On Feb. 24, the UC Davis Dining Commons hosted the Green Chef Challenge. Teams of students, each representing one of the three dining commons — Cuarto, Segundo and Tercero — competed to craft a vegetarian dish using produce from the Student Farm.

At 6 p.m., the secret ingredient was revealed: fennel. The teams had an hour and a half to craft their dish before they were whisked away to Segundo for judgment. On March18, the winning dish will be featured as an entrée in the dining commons.

“I’m really competitive,” said Amanda Nieh, a fourth-year clinical nutrition major. “As soon as I heard ‘cooking competition,’ I knew I wanted to do this.”

Nieh, a contestant on Segundo’s team, said she has plenty of experience cooking — she also holds a job as a teaching kitchen assistant at the Student Wellness Center. Nieh said she saw an advertisement for the event during one of her visits to the dining commons.

“They said you don’t have to be a chef, you can just sign up,” Nieh said. “No experience required.”

To help level the playing field, each team received guidance from a sous chef (kitchen under-chef). According to Ben Thomas, sustainability manager of UC Davis Dining Services, the sous chefs were present only to offer techniques and advice.

“We really try to make it equal and fair,” Thomas said. “We want to let the students lead the development of the dishes.”

Around 6:30 p.m., students flooding into Segundo stopped to watch the contestants chopping vegetables behind the tables cluttered with cutting boards and bowls, while Thomas stood by to inform the curious onlookers.

Thomas said the Green Chef Challenge started in 2011. He explained how a group of students involved with various sustainable food projects wanted to put on a fun event to call attention to their efforts. Following the success of the television show “Iron Chef,” he said they came up with the Green Chef Challenge. In this case, the competition specifically uses seasonal produce.

The Green Chef Challenge also makes an effort to use only local foods, according to Nicole Lesnett, a fifth-year international relations major and ground coordinator for the campus’ dining services.

“The Student Farm is as local as you could possibly get for food,” Lesnett said.

She said the Student Farm has been around since 1977, but only grew large enough to supply the dining commons as early as 2011. As ground coordinator, her job includes transporting produce from the Student Farm to the dining services.

She explained that this closer source of food means significantly less emissions and lower costs for transportation. However, she said the Student Farm still only has six marketable acres of year-round produce.

“When the winning dish is featured in a month from now, it isn’t guaranteed that it’s all coming from this student farm,” Lesnett said. “The sheer volume [of the order] might require more than the farm grows.”

Despite this limitation, she said an effort will still be made to order produce from local sources. However, she said each dining common has different standards.

“Everything in the Cuarto salad bar, usually, is food that’s in season,” Lesnett said. “That’s part of being sustainable.”

Even during winter, she said, Cuarto provides vegetables appropriate for the season, whereas Segundo and Tercero will use out of season vegetables like cherry tomatoes and corn.

Therefore, she said the dishes made at the Green Chef Challenge might encourage a greater percentage of local food use.

Joanna Wirkus, a fourth-year clinical nutrition major, nutrition intern with dining services and one of the event’s judges, said she was excited to see how teams would combine the Student Farm ingredients.

Wirkus, Jianna Robertson, a student programmer for sustainability in student housing, and Raoul Adamchak, Market Garden and CSA coordinator of the Student Farm, were this quarter’s judges, and just before 7:30 p.m., the Cuarto and Tercero teams arrived to present their dishes.

Before the competition, Nieh said she isn’t the type to use a recipe — she’d prefer to use what’s there and throw it together. Her team’s dish, “Veggie Bao,” reflected that style: she said they sautéed all their vegetables and stuffed them into balls of pizza dough baked with egg wash. They topped the dumplings with tahini sauce and added a side of pickled fennel.

Tercero presented their “Curry Potato Pancakes,” featuring a vegetable curry, marinated tofu and a garnish of pickled fennel with onions.

Cuarto’s ‘Fennelicious Frittata’ sat upon grilled flatbread topped with a carrot and dill salad, with a side of roasted beet chutney. After the judge’s scores were added up, Cuarto’s dish won first place, with just a few points more than Segundo’s.

Thomas said to look out for the next Green Chef Challenge, planned for Spring Quarter. He said the sous chefs will work with new teams to keep things fresh and, of course, there will be a new secret ingredient.

This year’s winner of the TASTE award for Best Mini-Film or Documentary is “The Art and Science of Beer” starring UC Davis’ own, Professor Charles Bamforth.

Bamforth said the award winning film was one of two short documentaries on beer brewing at UC Davis, both commissioned by the University of California Office of the President.

“The Office of the President was commissioning some films to illustrate what goes on in the University of California as a whole. They selected two topics from Davis and we were one of them,” Bamforth said.

He also said that he was not able to attend the awards ceremony in Hollywood because he was busy teaching, which he mentioned was his favorite aspect of his career.

“It never gets old, there’s always a new angle on it,” Bamforth said. “There’s always the joy of seeing the smile on people’s faces as they get it, and the realization that some of these people are going to go on and be successful brewers.”

Bamforth is a professor of malting and brewing sciences at UC Davis. He said he has been dubbed by his students “the pope of foam,” a name by which he is addressed in the documentary. He pointed to his research focus on beer foam as the inspiration for his nickname.

“I’ve been working on bubbles for a long time and we’ve probably done more research on the head on beer than anybody else,” Bamforth said.

Foam is one aspect that Bamforth said emphasizes beer as an art on top of being a science.

“We’ve done a lot of work to confirm absolutely that people drink with their eyes,” Bamforth said. “Most beer drinkers, most civilized beer drinkers, will put their beer in a glass, and if the beer’s got a foam on it they say it looks good. And if the beer’s not got a foam on it they say ‘what the hell is wrong with the beer?’”

But the art of beer does not begin and end with foam. Bamforth speaks of an entire culture surrounding beer, and points out that everything from the appearance to the actual drinking contributes to its consideration as an art.

“It’s an art form as far as it speaks to a quality of life. It’s not just the science of making the beer, it’s the imagery of that beer, it’s the presentation of the beer [and] it’s the circumstances of which you drink it,” Bamforth said.

Nor is the art simply part of the finished product. Ted Kizor graduated from UC Davis in spring 2013 with a degree in viticulture and enology, and he is a former student of Bamforth, completing both lower and upper division brewing classes under the professor. He noted that the art starts in the very beginning of the brewing process.

“Writing beer recipes is an endless art. Whether you’re playing with adjuncts, or differing the ratios of various hops or even deciding which water chemistry is going to help you make the best beer — it is an art,” Kizor said.

Kizor went on to say that the features of beer that can be considered art rely heavily on the science behind brewing.

“Most people don’t drink a beer at a bar and wonder if it has an invisible haze or what the oxidation level was at bottling, but you do notice how it smells, looks, tastes and feels,” Kizor said. “How are you going to measure those changes? How are you going to be sure that you have a consistent product? What are your standards of quality? That’s where the science comes in.”

Even speaking of beer as an art form, Bamforth does not want people to underestimate the contributions of beer to the scientific community.

“I know full well over the years what brewing has done for society, in terms of science,” Bamforth said. “A lot of the fundamental work that is applied in day to day life came out of the brewing industry.”

The documentary comments on both the art and science, which Bamforth said come together in complicated ways to form a finished product.

“It was basically me talking about the process from the mill to the finished product, and hopefully convincing people just how complex this production is, this production of beer,” Bamforth said. “A lot of people seem to think that brewing is somehow simple and straightforward, but it isn’t. It’s a whole bunch of different sciences that come together, and anyone that’s taken the upper division brewing classes pretty much knows that brewing ain’t simple.”

Jason Porter is a graduate student in food science at UC Davis and can be seen brewing in the background of the documentary. He said that brewing is a mix of all subjects from biology and engineering to history and law. He mentioned Bamforth as an inspiration for joining the business of brewing and that he’s glad to be working with beer.

“It’s something fun; it’s something you can enjoy,” Porter said.

Bamforth said that he is glad to have been a part of the documentary and emphasized his goal of exposing people to the message of beer, and its usefulness in teaching.

“I’m pleased that it actually does allow us to point out to people that this is a serious topic but it is [also] a fun thing and a great way to learn science,” Bamforth said.

Ranked as one of the best ecology graduate programs in the world, the UC Davis Graduate Group in Ecology (GGE) showcased their scientific research at the seventh annual Graduate Student Symposium in Ecology on Feb. 15.

The symposium was funded by the Graduate Student Association, the Coastal Marine Sciences Institute and the Graduate Group in Ecology, and close to 100 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members attended. They gathered at Giedt Hall to tune in on topics ranging from marine ecology to population biology presented by 11 UC Davis graduate students in GGE.

“One of our main goals is to ignite collaborations that don’t exist yet,” Katie Eskra, an ecology graduate student and a primary organizer of the event, said. “There are people studying ecology from different graduate groups and this is a way to collaborate together.”

The GGE includes students studying a wide range of topics, from forestry and atmospheric sciences to hydrology and entomology. To advance future discussion, Eskra encouraged attendees to share their experiences in the field with one another throughout the course of the day.

“What are people’s high points and low points in ecology?” Eskra asked the audience.

Eskra explained that although students may be pursuing different projects from one another, there could be commonalities between the research challenges and successes they face, thus serving as a topic of discussion.

After the event, student presenters received feedback and answered questions regarding their research presentations. Having been involved in the planning of the symposium for several years, Eskra believes that the event has grown substantially over time.

“This is really a neat thing to be a part of, ” Eskra said. “There were a bunch of volunteers involved including undergrads, teachers [and] the community.”

Apart from the volunteer effort, the Ecology Graduate Student Association chose which graduate students would present at the event. The group also contributed to the logistics of the symposium, including setup, choosing a keynote speaker and securing event funding.

“When I found out that keynote speaker was Mark Bertness, I became really excited and jumped in to help schedule and run the website,” said ecology graduate student Matt Whalen. “Mark is a master of designing meaningful experiments to confront problems in ecology.”

Dr. Bertness, an American ecologist and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University, was introduced by Whalen as a pioneer in the field of ecology for over three decades.

Although there were initial concerns about whether Dr. Bertness would be able to attend the symposium due to severe weather, he was able to present his recent research from his lab about salt marshes.

Growing up on the West Coast in Tacoma, Wash., Bertness developed an interest in natural history at an early age as he recalled spending most of his childhood roaming the beach. After graduating as a chemistry major, Bertness never considered that he would find a career in ecology.

After reading various studies in ecology to guide his work as a chemist, Bertness discovered Robert Paine, a premier ecologist and retired professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Washington.

“Out of college, I worked as a chemist on the fungicide to save California potato crops,” Bertness said. “Once I met Bob [Paine], I thought this is what I want to do. I want to be Bob Paine,” Bertness said.

Eventually, Bertness went on to study hermit crabs in Panama and was hired by Brown University. As a professor at Brown for over 30 years, Bertness explained the uniqueness of the university in that it values undergraduate education as much as research.

“I don’t feel I have a job, but a calling,” Bertness said. “I have worked all over the world doing research in Europe, Chile, the Gulf and I’ve had a charmed life because I found something that I loved that I could focus on.”

Although it may take time to find the ‘perfect’ career for some, Bertness uses his personal experience to encourage all students to find out exactly what it is they really want to do in college.

“Identify what you love, forget about practicality and just focus on doing that and make it happen,” Bertness said.

Similarly, Grace Ha, a graduate student in ecology and one of the symposium chairs, explained that the symposium not only allows students to discover cutting edge research on campus, but also assists in career exploration.

“Davis is one of the best places to study ecology in the world and why not take advantage of that resource?” Ha said.

Eskra, Farlin and Ha agreed that more students are discovering ecology, citing an overall increase in undergraduate attendance this year with 47 pre-registered students. Ha said the symposium helps the various ecology groups on campus form relationships with one another.

“Davis has a lot of fantastic researchers, but there are so many different departments and a bit of a disjoint between groups,” Ha said. “The symposium fosters dialogue between different communities.”

While the symposium primarily focuses on ecological work, Farlin explained that the group wanted to incorporate other aspects of creativity and innovation. Along with the multiple research presentations and posters, dozens of photographs and pieces of artwork lined the walls of Giedt Hall.

“By and far the symposium essentially showcases the breadth and depth of work done by ecology graduate students,” Farlin said. “However, we also wanted to include other groups and had an art and photography contest.”

The art and photography contest was open to the general public and the contest winners went home with cash and gift card prizes.

“Our goal is to showcase the breadth and quality of ecological research being done by graduate students at UC Davis,” Whalen said. “The symposium provides a forum and comfortable, academic setting for people to get together.”