Drexel Food Lab dishes up solutions for food challenges

LABORATORY safety regulations typically dictate that no food should be found within close reach of the experimental action - no one needs nitric acid in their nachos, after all. Drexel's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management, however, is a different kind of lab, one that's earned an exception to this rule since fussing with food is all they do there.

The sixth floor of the Paul Peck Problem-Solving and Research Center, at 33rd and Arch streets, is home to the Drexel Food Lab, a collective that lends its brain to corporate and nonprofit clients.

Founded at the beginning of this year by Jonathan Deutsch, head of Drexel's culinary programming, the lab gives ambitious food-focused students a chance to slice apart and solve real-life problems, honing their cooking abilities along the way.

Deutsch, who has a doctorate in food studies and food management from NYU, worked in the culinary-research field before coming to academia. He described the lab as a response to an industrywide need. Many of his contacts, personal and professional, have expressed a desire for dedicated culinary R&D, but it's not a realistic option for many organizations these days.

"When I was coming up in the '90s, a lot of companies had research chefs," Deutsch said. "Now, more and more are outsourcing that, and it's hard to put a price on ideas."

This is particularly true of nonprofit food-based organizations, many of whose budgets barely allow for day-to-day progress, let alone luxuries like a recipe-development department. That's where pro bono contributions from the Food Lab come in.

Deutsch started with Cook for Your Life, a New York-based national nonprofit that promotes wholesome cooking to cancer patients and survivors. (Deutsch is on its board.)

CFYL founder Ann Ogden, a two-time cancer survivor, expressed a need for thoroughly tested recipes that were both healthful and flavorful. So, Food Lab members - student leader Alexandra Zeitz, a senior culinary-arts major, plus a small, rotating team of invested students - got to work.

They now provide CFYL's website, cookforyourlife.org, with three to five new seasonal recipes a week, themed around the dietary needs of the cancer community. That means dishes for those with weakened GI tracts or immune systems, for example, or adjusting seasonings to accommodate taste buds affected by chemotherapy.

"They're becoming an essential part of what we do," Ogden said.

Locally, the Food Lab was recently contacted by My Brother's House, a Bethesda Project safe haven offering social services to chronically homeless men. Based at 15th and South Streets, the shelter houses 20 adult men at a time and offers them three square meals a day, all on a monthly budget of just $446, subsidized by a "casserole network" of Good Samaritans and donations from the city's Office of Supportive Housing.

For program coordinator Larry Russock, the biggest meal-planning challenge was coming up with healthy, appealing uses for bland canned vegetable donations.

"Just because you're someone who's been struggling for a while doesn't mean you shouldn't get good food," he said.

With this in mind, the Food Lab got to work, writing original recipes - pea soup, pastas, and spinach and shepherd's pies - that use existing product and can be executed by the non-food-pro residential aides.

"This is playtime for me," said Peter Schoener, a junior culinary-arts major who also works in the kitchen at Vernick Food & Drink, in the Rittenhouse Square area. "I don't have to follow any directions. I can make whatever comes to mind."

"You have more freedom here," said Emily Crasnick, another junior culinary-arts major involved with the lab. (Students can earn both practicum credit and hourly pay for their work.) "They give you an objective," but to get there, you can "use whatever you'd like."

Earlier this week, Schoener, Crasnick and fellow junior Andrew Rosenbach cut up UglyRipe tomatoes, developing a gazpacho recipe for the supermarket heirloom brand, and dehydrated caramelized onions for produce supplier Race-West - two examples of the Food Lab's work with corporate partners.

They're also working with governmental bodies. In 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the "Food Recovery Challenge," working with retailers with the aim of keeping usable food out of landfills by acting as a conduit between food retailers, like grocery stores and bodegas, and food banks and soup kitchens.

While EPA's Philly office handles the logistics, the Food Lab has been tasked with inventing strategies for the recipients of food donations - think converting a crate of overripe bananas into healthy banana pudding or smoothies, as opposed to tossing it in the trash.

"When you shine a light on a problem, people can get creative," said Bob Greaves, director of the Office of Sustainable Materials Management. "This relationship ends up being a win-win for everybody."

Deutsch sees the lab's growing casework as both an opportunity and an obligation "to create new knowledge. All these kids can make a Hollandaise sauce, and I wouldn't be doing my job if they couldn't. But mastering a Hollandaise shouldn't be the end of their education."