Science on a plate
How do you get a bunch of middle school kids interested in science and nutrition? Disguise your goal as a pizza. Harvard College juniors Marina Chen and Bonnie Lei hit upon the idea of taking on one of the more daunting classroom challenges — encouraging education in science, technology, engineering, and math — while sitting in the dining hall at Kirkland House talking about food and one of their favorite courses, “Science & Cooking.” The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ (SEAS) wildly popular course hosts renowned chefs such as Ferran Adrià and David Chang to discuss and demonstrate scientific principles such as spherification and fermentation as they occur in restaurant kitchens, engaging students who might not necessarily think of themselves as “science people.” Chen, a baking enthusiast, and Lei, who spent a semester studying the genetic underpinnings for the microbial terroir of cheeses at the Dutton Lab at the FAS Center for...