests, rather than individual plants. The first step is realizing that humans have a crucial role to play in the cultivation and care of these forests. In a talk that Kamelamela gave as part of a TEDx event in Hawai‘i, she invited audience members to picture a forest. “Think about where you are, what you’re standing on, the weather at the time, what type of season is going on, and why you’re there,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a rug at the center of the speaker’s stage with her eyes closed. She asked several follow-up questions: How does the air smell? Is the wind moving? Do you hear anything?
Eyes open, she recapped the exercise with the audience, going through each point before adding one at the end: Did you see any people?
“When we do this exercise, nobody sees people in the forest, maybe one out of a hundred,” she said. “And that’s what I do.”
As an ethnobotanist at Arizona State University, Kamelamela studies historical and contemporary Native Hawaiian forest-gathering practices. Food science is central to these practices. She said that Hawaiian innovations in food science include a wide range of resourcefulness: the ahupuaʻa land management system, “which maximizes microclimate and geographic resources,” as well as the intentional movement of the water from the mountains to the ocean to supplement the land and sea with nutrients. Food science innovations go beyond the production of food; Hawaiians’ inventions were “necessary for the systems to be created, maintained, and utilized,” Kamelamela added.
The ahupua‘a system parceled land into vertical subdivisions stretching mauka to makai (mountain to ocean). Central to this theory of land management was the recognition that terrestrial and aquatic systems affect one another. In Hawaiian society, a subset of ali‘i called konohiki took charge of resource stewardship and land management, engaging in the practice of food science.
The konohiki achieved efficient levels of food production and labor, writes Claire Hiwahiwa Steele in her graduate thesis about their historical roles.
“The konohiki’s mindset and ‘oihana (duty) was to mālama (care for) the ʻāina (land, that which feeds us) based on aloha ʻāina,” Steele wrote. “For generations, the konohiki successfully balanced these values in the judicious and prudent stewardship of the ʻāina and all the kumu waiwai (resources) that was sustainable for generations.” Konohiki did this by immersing themselves in the ahupuaʻa they governed, learning the terrain’s unique features and making arrangements with adjoining parcels’ konohiki to ensure access to vital natural resources.
Science finds the whys
Food science, of course, also focuses on changing food itself. Cooking, fermenting, pickling, and processing all introduce chemical reactions for humans’ benefit. These reactions can add nutrients to our food, get rid of bitter or inedible compounds, or preserve food over longer periods. Processing kalo into poi is a prime example of food science at work. Both the leaves and root are considered inedible due to high levels of calcium oxalate raphides, needle-shaped crystals that cause irritation, swelling, and pain if ingested. The corm of the kalo plant is steamed to reduce the levels of calcium oxalate; next, it is pounded on a wooden board (papa ku’i ‘ai) with water until it takes on a putty-like consistency. Poi is often fermented with lactic acid bacteria.
In 2024, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa professor Dr. Yong Li published research that identifies specific ways in which these bacteria support the human gut microbiome. Fermented poi increased gut bacteria’s production of short-chain fatty acids, which play a crucial role in metabolism and health. “Poi holds potential for influencing human health through the modulation of the gut microbiota,” Li and his co-author concluded in the study.
Other staple crops have been studied analytically, and the conclusions largely agree with Indigenous wisdom. In fact, studies have even shown that eating these superfoods in combination forms the basis for a comprehensive, healthy diet. A foundational food science study known as the Waiʻanae Diet Program asked 19 Native Hawaiians to adhere to a strict, traditional diet consisting of kalo, poi, ‘uala, ‘ulu, fern shoots, and a few other foods. The researchers wrote about their reasons for conducting the study in the Hawaiʻi Medical Journal in 1994: “Currently, Hawaiʻi is being promoted as ‘The Health State’ by the DOH [Department of Health]. The tragic irony, however, is that in Hawaiʻi, the healthiest state in the union from the standpoint of longevity, Native Hawaiians have the shortest life span among all the ethnic groups in Hawaiʻi, and also among the shortest in the United States.” The Waiʻanae Diet Program revised the narrative.
After three weeks, health indicators like cholesterol levels, glucose, and blood pressure were all improved among participants. Over seven years later, more than 80 participants who partook in the three-week traditional diet weighed an average of 15 pounds lighter. The results of the diet, wrote the researchers, “reveals a remarkable consistency that suggests an effective long-term dietary intervention.”
With thousands of years of natural and lab-based experiments, food science remains an evolving field. Research being conducted through the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience advances the basic science of canoe plants and other staple crops. A recent study sought to understand the wavelengths and temperatures at which photosynthesis works best for breadfruit. Such science identifies vital traits for future research and links an environmental trait like sunlight with fruit yield, opening the door for future optimization.
Hawai‘i is uniquely positioned on the cutting edge of Pacific food science. On the research side, the University of Hawai‘i is one of 15 schools in the country to offer a degree in Culinology, accredited by the Research Chefs Association. The degree is offered as a track of CTAHR’s “Food Science and Human Nutrition” undergraduate major, and it prepares students for careers that blend technical know-how of research and development with the creative skills of food preparation. And as for applications, the new Culinary Institute of the Pacific has recently started offering workforce development programs in the culinary arts.
As we look to the future, how can an Indigenous perspective on food science help achieve health and abundance in the future? “Gratitude. Relationship. Reciprocity,” Kamelamela said. “When the food you consume is connected to stories of your own creation, your family, your sibling, your future, you treat food from the soil to the stomach with reverence.”
Even if this approach doesn’t turn lead into gold, it sprinkles meaning into the acts of growing, transforming, and eating food. And maybe a dash of magic, too.
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