UM Students Predict The Taste of the Future
The year is 2100. You sit down at a restaurant for a meal consisting of a black-eyed pea salad with fried quail egg, pupusa with bison filling, lentil cakes and a braised goat stew.
Little did you know the menu was predicted 78 years earlier by students in the Soil-to-Soil: Food and Climate class at the University of Montana, where students learn about resilient food systems in the face of climate change.
“Climate change and an unsustainable food system are creating an unprecedented challenge — and golden opportunity — to reimagine what we eat and how we get it,” said Peter McDonough, the director of the Climate Change Studies program and co-instructor of the class.
During the semester, students in the experiential class took several field trips to meet with producers at farms, ranches, seed libraries, and other food hubs to better understand Missoula’s food system and vulnerability. The course is also led by Caroline Stephens of the PEAS Farm.
Students wrote research papers about different ingredients, crops and other food items that are climate resilient and could possibly thrive in Montana in the year 2100 based on research from the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment.
In their papers, students chose an ingredient, like bison, prickly pear, lentils, potatoes and dandelions, and argued why it would be a successful crop to weather the shifting climate.
Experts with UM Dining concocted a menu based almost entirely on those researched ingredients and met with them at the learning kitchen space at the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center to taste the future.
To kick things off, students made masa, a dough made from ground maize, using drought-resistant Montana Morado Corn from Dave Christensen’s North Frontier Farm. The light purple flour transformed into a deep plum color as it became saturated with water.
“To see community growing with our local, individual food systems and the accessibility is super awesome and helps take away some anxiety and gives me more hope,” said Matthew Giacone, who is a senior majoring in environmental studies.
Giacone wrote his paper about lentils due to their long-standing use for nourishment across the globe. In his research he found that lentils are often used in African countries for baby food and are exceptionally successful at restoring nitrogen back to the soil. Additionally, Montana is already a strong lentil-producer, so it wouldn’t be too big of a jump for agriculture producers further down the line.
Rachel Halperin, a third-year student at UM studying biology, researched dandelions because they are extremely hearty and grow successfully in a wide variety of climates.
According to the Montana Climate Assessment, annual average temperatures have risen between 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit across the state from 1950-2015. By the end of the 21st century those averages are projected to increase up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Additionally, precipitation is projected to increase in the winter, spring and fall, but decrease in the summer.
“The issue of climate change is very critical for really the whole agriculture community,” said Dr. Luther Talbert, a spring wheat breeder with Montana State University, in 2017. “The changing climatic conditions definitely present a challenge to farmers, but they’re very proactive and they’re very used to changing their system and changing their varieties."
Skylar Rispens is an education reporter for the Missoulian.