Sorghum Makes the Dean’s List at K-State Dining Halls
Many questions run through an incoming college freshman’s mind, such as “What will my class schedule look like?” or “Will I get along with my roommate?” While preparing for the transition on campus, students might also be curious about the kind of food that will fuel them for success between classes or annual exams.
While Kansas State University features several university-produced foods on its menus (such as the crowd-favorite Call Hall ice cream produced from the milk of K-State dairy cows), the school has also provided students with options created by their peers. A farm-to-campus program called FarmUs connected two grains that are a cornerstone of Kansas agriculture — wheat and sorghum — with the plates of college students in student-developed recipes.
FarmUs began with the crossover of two departments on campus. Dr. Kelly Getty, associate professor, Food Science and Industry, was teaching a class centered around product development while, Dr. Kelly Whitehair, registered dietician, was looking for new ways to advance the campus dining hall menus. A grant proposal initiated by the Kansas Departments of Agriculture and funded by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service had a scope designed to introduce recipes that highlighted wheat and sorghum to consumers, and thus, the FarmUs Project was born.
As Food Science students developed recipes scaled to suit the campus dining halls, they had to think outside the box and brainstormed appetizing gluten-free recipes such as chocolate sorghum cookies, savory sorghum waffles or gluten-free lemon blueberry sorghum muffins. It may seem simple to swap wheat flour with sorghum flour to create a gluten-free recipe, but students learned it was not so easy. Many sorghum recipes require additions such as egg whites to properly bind the ingredients together.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” Dr. Getty remembered.
Like any research project, collaboration was key to FarmUs. As both undergraduate and graduate students worked to bring their ideas to life, they were able to spin ideas off each other, and eventually connect with K-State Housing and Dining production and baking staff as they looked for feedback or new ways to better their recipes. A few of the undergraduate students even went on to use their findings to develop and scale up their product in the dining halls as undergraduate research projects.
“It added a nice complexity to their research,” said Dr. Getty. “There were many different angles to take within food science when it came to factors such as shelf life and stability.”
Overall, the project turned out to be incredibly successful, according to both Dr. Getty and Dr. Whitehair.
“(FarmUS) really crossed the lines for collaboration,” said Dr. Whitehair. “From dietetics to dining and food services, to hospitality and of course, commodities grown across the state of Kansas and how we can pull those in.”
While the project was completed over three years from 2021 to 2024, students can still enjoy the recipes in K-State’s dining halls today. Dr. Whitehair also mentioned the visibility sorghum gained through the FarmUs project while also fulfilling K-State’s historic land-grant mission since its founding in 1863 “to research and connect with farmers.”
This story was written by Maddy Meier with Kansas Grain Sorghum.
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