TCNJ

16 SPRING 2017 A nthony Bourdain, meet Emery Varga and Jillian Farley, your co-conspirators in culinary courage. Bourdain, of course, is the chef and author who travels the globe sampling foods that lesser gourmands dare not touch with a 10-foot fork. Varga and Farley, first-year teammates on the Lions' nationally ranked field hockey team, displayed what can only be described as Bourdain- esque bravado when faced with a buffet of exotic entrées in the Eickhoff Hall dining area. The occasion was a project called Tasting the Tree of Life, a collaboration between the School of Science, Department of Biology, and Dining Services that brought heaping helpings of lesser-known ingredients to the dining hall on February 28. Cheddar insect larvae? Varga and Farley went back for seconds. Fried frog legs? Check. Alligator sausage? Check. Roasted crickets? "Crunchy," Farley said. "I would snack on them if I had a little bag of crickets." Roman-style tripe? Ok, so maybe Varga and Farley met their match with cow-stomach stew. (Even Bourdain is said to despise ketchup on a hot dog.) "I don't like it," Farley said. "Tastes like a farm," Varga concurred. Tree of Life organizers, including nearly 60 students, aimed to expose the TCNJ campus to the abundance of edible organisms — plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria — by incorporating scores of them into a single meal. Organizers also wanted students to learn about the need to diversify our food supply to feed an ever-growing global population. "We wanted to plan a meal that allowed people to see the relatedness of different species," says Jeffrey Osborn, dean of the School of Science. "All living things on earth today are related to each other. Just as you can draw a family tree for relationships in your extended family, you can do the same for all organisms on the planet, and that's called the tree of life." Scientists, including many at TCNJ, use the tree of life to explore relationships between organisms and document how species have evolved over millennia. "The healthy bacteria in your kombucha and the chicken in your pot-stickers may seem like unlikely relatives," reads the college's Tree of Life event website, "but they both evolved from an ancestor that dates back over a billion years!" Among the more rare Tree of Life menu items were breadfruit and jackfruit — widely consumed in southern Asia and the South Pacific but almost unheard of in central New Jersey — which helped illustrate the need to globalize the food supply. On the menu: breadfruit cake, a BBQ jackfruit avocado sandwich (recipe, page 38), and a jackfruit Reuben. The day's keynote lecturer, Nyree Zerega, an Tree of Life organizers wanted students to learn about the need to diversify our food supply to feed an ever-growing global population. Tree of Life recipes on page 38

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