Bouillon is a staple ingredient in West African cuisine. The cubes are used to flavor soups, stews, gravies and rice. Popular dishes include Red-Red, a bean stew made with red palm oil and fried ripe red plantain, and Jollof Rice, a spicy rice dish prepared with tomatoes, peppers and onions.

California’s small-scale fruit and vegetable processors and handlers will be getting new food safety online education and in-person workshops thanks to a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded to UC Davis community food safety specialist Erin DiCaprio and fellow collaborators.

Joanne Emerson is a virus hunter. She has tracked viruses in a hypersaline lake in Australia, analyzed viral communities in the thawing permafrost of Sweden and contributed to studies of oceanic viruses that infect marine microorganisms.

Diets lacking fiber are linked to health concerns such as colon cancer and heart diseases, but Americans only consume 30 percent of the recommended daily amount of fiber. One way to increase fiber consumption is to produce wheat varieties that contain more fiber.

Pamela Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, and with the UC Davis Genome Center, has been named the 2020 World Agriculture Prize laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, or GCHERA.

It’s not always easy to find silver linings during the COVID-19 pandemic, but here’s one that food scientists at the University of California, Davis, have discovered: More people are exploring the ancient art of fermented foods.

“My mom made her first batch of sauerkraut this summer,” said Maria Marco, a microbiologist and food science professor with the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “With so many of us sheltering-in-place, fermented foods are more popular than ever.”

At 5 feet, 2 inches, Plant Sciences Professor Emerita Barbara D. Webster may have been petite in stature, but she was a powerhouse when it came to reducing barriers for women in academia.

“She was formidable,” said her daughter, Susan V. Webster, with a chuckle. “She didn’t back down.”

Is cultivated meat — essentially, animal protein grown under lab conditions — a nourishing prospect to help feed the world, or is it more sizzle than steak? A consortium of researchers at the University of California, Davis, aims to explore the long-term sustainability of cultivated meat, supported by a new grant of up to $3.55 million from the National Science Foundation Growing Convergence program, in addition to previous support from the Good Food Institute and New Harvest.

Four years after plant sciences professor Kentaro Inoue was struck and killed while riding his bike, the last three graduate students from his lab are ensuring his scientific legacy lives on through their published research, careers in industry and academia, and mentoring of future science students.

By AJ Cheline and Diane Nelson

The University of California, Davis, has been awarded $20 million as part of a multi-institutional collaboration to establish an institute focused on enabling the next-generation food system through the integration of artificial intelligence, or AI, technologies. The award is part of a larger investment announced this week by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, in partnership with several federal agencies — distributing a total of $140 million to fund seven complementary AI research institutes across the nation.