Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021 by Colgate University

AUTUMN 2021

Cover

Table Talk P.32 Ask the Professors

Why people prefer different flavors P.29

Salmagundi

Campus dining through the years P.104

THE FOOD EDITION

Alumni restaurateurs, beverage mavens, snack science, and more

look Would you like some soft serve with this hard stare? Taken circa 1950s, this photo provides a look back at the convenience store in the James C. Colgate Student Union. For more on the history of campus dining options, see “Salmagundi” on p. 104.

Read this issue and all previous issues at colgate.edu/magazine.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 1

special collections and university archives

mark diorio

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look Pretty as a postcard. The Chenango Valley views in the fall season are just one reason why Colgate is considered one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 3

Photo / Art Credit

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look

mark diorio

Quarterback Grant Breneman ’22 (#15) scored the first touchdown of the homecoming game just one minute and 40 seconds into the competition against Lehigh. The Raiders beat the Mountain Hawks 30–3 in the Patriot League opener; it was the first win for Fred ’50 and Marilyn Dunlap Head Football Coach Stan Dakosty. Almost 3,000 fans attended the game in Andy Kerr Stadium on sunny Sept. 25. A captain of the team, Breneman is a mathematical economics and educational studies double major from Mechanicsburg, Pa.

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Contents

AUTUMN 2021 the food edition

President’s Message

Discover

The Future of Our Food

Letters

How climate change has been and will continue to affect our favorite ingredients.

Why Do People Prefer Different Foods? Some love cilantro while others think it tastes like soap. Professors Jason Meyers and Maura Tumulty explain why people enjoy different flavors (Hint: It’s not just taste buds).

Voices

The Beard Award Bryan Miller ’74, former New York Times restaurant critic, writes about his battle with bipolar II disorder.

Scene

Colgate News 18

How It’s Made Two food scientists — Marcus Brody ’92 and Kashif Ahmed ’08 — give the inside scoop on how snacks get from their labs to the grocery store shelves.

Table Talk From an island off of Maine to the California coast, alumni restaurateurs deliver creative cuisine in distinctive environments.

Food for Thought Colgate professors are exploring questions about humanity through food-related research.

Peter Shelsky ’01 Table Talk p. 34

We’ll Drink to Them Raising a glass to alumni innovators in the beverage industry.

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Vice President for Communications Laura H. Jack Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Senior Director, Communications and Strategic Initiatives Mark Walden Chief Creative Officer Tim Horn Art Director Karen Luciani

Lily Dupont ’04 Leedom (center) p. 61

University Photographer Mark DiOrio Communications Specialist Kathy Jipson

Endeavor

Contributors: Gordon Brillon, web content specialist; Daniel DeVries, senior director, communications and media relations; Sara Furlong, advancement communications manager; Garrett Mutz, graphic designer; Brian Ness, video journalism coordinator; Kristin Putman, social media strategist

Kingpin Dale Schwartz ’83 is upping his game with Pinstripes, where bowling and bocce meet American-Italian cuisine.

Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt.

In SEAson

Colgate Magazine Volume LI Number 1

Putting a new spin on an old cupboard staple, Lily Dupont ’04 Leedom specializes in gourmet salts.

Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University. Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407

One-Stop Shopping Grocery tech firm Chicory takes consumers from recipe to checkout with just one click.

Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Telephone: 315-228-7453

Miriam Garron ’83

Alumni News

The Doctor Will See You (Virtually) Now Awareness of food allergies in children has been on the rise. To the rescue: pediatrician and parent coach Julie Kolakowski ’01 Sweeney.

Salmagundi

104

Cover: Mac Hay ’96 owns restaurants and retail markets on Cape Cod. Read about him in “Table Talk” on p. 32. Photo by Julia Cumes

Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the University, the publishers, or the editors. Colgate University does not discriminate in its programs and activities because of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. For inquiries regarding the University’s non‑discrimination policies, contact Tamala Flack, Title IX coordinator and equity and diversity officer, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 7

President’s Message

olgate’s Bicentennial year (2018–19) marked an important symbolic milestone in the history of the University, a time to reflect on everything Colgate had done for two centuries to move into the upper ranks of American colleges and universities. It was a time for both reflection and celebration. Thousands of people came to the campus for an all-class reunion, where returning graduates not only connected with friends but also marveled at the changes to the campus. At that reunion, I was able to speak to the alumni crowded into the packed chapel about Colgate’s future, and to give a sense of Colgate’s Third-Century Plan, which had just been endorsed by both the Board of Trustees and the Alumni Council. Of course, within a few months of that reunion, Colgate and the world were facing a pandemic. We navigated COVID-19 throughout the 2020 spring semester and then the 2020–21 academic year. “Colgate Together” brought out our best; we managed an ongoing crisis well, with intelligence, strategy, and execution. We are, of course, still managing this public health crisis. As I write this column, in early fall of 2021, Colgate (and much of the country) is wrestling with the Delta variant and with continued uncertainty about the course of this pandemic. Such a situation makes thinking about the future difficult.

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But I do want to speak about a vision for the future of the University, one first suggested in the chapel that reunion weekend. I want to alert our alumni to an important transformation that, begun more quietly a few years ago and delayed a bit by the pandemic, is about to unfold both robustly and noticeably. We will do this through the Third-Century Plan. Through monthly emails and updated webpages, I want to ensure our alumni, parents, and friends know of recent activity undertaken in service of the plan. I also want our constituencies to know of the plan’s scale and ambition. Through the Third-Century Plan, Colgate will, among other measures: ⚫ dramatically expand our reach, improving both diversity and selectivity in admissions; ⚫ increase financial support so Colgate is accessible and affordable to all; ⚫ double our academic footprint, with new chairs, new academic initiatives, and new and renovated facilities; ⚫ enhance our athletics facilities and programs; and ⚫ redefine residential life around a core set of experiences available for all. The plan will see the University invest more than $1 billion in financial aid, new academic programs, and new facilities throughout the next 10 years alone. The Third-Century Plan contemplates the largest

Visit colgate.edu/ president

illustration by steven noble

An Ambitious Plan for Colgate

and most important transformation in the history of Colgate. It will both complete our physical campus and help us fully realize our potential to become one of the great institutions in the nation — and perhaps the most important undergraduate institution in the country. An Important Opportunity By most measures, Colgate is doing well — even historically well. Applications to the University are at an all-time high, and entering classes show the academic achievement and promise seen at the very best colleges and universities. Alumni support is also at an all-time high as measured not only by new gifts and pledges to Colgate, but also by engagement in events. The University’s endowment — standing at $1.3 billion as of this writing — provides an ever-stronger foundation for all we are doing. But in my six years at Colgate, I have seen some institutional shortcomings relative to our peers. We have had an admissions approach that didn’t always throw the net as wide as possible to attract the leading students to the University. We have seen decades of underinvestment in arts and technology. We have a fragmented residential structure that divides more than it unites the student body. We’ve had an administrative culture that didn’t always operate at the highest possible level. Perhaps most importantly, we have had, at times, a lack of confidence in what we could accomplish and a lack of conviction in our ability to undertake awesome tasks and make profound changes. Too often, Colgate has relied on reactive moves or quick fixes to address these challenges, when we really need a more strategic and sustained culture of excellence. And we must also note, this is a challenging time for the liberal arts as a whole. While addressing the important work needed to broaden access to this kind of education and working toward modernizing its curriculum, many institutions — including Colgate, at times — have lost sight of their purpose, by neglecting common values that transcend individual differences, replacing old orthodoxies with new ones, and shying away from the spirited debate and meaningful dialogue we need. These challenges, however, present an important opportunity for Colgate to go about things differently. In tackling our particular challenges, we have a chance to do something bigger, and of greater long-term consequence, to build something none of our peers have achieved. Namely: A four-year liberal arts experience that binds people

of diverse backgrounds together through a rational and comprehensive residential system, a dynamic core curriculum, and shared rituals and esprit de corps. That’s not just a better Colgate — that’s an undergraduate experience on par with the very best colleges and universities in the country. A Long-Term Perspective The Third-Century Plan is an ambitious, proactive, long-term road map for realizing this University’s full potential. Through the efforts and investments it contemplates, we are reaffirming our commitment to the ideals of the liberal arts by instituting a systematic “core experience” that deepens the value of a Colgate education while expanding learning opportunities, advancing equitable access, and creating stronger social bonds. We are bringing a residential system — like those seen at leading, large research universities — to the intimate academic and social setting of an elite undergraduate college. This will be seen in the full completion of the Residential Commons system for first-years and sophomores “up the Hill” — through which each student will live in a two-year set of halls that forms a foundational community. It then means undertaking the Lower Campus Project, which will call for the renovation of all Colgate-owned buildings that house our juniors and seniors and adding new housing and social spaces to Broad Street and College Street. With added social spaces and landscaping, this part of Colgate will truly feel like a part of campus. Finally, every student will have a place at Colgate, and all will be connected through the full completion of the campus on Broad Street. We are bringing more leading faculty, cutting-edge research, and interconnected disciplines to campus to enrich this

The plan will see the University invest more than $1 billion in financial aid, new academic programs, and new facilities throughout the next 10 years alone.

academic enterprise. We are making this education available to more of the best and brightest students, regardless of location or socioeconomic background through the Colgate Commitment, which caps the cost of an education to a family’s income and removes student loans from most of our students’ financial aid packages. We’ve built an incredible — and unique — Division I athletics program that’s become a powerful asset. This, too, will be strengthened. All of this will take time and significant new resources, but by doing this, we are elevating Colgate as both a physical place and an educational force. The Pillars of the Plan We’ve already taken some important steps to make the plan’s vision a reality, including: ⚫ building new residence halls that have allowed us to have a Residential Commons system for all first- and second-years; ⚫ creating a state-of-the-art career services center at Benton Hall; and ⚫ elevating our competitiveness through the Colgate Commitment and our NoLoan Initiative. Now we’re building on this momentum in a bigger and bolder way, with Colgate’s first comprehensive, long-term plan. Competing for the Best Talent The plan starts with the people who choose Colgate for such an important part of their lives. To fulfill our potential, we don’t just need to reach a wider, more diverse pool of students and faculty. We need the tools to compete more aggressively for the best — beyond the constraints of tuition, salary, or geography. First, we have set out to completely redesign our financial aid — allowing us to cast a wider net for students of exceptional merit, no matter their background or socioeconomic status. This not only makes Colgate financially accessible to more lower-income students, but it also allows us to welcome back middle class students. Our first step, the Colgate Commitment, doubled our applicants for the Class of 2025 — and more than 50% more accepted students chose Colgate. The significance of this for our future cannot be overstated. Second, we are aligning the financial resources, physical environment, and working conditions to attract more of the best faculty to Colgate. We will be seeking more than 25 new endowed chairs, the single largest such effort in our history — transforming this critical recruiting tool Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 9

Improvements in Residential Life The plan also imagines at Colgate something that only a handful of large, private universities do extremely well, but no private liberal arts school has implemented: a cohesive four-year residential program. The liberal arts experience is, of course, about more than academics, and at Colgate, we’ve long benefited from a strong social culture. But life at Colgate hasn’t always been as equitable for all as it should, and like most of our peers, it has tended to be defined by reactive, ad hoc moves, rather than intentional, comprehensive planning. Arguably the most significant component of the Third-Century Plan will thus be a systematic improvement to residential life through the implementation of a full residential system in which all have a place to develop a community, socialize, and gather. We’re investing more than a quarter billion dollars into this effort, which includes: ⚫ completion of the Residential Commons for first- and second-years, up the Hill; ⚫ transformation of Broad Street into a residential village with desirable housing for all juniors and seniors, regardless of Greek or other affinities; and ⚫ creation of new common dining, study, and community spaces that are designed to foster greater interchange and a stronger spirit of belonging within houses, among classes, and across social groups. When completed, Colgate will be the first private liberal arts institution in the country to offer a cohesive, premier residential system — a critical foundation of the larger, core experience we’re building. A New Campus for Arts and Innovation Reaffirming our commitment to the liberal arts doesn’t mean a static curriculum, it means applying the timeless ideals of intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and respectful debate to our current world.

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All our investment in faculty directly benefits our students in a way no research university can match.

To that end, the Third-Century Plan calls for the creation of a new Middle Campus, which will elevate the role of the arts and technology and infuse greater creativity into the Colgate experience as a whole. This is long overdue — more students and faculty have distinguished themselves in these areas than many know, and it’s time we gave them better resources and a bigger platform. The new Middle Campus will position Colgate to deliver a multidisciplinary academic curriculum and learning experience that better prepares students for the 21st century. It will be home to an exciting range of creator and performance spaces, including: ⚫ the new Benton Center for Creativity and Innovation, which will bring theater, dance, film, and media studies together with computer science, reflecting the growing interplay between culture and technology at large; ⚫ a repurposed Dana Arts Center, restored to its original intent as a home for maker and practice spaces as well as a renovated Brehmer Theater; and ⚫ a new performing and visual arts center. Together, these will make Colgate a more fertile ground for ideas, culture, and debate,

both within and across disciplines. And Middle Campus also represents a missing puzzle piece in the physical experience of the University, creating new connectivity between Upper Campus and Broad Street, a better flow of people, and an even more beautiful setting. Doubling Down on Athletics We have also long had a unique commitment to athletics among institutions of our size and are proud of our Division I status — both for what this means for our scholarathletes and for what this says about our institutional ambition. The Third-Century Plan will build on this strength, with major investments in: ⚫ athletics scholarships and financial aid; and ⚫ critical facility upgrades, including the Reid renovation. A Category of One By now you have a sense of the scope and ambition of the Third-Century Plan. By tackling old weaknesses and making historic investment into new strengths, we will physically complete our campus, from Residential Commons up the Hill to the “maker culture” of Middle Campus, down to a transformed Lower Campus — creating a stunning and uninterrupted experience of place. We will inspire — and enable — more of the best and brightest students and faculty members to choose Colgate, drawing from more places and backgrounds. We will give every student a premier, equitable, fouryear residential experience, something previously attainable only at the most prestigious universities and offered by none of our liberal arts peers. We will provide students with a uniquely rigorous, multidisciplinary education infused with creativity, innovation, and opportunities to participate at the highest levels in academics as well as athletics. The Third-Century Plan will move Colgate forward, from “top tier but hard to define” into a category of one with a real point of view — advancing a more purposeful, 21stcentury liberal arts experience and creating an even stronger sense of belonging for everyone who passes through this incredible place. I look forward to this work with our trustees, faculty, alumni, staff, parents, and students. It will be extremely challenging. It will also be extremely exciting for all of us, and those of us who care about higher education in the United States. Here we go.

— Brian W. Casey

Anje Jager

from a relative weakness to a new point of strength. We are creating new centers of gravity for cutting-edge research, such as the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Olin Hall. We are providing all our faculty with more start-up funds, fellowships, and grants, giving them more freedom and support to achieve their breakout moments. And I’ll remind you that all our investment in faculty directly benefits our students in a way no research university can match — Colgate students are not only taught by discipline leaders, but they are also frequently close collaborators with faculty members.

Letters Career Influences In response to “What are your memories of studying computer science at Colgate?” (“Colgate and the Machine,” summer 2021, p. 46): My freshman roommate and I took an Intro to Computer Science class on a lark. As a costume design major at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan, I had limited exposure to science and math, let alone programming, but I discovered I had a knack for it. Under Professor Thomas Brackett’s leadership, I ultimately majored in computers and information science. I still remember the lone terminal in a gray basement corridor that I used for my assignments, and then there was Professor Brackett’s class in very large scale integration; so very cool! Fast forward 30-plus years, looking back at my career in financial services IT at Salesforce, Oracle, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, I am grateful for Colgate’s liberal arts education, which encourages students to explore a variety of subjects. On a side note, Professor Elizabeth Brackett also had a profound influence on me. [I was] an overwhelmed and insecure freshman; she not only provided encouragement, she still is my role model of being a woman in science. Emily Gilman ’83 Beezley Choosing to study computer science at Colgate had a massive impact on my career. Professor Tom Brackett was an excellent department chair who showed great flexibility in allowing a kid like me to pursue graduating in three years by enrolling for eight straight semesters, including two summer sessions. I was allowed to overload with the Machine Language/

Assembler course during fall 1978 based on the fact that I had essentially learned the material that summer from my friends and classmates who had already taken the class, which was vital to my likely decision to move up from the Class of 1981 to the Class of 1980. I remember the vast majority of the students who majored in computer science worked together constantly, both as paid computer operators (including those famous late-night shifts in the basement of the Coop) but also as programmers. Our cohort created games that we proudly worked together on, leveraging the technology available at the time, which included cursor addressing on video terminals. The biggest change that occurred in the curriculum almost immediately after I graduated was the massive shift from a heavy focus on computer theory and how computers were developed and used (almost a computer engineering curriculum) to a focus almost exclusively on programming. Unfortunately, I did not agree with that evolution, as my experience of starting out as a software engineer working on the Backup Flight Software for Rockwell International on the Space Shuttle was dramatically helped by my deep technical focus from Colgate. I leveraged my training in Machine Language/Assembler and other skills to help evolve and fix microcode issues that arose with IBM Flight Computers. Without that background, I would not have been nearly as effective at the young age of 22. More than 40 years later, I am still actively involved in the field. Marc Fertik ’80 I took Computers, Science and Society in the spring of my freshman year in 1980.

Students in a computer lab circa 1960s.

We learned to program in Fortran using the school’s DEC 10 mainframe. There were terminals in the computer center in the O’Connor Campus Center and also in the subbasement of McGregory. When we all had a final project due at the end of the semester, it was difficult to get time on the terminals, and I pulled my only all nighter of my career to get my project done on time. That was my first experience with computers, and I loved it. I went on to minor in computer science at Colgate and had a successful career as an embedded software engineer. The DEC 10 was replaced by a Vax soon after, which also was a time-shared system with terminals. In my junior year, the center acquired about a dozen

Terak RT11 individual computers that used 8-inch floppy disks. Computer Science 101 was taught using the Keller method by that time, and I was one of the tutors. I remember having to teach raw beginners how to copy the operating system onto their blank disks that they had bought at the bookstore. It involved multiple iterations of inserting the master disk followed by the student’s disk in the single drive system. By the next semester, Colgate had acquired a machine with two drives, and the tutors used it to create disks with the operating system preloaded. That made things much easier. The Teraks had a full screen editor, which was much easier to use than the line editor on the mainframes. I started using it

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 11

LEtters to type my papers for my other classes. Of course, if everyone had done this, it would have overwhelmed the available computers, but only computer science students knew how to use the editor and printer. I never used my typewriter again. Senior year, I took Computer Generated Music from [Professor] Dexter Morell. It used programs that he and former students had developed on the Vax. In order to play a composition, the entire computer had to be devoted, shutting out any other users until the composition was finished playing. I have fond memories of the many hours I spent in computer classes and in the computer center with Dr. Brackett and the other professors. Technology has changed so rapidly in my lifetime. It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come. Nancy Goering ’83 Did you know IBM hired many of the members of the Class of 1955 about five years after graduation because they were liberal arts grads who were not salesmen and not systems analysts, but could talk to people in client companies effectively? Bob Youker ’55

Inspired Kathryn Bertine’s (Class of ’97) “Taking a Stand” article (spring 2021, p. 8) is OUTSTANDING. Very well written and heartfelt

and raw and honest. Amazing! Kerstan Lincoln ’93 Ruffer

Reward vs. Risk Looking at your article about concussion research (“Making Headway,” summer 2021, p. 29) with its dizzying graphic of colorful dots and ellipses made me feel like I’d had my bell rung all over again. I played football, hockey, and lacrosse in the days when they put you back in the game after you woke up from a knockout. As an athlete from middle school through college, I must have had a dozen concussions. One afternoon in freshman hockey practice, I was knocked out and my face was slashed with a skate blade. The coach dropped me at the hospital where I was stitched up and left to walk back to my dormitory in a blizzard. The doctor never checked for concussion. A week later I was knocked cold playing Army at West Point and woke up in the locker room. It was just part of the game. We used to joke that if you got hit in the head, the coach would hold up his hand and ask, “How many fingers?” and it would always be three fingers. The new concussion protocols are a good thing — certainly better than just taking the next line shift — but we haven’t stopped playing the sports in which concussions are almost a given. Joining the drama club is about the only way to eliminate the danger. What we ultimately want to know about concussion is not scientific, but whether the reward of sports outweighs the risk. I’ve hardly ever known an athlete without some kind of permanent injury. It would be good one day to know the true longterm consequences of a few concussions. If you are not a professional boxer, will a halfdozen knockouts eventually turn your brain to mush? At Colgate, I wondered whether my memory had been affected by concussions, or

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whether it was just that Doc Reading’s Russian history tests were a bear. But all these years later I have great memories of my time as an athlete and I am still able to write a coherent sentence … or so I think. Brian Rooney ’74

Fondness for Dana Arts Center I’m glad to see the picture of Dana (“Places of Imagination,” spring 2021, p. 34), where I spent many happy hours rehearsing, performing, and being in the audience. It is one of my favorite buildings in the world. Malachy Duffy ’74 Hail to the Chief

use of colored pencils. And I won’t forget him standing on an outcrop impervious to the swarm of black flies. I feel privileged to have had Chief as an adviser and professor. Christine Chariton ’84

In response to “In Tribute: Jim McLelland” (online, summer 2021): I remember Chief’s Petrology class and the flood of information that was spewed forth. It required extensive

Words can’t do justice to the man. His company has been sorely missed ever since graduation. He opened his heart and home to others in a way that few people do. Jesse Coburn ’94

Dana Arts Center was named after Charles A. Dana, a legislator, industrialist, and philanthropist.

LEtters Lucky to spend six months abroad with this absolute giant of a man; intellectual, and gentle, wise soul. All who knew him benefitted deeply from his wisdom. R.I.P. to the Chief. A life well lived! Robert Ochsendorf ’99 There was only one Chief. Even among a cast of novel individuals in Colgate geology, he stood out — rather, jumped out. He was always a mesmerizing melange of scary and wicked and yet gentle and affirming. And always in command of his facts (scientific and otherwise), the lesson at hand, and the cheer to be spread. After hearing of his passing, I recalled he was my most ardent cheerleader to go to grad school in Minnesota — where I’ve lived for three decades. My gratitude forever. And my sincere condolences to his family; thinking now of John who shared our field camp in ’91 and inherited some of his dad’s more engaging traits. There was always a song that sprang to mind when recalling “Brother McLelland.” Now Chief’s gone up to the spirit in the sky! Charles Tiller ’92 Enrolling in Chief’s Megageology course as a freshman at Colgate (to check off a box and fulfill my science area requirement) forever changed the course of my life. I ended up majoring in it and loved every single geology course I took at Colgate (and the summer-long off-campus fieldwork study group), and I continued straight through to earn my MS in geology and work for Amoco as a deepwater exploration geologist in the late 1980s. He was such a mesmerizing professor — both terrifying with his dry gallows humor and endearing (I can still hear his voice in my head, nearly 40 years later!). I was fortunate to see him

a few times after graduation (at one reunion, at the wedding of his son to one of my Colgate geology classmates, at Professor Bob Linsley’s weekend-long retirement bash. My sincere condolences to the entire McLelland family. One of Chief’s most enduring legacies is the legion of students and geologists he helped to launch into the world. Suzanne Shelley ’82 What a tremendous person, scientist, and mentor. The Chief and his style of educating will be missed by Colgate and the earth science community. He was my initiation into geology via freshman year Megageology, and I took all his courses and never looked back. He (and Professor Sheila Seaman, also now deceased) were my first true mentors. I think about those days often with fondness and smile realizing that the Chief was a mentor to so many Colgate students, and not just geology majors. What a scientific and educational legacy! As Chief would have said: A toast to “Brother” McLelland. Jeff Standish ’92 Jim McLelland was a largerthan-life character. I’m 27 years into my career as a professional geologist, and I can say with certainty that my path to being an earth scientist started with the Chief’s Megageology course my freshman spring. His voice boomed across the lecture room in Lathrop Hall. I don’t believe I knew exactly what I wanted to do back in 1988, but I was inspired by the Chief to question, investigate, learn, hypothesize, and reevaluate those ideas. (Chief’s generation of geologists had to come to grips with plate tectonics — a seismic shift in our understanding of the Earth.) Looking back now, I am grateful to have hiked the Adirondack trails with the Chief. RIP, dear friend. David Foss ’91

Lasting Impressions In response to “In Tribute: Richard Sylvester” (spring 2021, p. 70): Professor Sylvester was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had the pleasure to study with. His enthusiasm and kindness inspired me in my language learning. He made a lasting impression on the trajectory of my life. Suzanne Daly ’96 I took a year of introductory Russian with Professor Sylvester in 1992, and while I didn’t continue with the language, I remember him well. He was a great teacher and always struck me as a kind and caring man. I still remember the way he said очень хорошо [very good] when he was happy with an answer or pronunciation! Sorry to hear of his death, but I think he lived a very fine life. Daniel Williams ’96

Listen to Your Heart On “From Science to Set Design” (spring 2021, p. 86): Yes! We don’t have to be stuck doing what we’re doing or living where we’re living. We have the power to listen to our hearts and to follow them. Way to go, Suzi! Nancy Howland Walker ’87

Musician/Activist/Father On “A Troubadour’s Humanitarian Legacy” (spring 2021, p. 55): I loved Harry Chapin’s music. Saw him perform live up the road at Hamilton College in maybe ’79 or ’80. And was about to leave to see him at Eisenhower Park when we heard about the tragic accident. Looking forward to seeing the documentary. Sharon Adler ’82

For Kicks On “Venturing Into the Unknown, With Guidance” (summer 2021, p. 52): Love these and so excited to wear my pair to homecoming! Susie Becker ’03 Gould

Positive Influence On “Breaking Open” (summer 2021, p. 10): Chris [Fagan ’77] was a fraternity brother. He was an influence with those who knew him. Blessings to the Fagans. Anthony Pietrafesa ’78 To share your thoughts on this issue, email magazine@colgate.edu, or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 13

Voices

Introspection

The Beard Award Publicly, Bryan Miller ’74 had one of the most enviable jobs as a New York Times restaurant critic. Privately, he was often wrestling with bipolar II disorder.

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or those grappling with depressive illness, life is largely about showing up. Social interactions can be exquisitely painful, and much of one’s time is taken up contriving ways to avoid them. For more than a dozen years at the New York Times, my life was consumed by high-profile work and endless socializing. I reviewed restaurants five to six nights a week in the company of one or two couples; had lunch two to three days a week; reported food stories; wrote a weekly recipe column, a weekly kitchen equipment column, and magazine features; this was augmented by public speaking, a daily radio spot, and a weekly TV appearance. I am surprised they didn’t draft me as an auxiliary truck driver. I held what was widely considered the best job in food journalism — indeed, the best job in the country, period. In the span of nine years as the Times’ restaurant critic, I dined out more than 5,100 times... Greater New York City was my peach — but it had a dark, moldy underside. In 1982, I was felled by what might be called a double helping of mental illness. Typically, one is plagued either by a biochemical depression, caused by inexplicable changes in brain chemistry, or an emotional disturbance arising from personal loss, separation, anxiety, or other factors. We know a tremendous amount about the physical brain — how it communicates with various parts of the body, where information is stored, and how it responds to stimuli and medications. But when it comes to the etiology of depression, the why it is tormenting nearly one in five American adults as I write this sentence, there is so much to learn. Remarkably, despite my dread of socializing, I never failed to show up for a restaurant review. At times I would stand at the front door, breathing heavily... I repeated to myself that I could do it, had done so hundreds of times, and that it would pass quickly. It could take a while, but I always went in. Outside of professional eating, however, there were numerous vanishing acts, from the minor (private dinner parties, sports events, work functions) to the major (media interviews, business travel, social engagements). To this day I suspect there are some incensed Canadians in Ottawa who, in 1993, invited me to be the keynote speaker at a big gourmet gala, 400 guests. It sounded like fun five months in advance — as do many such invitations — until the date approached. Crushingly depressed, I made it as far as the United Airlines boarding gate. Taking a seat near the ticketing desk,

Illustrations by Billy Clark, Folio Art

I weighed the consequences of going to Ottawa versus not going to Ottawa. If I were to go, and suffer through the event, delivering a halting, semi-coherent speech, at least I would find $2,000 in my pocket. Going straight home, on the other hand, would be capitulating to the disease. As the last stragglers trundled through the gate, the attendant, a middle-aged lady with tight hair and a pinched smile, turned to me. Was I on this flight? “No, no, I made a mistake. It’s the next one.” Three years into the illness, and between wives, I had drifted far from the shores of optimism regarding an imminent cure. The medications — anywhere from 70 to 114 pills a week — could be like an overmatched prizefighter, effective in the early rounds but ultimately weak-kneed and feckless. At times they left me a trembling, withered old man. Climbing the stairs to my thirdfloor apartment could be a five minute trek. Psychotherapy was bearing some fruit, though as yet barely enough to make a small cobbler. Grimly, I came to expect the worst, and it was worse than I expected. In 1991, the James Beard Foundation anointed me with one of its two highest honors, the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America, awarded to a “most accomplished food and beverage professional in the country.” I had been at the Times for just over six years, five as the restaurant critic. It seemed a little early to get a career tribute like that, sort of like being voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame when your rookie contract runs out. The honor came with a large bronze trophy the weight of a young St. Bernard, in the form of a French waiter. The Beard Foundation, a nonprofit culinary organization that likens itself to the motion picture academy, bestows annual awards to chefs, restaurateurs, wine professionals, journalists, and other industry types… Two days before the event I was browsing in a guitar shop near Times Square. A familiar bell chimed in my brain. First there was a tingling on the surface of the scalp, like a mild electrical current; then confusion, followed by great anxiety. Before long, a cognitive thunderstorm rolled in, knocking down power lines and making a mess of things. My racing thoughts were random and unfocused and frightening … the wonderful assortment of guitars hanging on the walls could have been cured hams. I was certain I had forgotten how to play, so what was I doing there? I wanted to go home and sleep until it passed, but that was wishful thinking. In its wake arrived a thick, gauzy fog — a dull, stultifying

nothingness that Emily Dickinson described as a so-called “funeral in the brain… .” At the time I was taking an ornery medication called Nardil. It is a Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor (MAO), among the first antidepressants, developed in the 1950s. MAOs elevate levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, all related to mood. Surprisingly, it is often the drug of choice when modern medications prove ineffective. MAOs have fallen out of favor because of potentially dangerous interactions with certain foods, drinks, and other medications — perfect for a food writer. It is risky when combined with the chemical tyramine, an amino acid that helps regulate blood pressure and is found in red wine, aged cheeses, some smoked meats and fish, and more. They say it is in caviar, but I was not about to accept that without a fight. One day at home I consumed a teaspoon of Beluga (the highest grade) hoping I would not have to dial 911. Fortunately, I was fine, and continued to experiment with more generous (and expensive) servings to no ill effect. Aged cheese is another matter; on one occasion, after an accidental ingestion of feta cheese in a salad, my blood pressure skyrocketed, sending me into near stroke territory. I was trundled out of the Times newsroom on a gurney and hospitalized overnight. I have always wondered which of my colleagues observed this loud and unscripted performance, and why no one ever mentioned it. It so happened that, on the day I began taking Nardil, I arrived at the office and bumped into Frank Prial, our wine critic. A ruddy Irishman with a generous girth and a pocketful of witticisms, he was an immensely popular columnist because of his down-to-earth, witty writing style and approachable erudition. “Bryan, come on up to the test kitchen and help out,” he beckoned. “I’m tasting some Beaujolais.” All Beaujolais are red. I determined it was some sort of leap of faith I needed to go through and joined him. Besides, professional wine tasters do not drink the wine; rather, they swirl it around in the mouth, swallow a little, and spit it out. So I swirled, sniffed, tasted, and expectorated for half an hour. It turned out that red wine, like caviar, was not a problem for me. Nor were white or rosé. What a relief. Prial was also a talented reporter, having held at least a dozen positions at the paper over the years, including Paris correspondent. He wanted off the vinous

Greater New York City was my peach — but it had a dark, moldy underside.

beat, chiefly so he could return to Paris. If that were to happen, the paper would need a new wine writer. The brass decided I had a suitable palate and requested I accompany Frank on his bibulous rounds, which could involve assessing several dozen wines a day. How great was that? Drinking for a living. The paper even enrolled me in wine school. It did not take long to discover that my antidepressant Nardil was a real party pooper. At higher doses, it drains the libido to the level of an octogenarian, which is problematic for a married 39-year-old male. Thirty milligrams, an average dose, leaves the engine difficult to turn over; at 45 mg it sputters and belches smoke; at 60 mg it repeatedly stalls out; 75 mg, well, you can imagine. In the early days, I was prescribed 90 mg. My Beard Award appearance was set for 9 p.m., when I was expected to take to the rostrum and scatter some pearls of gastronomic wisdom. I would have rather been buried alive. Shortly after 7 p.m., I dressed in a charcoal suit and a loud yellow tie that had been presented to me by Pierre Troisgros, a three-star French chef. Adorning the tie were images of Pierre’s restaurant and his team of cooks — pretty wild, but that was the only night I could wear it without looking tacky. The event was held at the Times Square Marriott Marquis hotel, which has a grand ballroom that could hold a medium-sized junior college. I thought about the dozens of strange foodies I would encounter; the bubbly networking; the vows to get together for dinner, which of course we would not. Then there were those pearls of wisdom. I had scratched out a few talking points on a paper menu from a Japanese noodle parlor, but that hardly comprised pearls of anything. The night would be beyond distressing, presuming I could pull it off at all. Then again, there was the unthinkable: I could bail. Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 15

VOICES Turning west on 52nd Street, amid the forest of glass towers lining the Avenue of the Americas, I approached a popular steakhouse called Ben Benson’s. I had never reviewed the place, although it was well-regarded and only three blocks from my apartment, so I don’t know why I hadn’t. The tanned and tweedy namesake owner enjoyed a wide and loyal following. I had stopped by two years prior while researching the best crab cakes in New York. Ben Benson’s was the runaway winner — enormous, with sweet fresh crab, no filler, encased in a latticework of golden brittle potatoes. Near the entrance was a small, clubby bar that saw a flash flood of financial executives when the corporate whistle sounded at 5 p.m. I felt very weak, from torpor or tension, and decided to have a quick drink. By 6:30 p.m. the crowd was thinning out as tipplers hustled to catch trains to Larchmont or Tarrytown or Scarsdale. I commandeered a stool, reckoning that if I got myself sufficiently embalmed the evening might pass with less angst. I glanced at the clock: 7:10 p.m. The event had commenced at the Marriott. I was not exactly in the mood for barroom badinage, but the loud tie invited several queries regarding my plans for the evening. “You’re looking sharp, sir,” remarked a burly fellow in his 40s, wearing a khaki suit and a blonde brush cut. He had probably played defensive end in college. “Nice tie,” he added. “Where are you off to?” “Nowhere,” I mumbled. “So you are all dressed up with no place to go?” “I guess so. I’m supposed to be somewhere, but it’s a long story.” “Women. Say no more.” Two older fellows at the end of the bar nodded in approbation. My heart was racing. I needed a drink and ordered a rye old fashioned, my favorite cocktail. An

The medications — anywhere from 70 to 114 pills a week — could be like an overmatched prizefighter, effective in the early rounds but ultimately weak-kneed and feckless. 16 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

interesting looking man soon arrived; he was tall, trim, in his 60s, with longish saltand-pepper hair and a slow, warm smile. Clearly European. His name was Roger — actually, Rogier, from Belgium. He was nattily attired in a dark blue suit, Turnbull and Asser checked shirt, and blue tie. Time had skied down Rogier’s face, etching vertical creases that, in most men, would telegraph age but only added to his dignified mien. He could have been an art curator, a diplomat, an international banker. One thing was for sure: whatever Rogier was, he was well acquainted with that bar and the other patrons. He told me he was in the shipping business — fats and oils, whatever that meant. “Off to some fun party tonight?” he asked, inspecting my tie. “No…” Sedated by two muscular old fashioneds, my brain still felt sheathed in gauze. Psychiatrists strongly admonish patients taking antidepressants to steer clear of alcohol. For the vast majority of depressed people who attempt to drink themselves out of their misery, booze is an exit door painted on the wall. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and overdoing it can make one feel worse. In one respect I am fortunate, for I have a bell in my head that rings when I have reached my limit. Beyond that, I can be terribly sick for days. So I never cross the line. (Although that night came close.) Nearly a third of people suffering from major depression have a drinking problem to some degree. Women are more than twice as likely to start drinking excessively if they have a history of depression. Teens that have had one bout of major depression are twice as likely to start drinking as those who have not. And, if they are on medication, there could be serious side effects. Again, I entertained the idea of blowing off the award ceremony. No, you can’t do that. The entire culinary world will be there: the food press, colleagues from the Times, restaurant owners, chefs, industry leaders. If you bail it will be a calamity for the Beard Foundation, and for you. I bailed. My third cocktail was taxiing down the runway, donated by Rogier. The Beard Awards were no longer heavy on my mind, as long as I did not look at the clock. I looked at the clock. 8:30 p.m. If I changed my mind, there was still time to shuffle down to the Marriott and make an ass of myself. I turned my attention to the new old fashioned. Then arrived a hefty fellow named Martin, an affable

Irishman from Westchester who was in the commercial real estate business… He was one of the regulars, with an earnest smile and firm salesman’s handshake. He exhibited little urgency to decamp to his hushed suburban hideaway. Rogier, too, appeared to be settled in for the later innings, while deliberating another martini… We went on talking about everything, mostly sports and restaurants. And dogs. “I had a red setter when I lived in Fairfield,” recalled Rogier. He explained that he was the “stupidest” animal he’d ever seen. He liked to sleep under the coffee table, and if the kids came in making loud noises, he would jump up, whacking his head, every time. It was comforting to spend time with some blokes who knew little about neither my world nor my illness and just wanted to shoot the breeze. I was invisible. No one could intrude upon my scary world. After the third old fashioned, the Beard Awards had faded into the mist. I was not drunk, but I was not sober. The three of us called it a night and promised to see each other soon. The following morning I was in possession of what the French call a “guele de bois” (wooden mouth). A sequoia. And that was the least of my penance. I suffered from a nuclear headache and a royally vindictive stomach. Coffee offered little relief. The refrigerator was bare, save for a package of Kodak film and a roll of rock-hard goat cheese. At 9 a.m. I headed down to the office — something I tried to avoid when depressed, but today there was an important story meeting. As I approached the Marriott Marquis, images of the awards ceremony played out in my mind. In my fantasy, all the preliminary medals had been passed out. The largely inebriated audience awaited the grand event. “And now,” the president of the James Beard Foundation beamed, “the award for Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America is Bryan Miller of the New York Times.” Hearty applause. The recipient should be on his way to the stage. More hearty applause. Where is the recipient? Lackluster applause. Heads begin turning toward the rear of the ballroom. No applause. Murmurings. The foundation president sheepishly waits at the podium, an unclaimed bronze statue gleaming under the spotlights. Turning onto West 43rd Street, I entered the Times building and made a detour to my desk in order to avoid eye contact with the food staff. Would they confront me as

VOICES

IN THE MEDIA

As (former Supreme Court justice) Sandra Day O’Connor used to say quite a bit, it’s good to be the first, but you don’t want to be the last. — Elizabeth Wolford ’89, who recently became the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Western District of New York (and the first to serve in this role in any part of New York State outside of the New York City area), to the Daily Messenger

a chastising group, or individually? And even if they left me to myself, would I be fielding calls from food journalists around the country? To my astonishment, no one brought up the Beard Award. Following the editorial meeting, at which I contributed two good story proposals, I scooted out of the building, vowing to stay clear of the office for a while. Being a senior Times critic — I think there were around seven on the paper — I was a privileged character, free to come and go as I pleased as long as I fed the lion twice a week. The question was, what do I do about my shameful dereliction? What a slap in the face to the foundation. They must want to hog-tie me to a pickup truck and drag me around Times Square. I considered going down to the foundation’s headquarters to apologize, but what would I say? I am a manic depressive and you caught me on a bad day? Better perhaps to craft a letter of groveling apology. Still, what was the reason? Depressed people lie about their condition all the time, but for once in my life my lie repository was coming up dry. Looking back, I should have done something. I subsequently learned that Florence Fabricant, a Times food reporter, was nice enough to (awkwardly) accept the award on my behalf. We have never discussed it.

Two months later I was enjoying a beer on the porch of my farmhouse in Rhinebeck, N.Y., about 90 miles north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, savoring a glorious stretch of well-being. It was a resplendent autumn afternoon. A UPS truck pulled up the driveway and the courier placed at my feet a large, heavy, cardboard box. I lugged it inside and sawed through the top with a bread knife, plunging my hands into bubble wrap. I lifted its content and placed it on the kitchen table. It was the trophy.

— Excerpted from Dining in the Dark: A Famed Restaurant Critic’s Struggle With and Triumph Over Depression (Skyhorse, 2021) by Bryan Miller ’74 As a food critic, Miller enjoyed dinners with celebrities including Dolly Parton, Luciano Pavarotti, Stephen King, and Paul and Linda McCartney.

“One of the touchy areas about getting into an inquiry about the truth of somebody’s religious objection to a vaccine is, an individual within a religious tradition may have a different understanding than other individuals in that religious institution.” — Jenna Reinbold, associate professor of religion, in the Washington Post about religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates

Overall, alumni were incredibly inspired, and many increased their giving to Colgate to support this. — Jennifer Stone, Colgate’s assistant vice president for advancement, annual giving and professional networks, in the Inside Philanthropy article, “How a ‘Hidden Ivy’ Eliminated Most Student Loans Thanks to Alumni Support” Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 17

SCENE Connections

Serving Others Through Colgate’s Upstate Institute, students and staff members have been tackling a variety of food-related issues.

ilk consumption has been on the decline for a number of years, placing further economic distress on dairy farmers who have already been struggling to stay afloat. “Weaker prices and higher feed costs paint an unsettled outlook for the U.S. dairy sector in 2021,” reports the United States Department of Agriculture. To aid Madison County dairy farmers, the Upstate Institute has joined forces with the Partnership for Community Development (PCD). “Their wages and income are always declining,” says PCD Executive Director Jennifer Marotto Lutter, “and it’s making it extremely hard for them to remain dairy farmers.” In July, the PCD and Upstate Institute completed Phase 1 of the Madison County Dairy Study. This first step surveyed local farmers to gauge their interest in collaborating on a venture. The concept is modeled on the Hudson Valley Fresh cooperative, formed by three farms that own, process, and sell milk together. “It’s all done from one location, the farmers own it together, and they get equal payout,” Lutter explains. “They have much more control over

the quality of the brand and the distribution.” She and Upstate Institute Project Director Julie Dudrick organized a dinner where farmers could learn more from Hudson Valley Fresh founder Sam Simon about how that co-op has been successful. “The reason [Hudson Valley Fresh] started is the same reason we want to start ours: because they want the farmers to make a living wage,” Lutter says. Approximately 45 farmers attended the dinner in fall 2019. When the pandemic hit, it not only delayed progress on the initiative, but it also further reduced the demand for milk when schools and restaurants temporarily closed. “The first half of the pandemic was a difficult time for [farmers] to envision the future,” Dudrick says. In spring 2020, she reignited the conversation, and the Upstate Institute dedicated some of its own funding to hire consultants to survey Madison County farmers. Ten expressed interest in the possibility of forming a co-op, and several larger dairies called her to learn more. “I think our next step will be to bring these folks together again,” Dudrick says. The Upstate Institute and PCD are focused on helping the farmers, but they point out that aiding the local agriculture industry also benefits our communities. “Industrial agriculture is one of the largest sources of emissions in the world,” Lutter says. “So one of the things we need to think about is, how do we feed ourselves as a

18 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

community? We’re lucky we’re surrounded by farms. How do we keep them viable? I think this is a step toward a solution.” ‘There Is a Structural Problem’ Dipesh Khati ’22 has been analyzing the challenges facing Madison County dairy farmers from his perspective as an economics and applied mathematics major. This

summer, while interning for Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), Khati combed through the organization’s reports from the past few years and noticed alarming trends, starting with volatile milk prices. “The farmers were suffering huge losses and not able to keep up,” says Khati, who found the internship through the Upstate Institute. “And as I dug deeper, I started to see that, in Madison County, the size of [some] farms was getting larger, [but] the number of farms was getting smaller.” Next, he read the recent survey facilitated by the Upstate Institute and saw that only 40% of small farms were able to break even. He started thinking, “Why is that the case, and what can be done?” Khati started conducting his own research, interviewing

Growing up in Nepal, Dipesh Khati ’22 spent the early years of his life in the rural part of the country farming with his grandparents. “I think a sense of nostalgia drew me to this research,” he says.

agencies that work with farmers and the farmers themselves. “There is a structural problem, and I wanted to see it from a problem-solving lens,” he says. Khati broke down the issue by asking: “A lot of the small farms in the area are not able to generate profit. Would that be a problem on the revenue side or on the cost side?” Government price fixing, location, and equipment prices were some of the factors he considered. One potential solution, he’s learned, is increasing the size of the farm as others have done. That entails an increase in investment and cost, but some agencies offer loan assistance. Another option is purchasing older, less expensive equipment. “[To be] forward-looking, we should give farmers some resources for the future and make some preparations to enlarge the scope and the operations so they are efficient in the long run,” says Khati, who applied lessons from a Harvard business class he took online last summer. This fall, he’s been writing a summary of his findings and creating a template that assesses factors like cost structures, assets, revenues, and working capital. His work will be published in the CCE’s newsletter that’s sent to farmers in the county. With plans to enter management consulting after graduation, Khati has viewed his role as developing recommendations that the farmers could potentially use. He’s not approaching the situation as though he’s more knowledgeable than the people actually doing the work: “Farmers have been doing this for years,” he acknowledges. But rather, “Here’s something I saw from my lens. You might find it helpful, maybe not, but it’s worth taking a look.” And, by providing his ideas, he hopes to save them some time because their schedules are so rigorous. “This is to try to make it easier [for them].” — Aleta Mayne

Juny Ardon ’23 at For the Good in Utica

13 bits 1 On the first day of classes, Frank Dining Hall served more than 5,100 meals, 1,200 burgers, and 600 pounds of chicken.

In addition Juny Ardon ’23 got her hands dirty with For the Good. Working alongside Utica community members of all ages, Ardon learned how to garden vegetables like peas, onions, potatoes, squash, and cauliflower. The nonprofit provides thousands of pounds of free organic produce every year to members in exchange for their work in the gardens; some of the produce also goes to a local organization that makes meals for those with food insecurity. An educational studies major from Los Angeles, Ardon saw the value in giving children this connection with the earth. “It was a very natural way of learning,” Ardon says. “It was magical.” Grace Leightheiser ’22 was a busy bee with ADK Action. She installed pollinator gardens throughout the Adirondack Park through the nonprofit organization based in Keeseville. In charge of installing 15 new gardens, Leightheiser communicated with garden recipients, built the beds, sourced the soil, and cared for the baby plants before they were transplanted. “It has been really cool to meet and work with all of the different garden recipients,” Leightheiser says, “because it makes me feel more rooted to the area — I’m not just a summer tourist, but a real member of the community.”

Emma Goldstein ’21 felt fulfilled with Feeding New York State. Goldstein’s charge was to improve the quality and efficacy of food distribution. She analyzed three-year dairy distribution data from Feeding NYS’s 10 regional food banks, adding the pounds of dairy distributed by four regional food banks and calculating the percentage change of distribution by these programs from 2018– 20. The goal: providing Feeding NYS with data to understand which food programs in its network have the capacity to increase dairy distribution. As a result of Goldstein’s work, Feeding NYS received a grant from the American Dairy Association (ADA) in August, allowing for funding of milk coolers that will improve New York food programs’ ability to distribute dairy. (To date, the ADA has supplied eight coolers to food programs across New York, which is an approximately $25,000 investment.) Her second project involved developing a food preference survey to better understand the needs and desires of recipients in the emergency food network. “The information collected has the power to improve the effectiveness of food pantries across the state,” Goldstein says. “Thousands of people in the emergency food network will benefit.” — Lalana Sharma ’23

2 At Wingo! in the Coop, students eat wings and play bingo for prizes.

3 Seven Oaks Clubhouse may be closed temporarily for renovations, but its menu is offered at Merrill House this academic year.

4 Love a hot pastrami on rye? The Rye Berry’s house-made pastrami takes one week to brine, cure, and smoke.

5 Golden Ticket: CNY News named Maxwell’s Chocolates & Ice Cream in Hamilton one of the “12 upstate candy stores that would make Willy Wonka smile.”

6 Speaking of Golden Tickets, Case Library became Club Case during arrival week, with new students searching the stacks for coupons to local stores.

▼

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 19

scene

▼ 7 Ciccone Commons celebrated the birthday of Diane Ciccone ’74, P’10 with cake and “night owl” ice cream (a nod to the commons’ mascot) Sept. 3.

8 The Colgate Jewish Union Bagel Brunch gave students the opportunity to nosh and socialize during arrival week.

9 President Casey’s favorite food while in quarantine 2020: Chartwells’ “ambitious” cod.

10 Local restaurants with campus pop-up locations: Royal India Grill, Ray Brothers BBQ, FoJo Beans.

Clubs

Feeding Community

ne aspect of college life that never fails to bring people together is food. Three student organizations have focused their missions around food while simultaneously providing students opportunities to try new cuisines, dedicate themselves to service work, and promote cultural awareness. The Colgate Cheese and Culture Club, which has more than 300 active members, meets monthly to share an interest in learning more about various cultures and places around the world. “Our events often fill up within the first minute of signups,” says Cecilia Belzer ’22, who founded the group in 2018. Each meeting is centered around a variety of cheese

11 At ALANA’s Multicultural Night Market, students shared street and ethnic food from different countries.

tastings from a different area of the globe. The subjects can range from the historical and cultural significance of cheeses to specific processes in which they’re made. Although the pandemic hindered many campus gatherings last year, the Cheese and Culture Club persevered by transitioning to local cheese tastings from the Hamilton Farmers Market and Martha’s On Madison (before the new eatery’s grand opening in June). Another popular club is Challah for Hunger, whose objective is to raise awareness of food insecurity and money for hunger relief. Like the artfully braided traditional Jewish bread, the student-led organization works to intertwine community service, a common interest in baking, and social activities into one group. Through bake sales, the group donates 50% of profits to local food banks and the other 50% to the American Jewish World Service. Although the club is affiliated with Jewish culture, it

is open to all students. “Through baking and selling challahs, we are able to form new friendships with our peers while simultaneously learning about the importance of addressing food insecurity,” says Alexis Goldman ’23, co-president of Challah for Hunger. Lastly, the Colgate Hunger and Outreach Program (CHOP) works to ensure that community members have access to nutritious meals. Members visit the Friendship Inns in Hamilton and Morrisville to connect with town members and share freshly prepared dinners. In addition to the bimonthly get-togethers, CHOP members volunteer at the Hamilton Food Cupboard to further help community members. “We hope to promote food security and community in each of our volunteer opportunities,” says club leader Lucas Rondan ’22. — Tess Dunkel ’24

Convocation snapshot: At this year’s Founders’ Day ceremony, Brittney Dorow ’17 sang the alma mater as part of the annual welcoming of the first-years.

12 Current task of the Sustainability Council’s Food and Dining Subcommittee: assessing what percentage of dining services purchasing is plant based and organic.

mark diorio

Well-timed: Nick Kokonas ’90 sold his restaurant reservations platform Tock to Squarespace for $400 million.

20 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

scene

Student Voices

Mapping Food Deserts in Utica

ood access is a critical area of study in both environmental studies and geography. This summer, I conducted independent research through the geography department with Professor Peter Klepeis and Senior Lecturer Myongsun Kong to map food access and inequality in Utica, N.Y. The inspiration for my research came from a map published in 1936 by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. This map was called a security map and rated each area of Utica according to its investment potential. While areas were said to have been divided by the quality and construction date of its infrastructure and housing, the race and ethnicity of area inhabitants played the biggest role in determining an area’s classification. These security maps were created for more than 200 U.S. cities after the Great Depression to identify areas that were up and coming, appealing to new homeowners, and places where banks should give out mortgages. In Utica, ethnicity and immigration status played the largest role in determining an area’s classification with the majority of “C – declining” and “D – hazardous” areas occupied by central and eastern European immigrants. The historical legacies and modern-day impact of these security maps have been studied in a variety of different contexts. I chose to use the Utica security map to try to explain the current locations of supermarkets and

food deserts using a theory known as supermarket redlining. Redlining is a broad term used to describe the effects of racially based housing policies — such as security maps. Most banks refused to provide loans and mortgages to redlined areas, creating a pattern of disinvestment that has persisted to this day. To determine whether the spatial distribution of supermarkets and food deserts in Utica was impacted by redlining, I used the mapping platform ArcGIS Online to display the locations of supermarkets and food deserts. I then overlaid a digitized version of the 1936 security map of Utica and compared the redlined areas to the current locations of food deserts and supermarkets. What I found was surprising. The current locations of fullservice supermarkets are evenly distributed among all of the different area classifications in Utica. Supermarkets were in “D” graded, “C” graded, as well as the highest rated “B” and “A” graded areas. This does not follow the theory of supermarket redlining and is an encouraging result for the city of Utica. Despite being classified as a food desert, Utica has experienced a recent expansion in the number of supermarkets offering affordable, healthy foods. The results from my research can be used to identify areas in need of full-service supermarkets and as a testament that historical legacies of redlining can be overcome. I am continuing the research this fall as an honors thesis in geography, looking more specifically at refugee food access in Utica’s food deserts. I will be able to enhance my current findings and further advance my research in understanding what food access and inequity looks like in Utica.

— Anna Duerr ’22 is an environmental geography major from Lake Elmo, Minn.

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906), Male Nude, Back View (Homme nu vu de dos) (recto), 1863–65, pencil on wove paper. Collection of Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University. Gift of Joseph Katz

Art

Fundamental Figure

pencil drawing by Paul Cézanne that has been in Colgate’s permanent collection since 1959 was recently part of an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Picker Art Gallery loaned the piece to MoMA for its Cézanne Drawing exhibition that ran from June until the end of September, featuring 250 rarely seen drawings and paintings. “In determining whether or not to loan a work, we look at factors such as the environmental and security controls at the borrowing institution, but also at whether the work is in good enough

condition to travel and whether it is needed for exhibitions, programs, or teaching here at Colgate,” explains Nick West, co-director of University Museums and Picker Art Gallery curator. The work was shown in a colorful gallery filled with Cézanne’s kaleidoscopic watercolor paintings and pencil still lifes. MoMA gathered the pieces from its own collection as well as public and private collections around the world. “Presented together, these works reveal how this fundamental figure of modern art — more often recognized as a painter — produced his most radical works on paper,” according to MoMA. — Tess Dunkel ’24

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SCENE scene

Projects for Peace

A Teaspoon of Translation, a Cup of Kindness, and Immeasurable Experiences Two alumnae compile a cookbook of recipes from the Arab world, providing aid to women Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Leila Ismaio ’21 (left) and Melissa Verbeek ’21 in Amman, Jordan

eaping servings of dishes like grape leaves, lamb meatballs, basmati rice, and tabbouleh left Melissa Verbeek ’21 and Leila Ismaio ’21 stuffed after dinners at a Syrian refugee center in Amman, Jordan. Even the strong Turkish coffee that’s the customary conclusion to meals failed to rouse them, so they’d return to their apartment and nap. Verbeek and Ismaio spent the summer helping Syrian women of refugee status; their work was supported by a Kathryn W. Davis Projects for Peace Grant. During their two months in Amman, they used the grant to create a children’s play space in one center, build a rooftop garden in a second center, and develop a digital cookbook that they began selling in September to provide financial aid to the women. “Leila and I want to raise as much money as possible because we think that everyone deserves to live not only with the basic needs, but also comfortably and well,” Verbeek says.

The recipes in the cookbook were provided by the women at the second refugee center and translated into English by Verbeek and Ismaio. “Everyone had really cool ideas and they were super excited,” Ismaio recalls. Verbeek and Ismaio spent a day with each family to learn how to cook the dishes, take notes, and eat the meal together. “It was obvious when we started cooking with every family that that’s something they really enjoyed doing, and it was incredible to be a part of,” Ismaio says. As is often the case with

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SCENE scene family recipes passed down through generations, cooking is done through instinct, so there aren’t exact measurements. In addition, the Syrian women are used to cooking for their large families. For example, one woman made 100 kibbeh — deep-fried pouches of ground lamb and beef. “They’d say, ‘4 pounds of flour,’ and I’d think, ‘How do we convert that into four servings?’” Ismaio remembers. “So it had its chaotic moments, but I think that was my favorite part.” Verbeek adds: “I would be in the corner with my notebook writing everything as fast as I could. The notes are incomprehensible if you look back at them.” Through the process, the two developed close relationships with the families. “It was more than just eating or picking a recipe, it was sharing my stories and their stories,” says Ismaio, who grew up with an Arabic background (her parents are from Libya). Dinners would last hours. Sometimes the Syrian women would FaceTime with their families back home and include Verbeek and Ismaio on the calls. “We really got to know people through the process of cooking and then sharing Turkish coffee afterward,” Verbeek says. End-of-the-meal Turkish coffee was a requisite part of the experience. Despite their achingly full stomachs and a general distaste for the beverage, the two Americans knew it would be rude to turn down the offer. The title of their cookbook, Bidkum Qahwa? — meaning “Do you want coffee?” in Syrian — is a nod to that experience. “The answer is always yes, even if you don’t really like coffee, because it’s the social way to gather and talk,” Verbeek explains. The cookbook includes directions for how to make the thick, rich drink, along with a suggestion to add cardamom or coriander. The page is decorated with pictures by a woman called Um Amar, whose hobby is to

The digital cookbook includes video links to show the process of making dishes like stuffed grape leaves, pictured here.

photograph arrangements of her Turkish coffee. Most of the recipe titles begin with “Um” — meaning mother — followed by the name of the woman’s oldest son. The authors explain this as well as other tidbits of information and anecdotes in the book. “Something Melissa and I talked about while we were putting in these stories is we really wanted the book to center on who these women are, some of their passions, and what they’re excited about,” Ismaio says. “Obviously, they’re coming from a war-torn country, so there are a lot of really sad stories, but we wanted the book to reflect who they are and not the circumstances that have led them to be in the situation they are in. We wanted to highlight the strong women we met.” They first met the women at the centers in 2019 during a study abroad program that focused on persons with refugee status and humanitarian action, specifically looking at the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan. (The nation currently hosts 668,000 Syrians registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.) Verbeek and Ismaio had become best friends through their Arabic studies courses at Colgate — both majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies (with Ismaio adding a second major in peace and conflict studies). During the study abroad

program, Verbeek’s research project was inspired by her courses in educational studies (her double minor with psychology). She interviewed Jordanian and Syrian youth about the effectiveness of their educational system. Ismaio’s research looked at the gaps in services from humanitarian aid organizations serving widowed Syrian women. The two students’ research projects often overlapped as they were interviewing the women and children at the refugee centers. The issues they saw while doing this work inspired them to apply for the Projects for Peace Grant. “We did basic undergraduate-level research and weren’t really able to offer anything to the women, so we had them in our minds when we applied for the grant,” Verbeek says. They received the award in 2020 but had to postpone their trip due to the pandemic. Returning to Amman this summer, Verbeek and Ismaio observed how communities have been affected. International funding assistance has been redirected to COVID-19 efforts, some of the women have lost their jobs, and many of the boys quit school to work to support their families. “The situation definitely has gotten worse,” Ismaio says. From her 2019 research project, Ismaio learned that direct cash assistance is an essential

service often overlooked by humanitarian aid organizations. That knowledge fed the idea for creating a cookbook and giving 100% of the proceeds to the Syrian women at the second center, which receives much less international aid than the larger center. There are 28 recipes in the cookbook, most of which were provided by the Syrian women, but a handful are from the authors’ friends and Ismaio’s family (including her dad’s shakshuka, which the alumnae often made when living together). “The donated recipes are from other people across the Arab world to enhance the cookbook,” Verbeek says. A “cucumbers of difficulty” rating on each recipe tells readers how much skill is involved. For a couple of the more complex dishes, there are links to videos showing, for instance, how to roll the grape leaves or form the kibbeh. A donation option on the website allows people to give and receive without purchasing the cookbook for $25. “If you donate any amount, we send you three mystery recipes,” Verbeek says. Now they’re on to their next adventures. Verbeek received a scholarship to attend England’s University of Exeter, which has a well-known Arab and Islamic studies institute. Ismaio is studying for the LSATs with the goal of attending law school next year, and she is considering going into immigration or international law. — Aleta Mayne

Find photos of Verbeek and Ismaio in Jordan as well as information about their cookbook on Instagram @leila.mel.amman.2021.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 23

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Fundraising

Record-Setting Year

olgate closed the books on a record-setting 2020–21 fundraising year, thanks to the generosity of alumni and other supporters. More than 12,050 alumni, family members, and friends contributed a total of more than $42 million this year. These gifts — of all sizes — allowed the University to operate fully this year and to move forward with Third-Century Plan initiatives. “I would like to recognize the profound generosity of our alumni, families, and friends,” says President Brian W. Casey. “They have stood with us as we navigated our pandemic response, and they have set us on an ambitious path toward realizing our plans for Colgate’s third century.” Contributions to the Colgate Fund rose to $9.1 million, the highest level in University history. These unrestricted gifts, in concert with careful fiscal management, enabled the University to offer a safe, in-person experience for

$9.1 million Contributions to the Colgate Fund rose to $9.1 million, the highest level in University history.

24 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

students during the 2020–21 academic year — that included investments in classroom technology, emergency financial aid, testing, PPE, and more. Last December, Colgate community members around the world stepped up to the Colgate Together Challenge, raising more than $4 million to assist with pandemic-related expenses. Importantly, this record-setting level of support for the Colgate Fund allowed the University to accelerate the implementation of the Colgate Commitment, which has resulted in the removal of student loans from the financial aid packages of students coming from families with annual salaries up to $150,000. Further, the Colgate Commitment will cap tuition costs for many families while removing tuition fees entirely for students whose families earn $80,000 or less. In the second half of the fiscal year, efforts led by the Alumni Council and the Presidents’ Club Membership Council raised more than $1 million in support of the Colgate Commitment. The University received transformative gifts from Dan Benton ’80, H’10, P’10 to establish a new home for arts, creativity, and innovation, and from the family of Peter Kellner ’65 to create two new endowed chairs that will recognize the work of outstanding faculty. More than $2.5 million was provided specifically for athletics, allowing the University’s Division I teams to compete while complying with elevated NCAA and Patriot League safety protocols, even as they excelled in the classroom — Colgate student-athletes broke numerous records this year for academic achievement, including for their overall term GPA of 3.42. The achievements of this year extended beyond direct giving. The alumni office and Colgate Professional Networks hosted more than 200 virtual events that were collectively attended by thousands of

I would like to recognize the profound generosity of our alumni, families, and friends. They have stood with us as we navigated our pandemic response, and they have set us on an ambitious path toward realizing our plans for Colgate’s third century. President Brian W. Casey

graduates, students, and parents. Hundreds of volunteers assisted in offering these events as well as in fundraising, event planning, admission recruiting, and more. “Community support in this historic year has been humbling,” says Karl W. Clauss ’90, vice president for advancement. “We are grateful and inspired to have the resources to advance initiatives that will make our alumni, families, and friends even more proud to be connected to Colgate in the years ahead.” — Sara Furlong

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President’s Cabinet

New Vice President for Equity and Inclusion

enee Madison, former director of human resources for the City of Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind., has been named vice president for equity and inclusion at Colgate. The veteran administrator, with experience promoting inclusion and equity in higher education and government, reports to the president and serves as a member of the president’s cabinet. “Renee’s leadership, in coordination with efforts adopted by the Board of Trustees, through faculty governance, and across administrative divisions, will advance the Third-Century Plan and our DEI Plan while bringing us closer together as a community,” President Brian W. Casey says. Before joining the mayor’s cabinet in Indianapolis, Madison was chief human resources officer, senior advisor to the president for diversity and compliance, and Title IX coordinator at DePauw University. She also served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in the domestic violence division of the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office and an associate director of enforcement for the NCAA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from DePauw and earned her JD at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law. “She has the experience that Colgate needs to identify gaps in access, equity, and support across the institution and to work collaboratively with University leaders to

address them — to make the University’s intellectual environment, community, and student experiences richer, more robust, and more inclusive,” say search committee co-chairs Laura Jack, vice president for communications and acting chief diversity officer (CDO), and Spencer Kelly, Charles A. Dana Professor of psychological and brain sciences. The role of the vice president for equity and inclusion is dynamic, responding to the challenges and needs of an ambitious institution during a period of significant advancement. Madison will serve as a core member of the senior leadership team, providing oversight and strategic vision for policies and initiatives that promote an inclusive and equitable learning and working environment for students as well as faculty and staff members. With a staff of four, she will oversee the Office of Equity and Diversity, which currently guides hiring practices, Title IX cases, ADA concerns, affirmative action/ equal opportunity, and the University’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment processes. She will ensure that an inclusive vision is integrated into overall institutional planning, bringing visibility and organizational focus to campuswide DEI efforts that have been captured in the Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the University’s Third-Century Plan. Madison will be supported by structures already put in place by the Office of Equity and Diversity and through Jack’s work as acting CDO. She will begin the work of updating the DEI Plan, drawing on input from campus partners. She will continue implementation of the plan in concert with all campus divisions. Newly formed DEI advisory and DEI coordination groups have been meeting for the past year, and members will be instrumental in supporting her as practitioners and divisional leaders. “They have already begun that hard work of getting comfortable with change, with reimagining our community,” says Jack, who helped facilitate that work as acting CDO. Madison says: “The intentionality and determination demonstrated by the board, the administration, faculty and staff members, students, and alumni underscore Colgate’s commitment to inclusivity. I share that commitment.” — Mark Walden

colgate.edu/equityanddiversity

new faculty faces Arif Camoglu Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) postdoctoral fellowship, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies program Dana Cypress Assistant professor of English Jessica Davenport Assistant professor of religion Ewa Galaj Assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences Taryn D. Jordan Assistant professor in women’s studies Nikki Lee CFD postdoctoral fellowship, psychological and brain sciences Matthew Makofske Assistant professor of economics Ariel Martino Assistant professor of English Seonyoung Park Assistant professor of economics Ganiyat Adeduntan Head women’s basketball coach Lee Aduddell Women’s basketball assistant coach

Arif Camoglu

Ewa Galaj

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 25

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SOPHIA MANNERS ’22

Sports

What Athletes Eat Raiders report how they fuel their bodies for ultimate performance.

Cross country History and French double major Hometown: Pleasantville, N.Y. My eating is dependent on my practice schedule. If my practice is before 11:30 a.m., I won’t eat beforehand because running long distance on a full stomach is never a good idea. I will have breakfast afterward, consisting of either 10 ounces of yogurt with granola, four to five homemade chocolate chip muffins, or a breakfast sandwich. If my practice is in the afternoon, I will eat breakfast when I wake up, and possibly a small snack later. On harder effort days, I drink Muscle Milk after practice for extra protein. Being a long-distance runner, we tend to lose so many calories during practice that I find myself needing to eat calorie-dense foods to make up the difference. Chocolate milk is a popular choice among distance runners for its taste and calories.

“Chocolate milk is a popular choice among distance runners for its taste and calories.”

I drink my 17-ounce water bottle about once an hour. Drinking is one of the most important pieces to recovery, and I try to ensure that I am always hydrated.

I try to have the same premeet dinner no matter where I am: one to two servings of steak and a halfpound of pasta seasoned with garlic and oil. It gives me exactly

what I need in terms of carbs and protein to perform my best the next day. I usually round out dinner with a vegetable as well as a dessert, which helps me to feel more satiated and allows me to get in more calories. Favorite thing to eat after a race: I tend to not eat a lot the day I race to preserve my stomach, so afterward, I am looking to consume anything and everything. The best advice I’ve received about diet: Eat by feel. If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re full, stop. If you want sugar, go for it. That is what your body is craving. In high school, I was much stricter [about] my diet, but since eating by feel in college, I have seen tremendous improvements to my body, performance, and most importantly, happiness. Happy runners are faster runners.

post-practice. Depending on the day, I will eat a small snack while studying and doing homework. All of this food is made by our great cook at Delta Upsilon, Suzi Bradbury, who does an amazing job to feed many of the football players who require a lot of food during the day, and we are all very thankful. Staying hydrated: Along with a lot of water, I tend to mix in sports drinks because our bodies need the electrolytes to stay hydrated. A pregame meal consists of two meals the night before, during which I try to eat a lot of carbohydrates and get hydrated. This is usually a bigger meal: steak, chicken, pasta, and water and sports drinks. At the end of the meal, I tend to eat dessert, like ice cream. The day of a game, I do not eat a lot because I feel the best way to be prepared is to be going into it a little hungry.

A.J. Desantis ’23 Football, offensive line, #65 Biology major Hometown: Endwell, N.Y. “I feel the best

On a typical day, I aim to way to be prepared is to be going into it eat three to four meals. a little hungry.” Breakfast in the early morning usually consists of an egg and cheese bagel sandwich with a Super Coffee. [Fun fact: The energy drink was cocreated by former football captain Jim DeCicco ’15.] For lunch, I will eat a sandwich, usually turkey, cheese, and lettuce on a sub roll with a bag of chips and a glass of either water or juice. After practice, I have dinner. An ideal dinner for me is grilled chicken with broccoli and a side of rice. This tends to be a bigger meal because it is

scene I usually eat eggs, a breakfast meat, and orange juice. I am constantly drinking fluids to help prevent cramps and other setbacks during a game. After a game: I love to eat two chicken sandwiches, a bag of chips, and a cookie. I will usually go see my parents after the game and eat pulled pork sandwiches or pizza. Calories: In season, between 5,000–7,000 calories per day to maintain weight.

MALIA SCHNEIDER ’22 Ice hockey, forward, #18 Sociology and theater double major Hometown: Millarville, Alberta, Canada In a day: For breakfast, I will eat eggs with spinach, a cup of coffee, and water. Lunch, I will try to eat salad, usually with chicken, tomato, cucumber, chickpeas, and other veggies. A classic dinner would consist of protein like chicken or fish, carbs like rice or bread, and then a side salad or veggies.

Staying hydrated: I shoot to drink a gallon of water a day. Pregame meal: chicken, rice, and sides like broccoli, asparagus, or other veggies. Eating on the go: I always bring snacks with me — granola bars, trail mix, fruit, or veggies. My favorite thing to eat after a game is Lucky Charms cereal as a snack. As a post-game meal, I love steak. The best advice I’ve received about diet: Food is fuel. What I put into my body is going to either help or hinder my performance. If I do not provide my body with the proper nutrition, I am not going to be able to perform at the high level I want to be able to compete at.

“I shoot to drink a gallon of water a day.”

ryan krueger ’22 Soccer, forward, #15 Computer science major Hometown: Wilmette, Ill. I tend to cook myself breakfast: eggs, Greek yogurt, and a granola bar. Thanks to my mom’s influence, I make sure I have something green for both lunch and dinner. I do not aim for a certain calorie count each day. However, if I recognize I’ve eaten a lot of calories one day, I tend to reel it back the next — and vice versa. I track my weight on a weekly basis. I have a water bottle on me at all times. Starting three days before a game, I drink one to two Bodyarmors per day. I like to consume a lot of electrolytes in the lead-up to games with consistent water intake. The night before a game: I make sure I eat a ton of carbs. This started in high school with carbfests, in which we would devour pounds of pasta. Knowing I will burn off most of what I eat, I like to stuff myself. With the combination of a good rest, in the morning, I feel ready and energized.

“Pregame meals are a tradition for the men’s soccer team.”

apples, or mango with some source of protein.

Pregame meals are a tradition for the men’s soccer team. You can always find us at Rusch’s eating chicken, rice, salad, and those delectable rolls. Favorite thing to eat after a game: fruit. I usually pair either strawberries, raspberries, bananas,

The best advice I’ve received about diet: the importance of sleep. Getting the recommended hours of sleep not only helps brain and physical function, but also helps rebuild your body with the good food choices you make during the day.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 27

Book

The Future of Our Food Carrie Koplinka-Loehr ’80 enlightens, in her new book, on how climate will change our menu.

t used to be once every few years that we’d hear news of a late frost damaging a cherry crop, a new pest moving into an orchard, or a freak flood wiping out cornfields. But as climate change transforms these events from bad luck to a new normal, the people who grow and harvest food — and the people eating it — are going to have to accept some changes. That’s the premise of Our Changing Menu (Cornell University Press, 2021) by Carrie Koplinka-Loehr ’80. Alongside coauthors Michael Hoffmann and Danielle Eiseman, she takes us through a menu of our favorite foods and beverages, tackling how climate change will affect ingredients from olive oil to dairy, coffee

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to chocolate, and more — as well as how our choices affect how much the climate is changing in the first place. As humans continue to pump greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, it thickens the cozy blanket that keeps our planet warm. This warming not only raises the average temperature, but also alters weather patterns we, and our crops, are used to. Dry areas are getting drier, and wet areas are getting wetter. And when rainfall does come, it’s often in fewer, harder bursts. Koplinka-Loehr and her coauthors scoured more than 700 research studies and other references, and interviewed experts from universities, farms, orchards, and more to learn what changes the climate has already

brenna Merritt

Discover

brought to our food system and, perhaps, what's yet to come. The picture is extreme but hopeful. For instance, many of the crops on which our favorite alcoholic beverages rely are at risk, but only if the production system doesn’t adapt. Researchers the world over are developing heat- and drought-resistant crop varieties that can save our barley and hops for our beer. Tequila makers can switch to commercially grown, wild agave, which better tolerates hot and dry conditions. And as vineyards lose their historical growing conditions (or worse, are flooded by rising seas), others will pop up when new areas become ideal for grapes — connoisseurs of wines from California, Italy, and France may have to accept bottles from Washington, New Zealand, or northern Europe. Climate doesn’t just affect our food; our food choices affect our climate. The biggest impact we can have, the authors say, is through how much beef we consume. Per unit of protein, beef produces 50 times the greenhouse gases as wheat and six times more than pork. “Eating beef is a huge driver for climate change, not just the methane the cows create as they digest their food, but also transportation and the cutting of the rainforests; the whole cycle of beef production is very energy intensive,” Koplinka-Loehr says. Especially in places like North America where protein options are plentiful, people could make smarter choices. Even reducing beef consumption by a little — treating it as a delicacy instead of a daily staple — would help. Koplinka-Loehr always knew she wanted to combine science and writing to help the environment, even before she arrived at Colgate. It was there, she says, she found her niche — and became a vegetarian. She also started an ecology house on the edge of campus. “There were ways I was able to combine my love of the environment and of writing,” says the English major who also studied biology and earth sciences. “And I think that held me in pretty good stead.” During college and after graduation, she worked in a water quality research lab, with kids at an environmental education camp, and for the nonprofit Atlantic Center for the Environment before going back for a master’s in science education from Cornell University. After a career in communications, Koplinka-Loehr switched to book writing. “The book was a great way for me to feel, especially during the pandemic, that I was contributing to a larger whole,” she says. “Writing the book felt purposeful; it’s something greater than myself.” — Anna Funk

ASK A PROFESSOR

Why Do People Prefer Different Foods? hat we perceive when we taste something is a complex interaction of our physiology and our past experiences. Our taste buds have receptors that detect the five classical taste modalities: salty, sour, sweet, umami, and bitter. Sweet, umami, and bitter are detected by receptors built from a closely related family of proteins. While there appears to be only one specific receptor to detect sweet and one to detect umami (both of which generally give us a positive taste sensation), the human genome has instructions for building more than 30 receptor proteins for detecting distinct bitter compounds. Notably, different people can have different polymorphisms (changes) in these bitter receptors, which can impact which bitter compounds a person can detect and how strongly they will taste them. For example, some of the compounds found in broccoli, kale, and similar vegetables are sensed by one particular receptor, TAS2R38. The gene that encodes the instructions for that receptor has sequence variation in the human population, making some of us less sensitive to those compounds. This affects how much people want to eat their broccoli: which specific version a person inherits has some effect on their dietary intake of vegetables. Our sense of smell also plays an important role in our taste experience, as anyone who has ever had a stuffed nose can attest. Our olfactory receptors are structurally similar to the bitter, sweet, and umami receptors in our tongue. However, there are instructions for approximately 400 olfactory receptors encoded in our genome (making it the largest family of proteins in our DNA). As with the bitter receptors, there are many polymorphisms to these genes across the human population, and some of these have been connected to specific taste preferences. For example, whether you think cilantro is a delicious ingredient or a horrible plant that tastes like soap seems to be based on a

Illustration by Gillian Blease

sequence difference in an olfactory receptor encoded on chromosome 11. Even considering just our physiology, it’s important to note that we typically are not tasting anything based on a single receptor in our mouth or nose. Rather, what we call the “taste” of what we eat or drink depends on the collective work of taste and olfactory receptors, as well as temperature receptors, mechanoreceptors (which sense the texture of the food), pain receptors (which sense many of the spicy compounds in our food), and other sensory receptors (tracking, for example, texture or fizziness) in our mouths. While pure chocolate is quite bitter, adding a little sugar, fat, and a dash of cinnamon and chili pepper makes a rich and spicy treat that activates dozens of different receptors. Bitter substances, alone or in combination with other ingredients, tend to produce taste experiences with a negative valence. But repeated exposure in the right context — such as a culture that values chocolate as a birthday treat or pitches coffee as a grown-up drink — can help create an overall positive experience when we consume those bitter things. That’s because, once we expand our inquiry beyond oral and nasal physiology,

we find even more variables that affect taste experience. For example, your past experiences and current interests can affect what you pay attention to, and that can affect your sensory experiences (exactly how this happens is a matter of dispute). Formal or informal training — as part of a wine appreciation course or learning from a parent how to cook a favorite dish — can enhance our ability to attend selectively to different components of what we eat or drink. Outside a lab, we are never tasting single chemicals one by one. When we drink whiskey or eat chicken biryani, we are ingesting a myriad of types of molecules at once. We may have some control over which part of that stimulating symphony we focus upon, and that may affect not only how much we like the taste of what we are drinking or eating, but also what that taste, for us, actually is. So sometimes a kid just can’t like broccoli; but maybe, sometimes, they won’t. — Jason Meyers, associate professor of biology and neuroscience, and Maura Tumulty, professor of philosophy, are co-teaching Our Sensational Mind: The Physiology and Philosophy of Perception in the spring.

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DISCOVER

Chemistry

How It’s Made Two food scientists explain how your snacks get from their labs to the grocery store shelves.

arcus Brody ’92 spends his days figuring out how to create new foods: A cracker made from legumes. A plant-based cheese. A beverage for those with swallowing disorders. Brody is a senior food scientist at The National Food Lab, which is hired by companies seeking to bring new products to the market — often ones that satisfy a certain consumer desire, such as lemon flavor or all-natural ingredients. Brody joins a team of people with various specialties, from research chefs and process engineers to those who work in consumer research. “We sit together and try to ideate a new snack,” Brody says. He is bound by confidentiality agreements not to reveal the brand names of the products he has worked on. “It’s always fun to make something and see it in the grocery store, but I can’t tell anyone,” he says. Brody’s love of chemistry blossomed during a Colgate summer research program, during which he abandoned his previous career goals and decided to become a chemist. Since completing his PhD at the University of Virginia, he has had a varied career, working in cancer research and cannabis derivatives — and also founding a sparkling wine company — before taking a position at the lab where he now works, in Ithaca, N.Y., six years ago. He relishes developing a new product or modifying a current one, which involves trying out ingredients such as protein, starch, fat, and emulsifiers; creating prototypes; and, later, visiting the plant where the product will be made to troubleshoot the process. The timeline from development to finished project can take three months to more than a year. Brody has worked on everything from ice cream to CBD-infused beverages.

and then to the consumer, and baking or pasteurizing them, for example, “keeps them free from bacteria and maintains their quality,” he explains. Raw milk, for instance, might seem healthy “until you realize it comes from the underside of a cow, which is dirty and can make you sick. Pasteurized milk is much healthier.” Some of Brody’s most technically difficult work has involved creating meals and beverages for people with dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing, which often develops after throat cancer or a stroke. “The patients

30 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

It’s always fun to make something and see it in the grocery store, but I can’t tell anyone.

Marcus Brody ’92 Creating products without gluten — such as a cracker made from legumes — is an example of the challenges he tackles. “The goal is to make it resemble a wheat cracker but without a beany taste,” he says. Replacing wheat flour with a glutenfree alternative also affects texture. He employs ingredients such as cassava flour and flaxseed meal to improve texture. His team also needs to keep in mind the manufacturability of the dough. A commercial bakery is expected to produce approximately 10,000 crackers a minute. Brody hopes to counter some of the negative associations people have with processed foods. It takes time to get products from a plant to a grocery store

don’t have the strength to swallow food easily, so it goes down the trachea instead of the esophagus,” Brody explains. “And they aren’t getting enough nutrition because it’s not palatable.” His goal is for the beverage to be thick enough that it won’t enter the airway, but not so thick that it is hard to drink. “Think of drinking gravy,” he says. His team created a beverage with high viscosity, or thickness, but a lower “yield stress” — how much force it takes for the liquid to flow — so it would be pleasant to drink. For Brody, such work is especially satisfying: “It feels good to make something that is going to make someone’s life better.”

— Jennifer Altmann Illustrations by Bruce Morser ’76

DISCOVER New versions of existing products also help keep Frito-Lay above the competition. For example, adding the Flamin’ Hot spice and branding to Cheetos and Rold Gold Pretzels has recently been a hit. “Consumers are asking for that type of flavor profile as well, so that also helps with those brands being seen as iconic and winning against competition consistently.”

ow is it possible that every bag of Cheetos tastes exactly the same? The answer: Food scientists like Kashif Ahmed ’08. He’s worked in many parts of the process, from product formulation to measuring success against competitors. Now the North American lead for competitive quality assurance at PepsiCo, he makes sure the crunch of your favorite chips is the best it can be. “Whatever product it is, we make sure that we do our due diligence to ensure it’s accurate to what the consumer wants and expects,” he says.

Crunching the Numbers There are a few ways Ahmed and his team measure success. Qualitatively, they assess the appearance, texture, and flavor. The process is similar to when you try a new snack food: Are the potato chips a nice golden color? Are they salty enough? How’s the crunch factor? Quantitatively, they look at consumer insights including “overall liking” when comparing Snack A to Snack B. You’ve probably enjoyed one treat that performs consistently well across the board. “When you think of the orange on your fingers, you think of Cheetos, not necessarily another product,” he points out.

Discover what it takes to be a food scientist through the lens of Ahmed’s work: Learning the Ropes A chemistry major at Colgate, Ahmed felt like he needed an advanced degree if he wanted to enter a career in a STEM field. When it came time for him to depart the Hill, he veered away from the norm to an area he’d never heard of: food science. “When I was reading about food science, it entailed a lot of the scientific principles and methods that we learned about [at Colgate], just in a more tangible output, i.e., food products or something you can consume at the end.” While earning his master’s at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ahmed studied the bioactive component curcumin, found in the spice turmeric. He was specifically interested in how to effectively deliver curcumin to the body through emulsions, so consumers could make the most of its health-promoting properties, like anti-inflammation. ‘The Tomato and Beans Group’ Before joining PepsiCo, Ahmed worked in product development at Conagra Brands Inc., known for old-school names like Duncan Hines and recent ones like the plant-based Gardein. What you see at the grocery store are the products resulting from the formulas and components developed by scientists and engineers. “We were lovingly called ‘The Tomato and Beans Group,’” jokes Ahmed, who helped formulate condiments like ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce, as well as some additional canned tomato products. If you’ve ever mixed Rotel into your Crock-Pot queso, you partially have Ahmed to thank. On to Pepsi Ahmed’s first partner at PepsiCo in 2013 was the Quaker Man. “That’s when I started my quality assurance journey to create a

Kashif Ahmed ’08 program where we would do a lot of internal testing of our products to make sure that we could improve the consistency of them from the manufacturing plan,” Ahmed says. In layman’s terms: What improvements can make Quaker products better, and how can they be achieved? After the company reorganized, Ahmed headed for the Lonestar State to join the Frito-Lay division. Until late 2020, he was the main quality assurance resource supporting North American innovations among brands like Lay’s and Cheetos. He ensured that the company had the correct specifications and legal documentation for the snacks it produced, with the right numbers and methods used during formulation. Also, from a sensory point of view, he made sure that the finished product met competitive design standards. For example, if a potato chip is cooking too long and becoming hard in texture, he would ensure the right steps were taken to come up with the proper adjustment to meet the expected standard. The Snack Food Arms Race Today, as the North American lead for competitive quality assurance, Ahmed helps Frito-Lay compare its products in the marketplace. The goal is to win in terms of design and other attributes. “If we’re not, [we ask ourselves] ‘What are some of the action plans we need to institute to be able to consistently win against the competition?’”

The Perks of Being a Food Scientist With Ahmed’s job, it’s difficult not to get a little snacky. His favorites: “Kettle-cooked chips with that hard bite crunch. In terms of sweet: Grandma’s double chocolate chip cookies; whenever we get to taste test those, I always make sure to take a little extra.”

— Rebecca Docter

About the Illustrator Bruce Morser ’76 estimates he has drawn 1,000 portraits in his 45 years as a freelancer. “I really don’t think about drawing a face,” says the fine arts major. “I become utterly aware of the visual pattern that they make. And, if I can stay true to that pattern, it seems to unlock a greater ability to communicate who they are.” Commissioned portraits are a small portion of Morser’s work, which currently focuses on drawing and building large installations. At press time, he was creating a 25-foot-tall installation for the Washington State National Guard. The Vashon, Wash.–based artist’s clients have ranged from the Smithsonian to Nintendo. In addition, he teaches drawing to groups of all ages, including bird imagery with fourth graders. Learn more about Morser and his work at colgatemagazine.com. Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 31

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The dish: Alumni restaurateurs from around the country discuss their inspirations, paths, and working in the pandemic. By aleta mayne

SCALING UP

he steak au poivre — a French dish with peppercorns, cognac, and heavy cream — was so divine that Mac Hay ’96 stood up from his table at the Hamilton Inn, strode into the kitchen, and asked the chef for a job. “It blew my mind how good it was,” Hay remembers from his sophomore year at Colgate.

Hay’s area of expertise, then and now, is actually seafood, but this story is indicative of how driven he’s been to learn everything he can about cuisine from around the world. Today, he brings the knowledge he’s gleaned to his five restaurants. In addition to the restaurants, he owns six retail seafood markets and a wholesale company, under the umbrella of Mac’s Seafood.

mark diorio (2)

Mac Hay ’96 at Mac’s on the Pier, one of his five restaurants on Cape Cod.

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With six retail markets, Hay is able to take the excess seafood and make dishes like poke bowls, ceviche, and soup at his restaurants.

mark diorio (3)

And it all started when he was only 20 years old. That was a momentous year for the philosophy major in a couple of ways. The chef at the inn told Hay that the only open position was for a dishwasher. “Whatever it takes to get in this kitchen, I’ll take the job,” Hay responded. Although scrubbing dishes wasn’t what he’d hoped for, it was an entrée into the kitchen where Hay learned the techniques of French cooking and fine dining. “He showed me the classic dishes and the basics. It was like a real class at Colgate, but it was on my own terms, and at the will of this chef who recognized that I was really interested in it.” Then, just before the summer, Hay’s boss back in his hometown of Truro, Mass., on Cape Cod asked if he’d take over her fish market and manage the attached fried clam shack. He’d been working for Carol Larsen for a couple of years at that point, so she trusted him and recognized his skills. “I knew how to filet fish, and that was unusual for a person of such a young age,” he says. “Once you know how to cut fish, you have to know how to handle fish, because exposure to the product can make it spoil in an hour sitting at room temperature.” That firsthand experience actually started at a much younger age. As early as 8 years old, Hay was casting for bluefish and striped bass off the side of his grandpa’s boat. His grandfather, whom he called “Humpa,” would pull his little fishing boat up on the beach in front of his

weathered gray cottage in Truro so Hay and his brother, Alex, could hop in. Other times, Humpa would show them the best holes on the beach to dig for sea clams and quahogs. To complete their meal preparations, they’d gather potatoes, onions, lettuce, and asparagus from Humpa’s little garden. “It was amazing what he could get out of there.” By the time Hay was 20, it had been deeply instilled in him the value of “making a meal from everything that was right there on the property.” He’d also begun to learn how to cook professionally, first through preparing New England classics at a fried food and lobster pound on the Cape, and then shadowing the chef at the Hamilton Inn. That first summer running Larsen’s operation in Wellfleet was a success, and she was looking toward retirement, so she proposed, “Why don’t you just buy the whole business off of me?” Thus, Mac’s on the Pier set sail. “The fact that I could cook my own food, sell my own food, and hopefully make my own money from doing that — it felt very empowering,” he remembers. Larsen acted as the bank for part of the purchase, and for the rest, Hay borrowed $500 from 10 people. “Looking back, I don’t know how I did it on so little.” The business’ seasonal schedule made it possible for him to return to Colgate for his junior year. Having spent the summer working 14-hour days, Hay welcomed being a college student again and catching his breath. “I have to work mentally now, and focus on my studies,” he told himself. “And I really enjoyed that,” he recalls. After graduation, the seasonal schedule meant he could add to his repertoire by working in high-end seafood restaurants in places like New York City, Boston, and the Virgin Islands. He also spent time with family on the West Coast, eating all kinds of Mexican food, ranging from authentic to “the polished, corporate American version,” he says. “I took the best of everything I saw there.” All of this contributed to Hay’s ultimate goal of offering more than just fried clams and lobster rolls. “Cape Cod is known for its seafood, and that’s something I felt a tremendous amount of pride in: acquiring local, fresh products and then serving them to customers,” Hay says. But “the food scene was tired.” In 2006, Hay let his culinary talent take over when he opened Mac’s Shack. Don’t be fooled by the name, the website warns; this is his cloth napkin place, serving oysters Rockefeller and Mexican street corn, Bermuda fish chowder and miso soup, swordfish curry and prosciutto-wrapped cod. Hay acted as the head chef while also running that restaurant, Mac’s on the Pier, two retail markets, and a processing facility. “Mac’s Shack exploded with popularity,” he says. “I was able to try different things, and people responded to that very well.” Three additional restaurants and four markets later, Mac’s Seafood is now in its 26th season, serving approximately 5,000 people daily. Deemed essential, the businesses never closed during the pandemic but rather switched to takeout. They also saw an influx of customers at the markets as more people started cooking at home. His approach to the increased demand is “controlling the flow.” His restaurants only

take as many orders as they know they can handle and, when they’re at capacity, they stop accepting orders. “We stay focused on the quality of our product,” he says. In terms of what the future holds, Hay is ever the philosopher. “The pandemic has changed the way food service operates; it’s become different on our side of the counter. We’re recalibrating what’s important to a company like ours,” he says. “I’ve always put an emphasis on the quality-of-life aspect of what you do; that’s one of the reasons I moved to Cape Cod.” Hay has continued the tradition of going out in a boat and catching fish for family dinner, now with his two daughters and wife Traci Harmon-Hay. “I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to raise my kids here,” he says, “and have this dream world of natural beauty around us.”

WHAT A RIDE

ou could have a flame-grilled burger or sashimi; you might hear the sounds of Billie Holiday or Bob Marley. The experience at Hi-Life Bar and Grill on New York’s Upper West Side seems eclectic, but it’s all part of a well-thought-out concept created by Earl Geer ’80. “I saw this as a way for me to follow my passion, but also a formula for what could work in New York City,” he says.

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It has worked — the restaurant celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. That’s not to say there haven’t been bumps in the road. Surviving the city’s stiff restaurant competition is in and of itself a feat. (According to Business Insider, 80% of New York restaurants close in the first five years.) Geer has also maintained success through the 2003 blackout, the financial crisis, Hurricane Sandy, demolition, and, most recently, the pandemic. More on that later. First, a cocktail. “The perfect martini is a state of mind, more so than a recipe,” Geer says of the anchor for the restaurant’s drink menu. “The martini is one of the simplest of drinks, but it has to be very cold, and the setting for the drinking of it has to be right. It should be a classic backdrop where, if Frank Sinatra were sitting on your left, you would not be surprised.” The bar and grill transports patrons to a different time, starting with the Hi-Life Mobile parked outside — a 1936 black Lincoln Zephyr with a martini-glass neon sign atop its roof. Inside, button-tufted upholstered walls, circular booths, vintage light fixtures, and a sultry mahogany bar complete the ambience. Geer was inspired by “the great old lounges typically built in the ’30s and ’40s [that] invariably had a channel letter neon sign to announce their existence,” he says. “I became an aficionado of that kind of place, and I want the customer to have the things I loved.” The design has proven to be timeless, Geer says, but he has modernized the restaurant through the food and music. Hi-Life was the first non-Japanese restaurant in New York City to feature an authentic sushi bar, which was a bold move in 1991, he says. “Out of context,” Geer explains, “sushi and burgers on the same menu may be puzzling, but sushi is really an extension of a raw bar, which is perfectly in place in this style of restaurant.” At Hi-Life, clams, oysters, and sushi are served alongside steaks and big-bowl pastas. Geer has been making bold moves ever since his youth when his dad encouraged his entrepreneurial spirit. It started with a hot dog and taco truck — “long before food trucks were cool,” Geer says. “The only food truck inspiration in those days was either the Good Humor man or the slightly creepy chili dog guy lurking around.” In Geer’s hometown of Bronxville, N.Y., his dad helped him convert a 1959 laundry vehicle into Gourmet Trucking, which had a small propane stove and a slop sink attached to a bucket of cold water. “We were able to get a legitimate food vendor’s permit without, I’m sure, the scrutiny that would exist for a food truck today,” Geer acknowledges. He partnered with a friend, Jeffrey Cooney (who passed away a few years ago; his son, Nick ’17, attended Colgate). They mostly catered local parties, but in 1976, they capitalized on two enormous New York City events. Six million people gathered on the Fourth of July for the Operation Sail parade of ships on the Hudson River. Geer and Cooney parked Gourmet Trucking on a pier, where they fed the hungry crowds throughout the three-day weekend. They kept provisions at Cooney’s dad’s office nearby and slept on top of the truck at night. Then a few days later, they pulled the truck right up onto Central Park’s Great Lawn, next to the grandstand during the

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The Hi-Life menu currently includes the Bubbly Rosé Zoom cocktail: sparkling rosé, 1/2 oz of St. Germain liqueur, 1/2 oz of Grey Goose vodka, and a squeeze of fresh lemon, served in a sugar-rimmed champagne flute.

Jefferson Starship concert. “These days, you’d certainly be arrested if not taken out by a sniper,” Geer says, “but we had a little placard, and the complementary chili dogs for the police officers were enough to make that happen.” At Colgate, Geer majored in sociology and economics. After graduation, he remembered his dad’s advice that “the best experience is sales experience.” Geer went on to peddle everything from encyclopedias to hot tubs. Eventually, he got into real estate in New York City and was at an age where he started going to bars. “I became fascinated with the old, soon-to-be nonexistent neonsigned lounges, bars, and nightclubs,” he says. The real estate business in the city began fading in 1990, and Geer was ready to open Hi-Life Bar and Grill on the corner of Amsterdam and 83rd. It prospered, so Geer opened a sister location in 1993. The new spot “was among the hottest places on the planet; we were featured in press releases in Tokyo,” he says. “We had lines around the block.” Emboldened by his accomplishments, in 1996, Geer threw his hat in the ring for a new restaurant CBS was opening in the building where The Late Show with David Letterman was being taped and the Ed Sullivan Show had been broadcast decades earlier. CBS selected Geer from 40 competing restaurateurs to head Sullivan’s Restaurant & Broadcast Lounge. He had ambitious plans, starting with recruiting Letterman’s musical director, Paul Shaffer, to curate the restaurant’s live music program. The opening party included appearances by Richie Havens, the Four Tops, and the Rascals. Despite the initial fanfare, Sullivan’s didn’t take off as expected. Soon, the head chef gave two-weeks’ notice — which resulted in Geer hiring a pre-famous Anthony Bourdain (when he was just “Tony”). Despite Bourdain’s skills in the kitchen and Geer’s aspirations, Sullivan’s closed in 1998. “Now, more than 20 years later, I continue to conduct a postmortem on Sullivan’s in my unconscious nearly every day: Was it the location? Was the strategy to emphasize quality rather than embracing the theme restaurant trend misguided? Did a project of this magnitude expose a weakness in my managerial and decision-making skills?” Geer wrote in a 2020 Daily Beast article. “Probably all of the above were factors, but I was no longer living the Hi-Life and it was time to learn how to survive the low life.” Some things, as Geer has learned, are just out of our control. In 2006, the second Hi-Life restaurant had to close due to a demolition clause; common in New York, the clause allows landlords to terminate a lease if they choose to demolish the building. Geer took the signage and many of the elements to another location on the Upper East Side. At the end of that location’s 10-year lease, a demolition clause again led to the restaurant’s demise. “That’s when I came full circle and put as much of my time and attention into running my original HiLife,” Geer says. “Not surviving was not an option,” Geer adds. That resilience is what’s carried him through the pandemic. Like every other restaurant in the city, Hi-Life had to shut down indoor dining in March 2020. The restaurant, which had never closed its doors since it opened, switched to delivery. “I credit my team for risking health

Mikaela Hamilton (inset)

and their own well-being to come in and help me keep Hi-Life going.” When the weather allowed, they set up outdoor dining and had “more business than we could handle” in the summer and fall. Still, the pandemic has been an entirely new challenge. “It was different; it was harder. It was more frightening, and at times seemed bleaker,” he says. Geer wrote about his perseverance in an Aug. 19 Daily Beast article: “As a mindset, I’m trying to move past seeing these variants, troubling outbreaks, and business setbacks as a ‘new normal.’ Instead, I’m viewing them as simply normal. I will be ready to accept whatever lies ahead for me and my staff. Ups and downs in an industry that is both precarious and thrilling is what those of us in the restaurant business signed up for.” One recent positive turn is Geer was able to renegotiate the original Hi-Life’s building lease, signing on for a longer term. So, for the foreseeable future, he can sit back and sip that chilled martini.

LOCATION, LOCATION, Fritzsche is also president of the Cayucos Chamber of Commerce. “I’m the pandemic president,” he says, noting the increased demands of accepting the volunteer position in January 2020.

LOCATION

alfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the coastal town of Cayucos has become an escape for city dwellers. From the deck of the beachfront restaurant Schooners, owned by Brendan Fritzsche ’00, visitors can watch dolphins playing in the Pacific and sometimes see whales breaching. It’s also the only spot where one can get both a meal and a drink in the town of 2,500. “[Cayucos is] not extremely populated… [but] it’s getting more popular, especially in the pandemic times because people are getting away from crowded cities Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 37

and areas,” Fritzsche says. “It’s a place where people walk the beaches and look at wildlife, hang out, surf.” It’s also a town known for amazing fish tacos, he adds. Schooners offers halibut, salmon, shrimp, and ahi, each topped with avocado-jalapeno sauce and chipotle aioli. A short distance inland, there’s the agricultural region of Central Valley, which produces 40% of the nation’s food. “Pretty much all of the vegetables we get [at Schooners] come from within 100 miles or less,” Fritzsche says. Avocados make an appearance in several spots on the menu; tomatoes and other fresh ingredients supply the pico de gallo; and produce like lettuce, onions, and citrus fruits play supporting roles. The farmers and ranchers themselves go to Schooners to cool down on the coast, Fritzsche says. He moved to the area to be closer to family after spending four years running a restaurant in Hawaii. Lulu’s Waikiki is still there but under different management. Fritzsche was overseeing it remotely for a couple of years when he moved back to the mainland, but then Schooners became available. Lulu’s was a significant professional step for Fritzsche, who was given the opportunity by his boss at the Chicago bar where he was working. After graduating from Colgate, he’d been enjoying the life of a twentysomething. He was bartending and working at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, rekindling an interest he’d had as an English major studying with Margaret Maurer, William Henry Crawshaw Professor of literature. Outside of work, Fritzsche was playing in an indie band with his brother; they toured the Midwest and released an album (titled Gardens & Armies). Today, at Schooners, Fritzsche hires bands for the Sunday live music series and hosts a weekly open mic night. The restaurant experienced explosive sales growth last fall. “The weather in September is better than the weather in July here,” Fritzsche explains. “Also, as the COVID-19 numbers began to rise, we were fortunate to have an outdoor venue that appealed to people getting away from the crowded areas to our north and south.” The location aids the business in that respect, as well as providing a stunning backdrop. “It’s a lot easier for us to [serve] people who want to be eating outside or food to go because we’re on a beach that’s 7 miles long,” he says. “You couldn’t run into somebody unless you tried.”

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Crown Jewel

Photo: Courtney Theberge of Courtney Elizabeth Media; Illustration: Mercedes deBellard

A REAL GEM

hen the Casco Bay ferry pulls into tree-lined Diamond Cove, couples, families, and groups of friends disembark to stroll onto the island. It’s only a 30-minute boat ride from Portland, Maine, but it feels like a secret only a select group knows. Upon entering the third brick building on the left, diners are officially on island time. Technically, it’s Great Diamond Island, but inside the Crown Jewel restaurant, it could be any island — that’s the point. “Our decor is supposed to be reminiscent of an island in a very universal sense, not a Maine sense,” says owner Alexandra Collins ’04 Wight. Flamingos, rather than lobsters, are the emblematic creatures. Pinks and turquoises are the hues of choice, not navy and white. “It’s pulling from places like Havana, Miami, Palm Beach, and Palm Springs,” she explains. On this summer’s seasonal menu, lobster yakitori and miso steamed mussels took the place of traditional Maine fare. Other dishes like pickled mango, grilled octopus with chard and coconut, and scallop crudo further elevated the seafood-based creative cuisine. “We aim to create a space and a menu that make people feel transported,” Wight says. She hired an interior design firm to execute her vision, but Wight also has experience in aesthetics, having worked for Elle Décor and Vogue after graduating from Colgate with a major in religion and minor in

international relations. Contributing to “island time,” the internet is unreliable; in fact, they can’t give out their WiFi password because it crashes their systems. “The beautiful thing about that is it really forces people to be present,” Wight says. And although the ferry schedule states it will deliver customers in half an hour, it sometimes takes longer. “[You have to] kind of give yourself over to these variables you can’t control,” she says. People can also reach the island through water taxis (which are faster) or private boats (slip and mooring reservations are available on their website). From the chef’s counter, customers can watch the kitchen staff work their magic in a Zenlike trance. Waiters dance out of the kitchen lip syncing to pop music playing over the speakers. Lending to its intimate atmosphere, Crown Jewel only seats 35. At a small bar in the back, a bartender serves drinks as well as pints of ice cream to tourists wandering in for dessert. Wight’s previous endeavor was Flanagan’s Table, a dinner series featuring rotating guest chefs. A long harvest table inside a barn in Buxton, Maine, sat 50 for a five-course dinner each month. Originally planned to be just an eight-part series, it developed a cult following, earned rave reviews from the press, and turned into a four-year venture. Owning Flanagan’s Table, Wight began to seriously consider opening her own restaurant. That wasn’t the career she previously envisioned, though. In her first magazine jobs, Wight yearned to work for a food publication. “But the movement on those mastheads was practically stagnant,” she explains. Wight had also been pondering culinary school for a while. Her mom told her, “Either go and stop talking about it, or don’t go, but stop talking about it.” Wight attended the Institute of Culinary Education, after which she was hired to do recipe testing and development for Martha Stewart Living, Saveur magazine, the Food Network, and independent food stylists. A mentor who was aware of Wight’s dream of becoming a food editor advised: “Go work in a restaurant, get real experience, and come back; that will put you ahead of the pack.” She went on to cook for French chef/restaurant owner Daniel Boulud in New York City; a three-star Michelin gastronomic wonder outside of San Sebastian, Spain; and a couple of boutique restaurants in New York. “That was when I really started daydreaming about owning my own restaurant,” says Wight, adding that she knew she didn’t want to work in the kitchen as a longtime career. As Flanagan’s Table was flourishing, Wight was pregnant, so her family with husband Oliver Wight ’04 became an important factor in planning their future. She decided that a seasonal business would allow her to balance out her parental duties with her career goals. She also identified Maine as a promising location for a restaurant, primarily because her mother lives in Portland, so she and Oliver were already spending summers there. “Crown Jewel [which opened in 2018] checks a lot of boxes,” Alexandra says. Oliver, meanwhile, is able to work remotely for Morgan Stanley during the summers. “He’s a great support system,” she says. “He’ll come out [to the Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 39

restaurant] and wash dishes, or he’ll bartend, he’ll help serve; but he also ends up taking on the bulk of childcare during the weekends, because I’m largely gone.” After Alexandra gets their three children situated in the morning, she heads off to Great Diamond Island to oversee the business, from handling payroll to ordering everything that keeps the restaurant running. Their serviceware, for example, includes dishes from Japan that are compostable and mimic fine China. “The soils on this side of our island can’t support septic, and there’s a wastewater issue,” she explains. “So to minimize our wastewater output, we have a disposable service, and we made a commitment to the city that we would be 95% compostable.” During the pandemic, Wight came up with the idea to offer boatside delivery because the majority of their business is from those who come to the island. She hired two teenagers to take a small motorized inflatable to deliver dinner and drinks to boaters in the cove. “It was a different spin on takeout.” Now in the off season, the Wights are back in Brooklyn. While their kids are in school, Alexandra designs new merchandise, assesses the restaurant’s financials, and prepares for the next summer. “It’s exciting to be able to scrap the menu at the end of every season and start fresh,” she says.

Alexandra first met Oliver during their senior year at Colgate. “He, with a group of friends, released a live chicken in our home at about 4 o’clock one morning,” she remembers.

LOX, SHOPS, AND 5-GALLON

eter Shelsky ’01 isn’t just serving up bagels and lox. “We’re selling people nostalgia,” he says. When customers walk into Shelsky’s of Brooklyn Appetizing & Delicatessen, they smell the pickled herring, smoked salmon, and 5-gallon buckets of pickles. “And they’re like, ‘Oh my god, it smells like my grandma’s house,’” he says. “That’s such a cool memory; I love when people have that experience.” Shelsky started the shop because he himself wanted easier access to memories of his childhood: “I was tired of schlepping into Manhattan to get the food I grew up eating on Sunday afternoons.” At first, Shelsky’s circle thought his idea would never work. “Every year, my friends would tell me it was a crappy idea,” he says. But, in 2011 over Christmas Eve dinner, Shelsky’s family gave him the encouragement he needed. When the holiday hustle and bustle settled down, Shelsky created a business plan. He posted on Facebook, “Fingers crossed, knock on wood, wish me luck” as he was about to ask a neighbor for seed money. James Cordon ’01, who lived across the hall from Shelsky in Center Stillman during their first year, followed up with questions. Shelsky told him about the idea, presented the business plan, and Cordon and his wife invested the seed money. “That’s how Shelsky’s was born.” Having attended the Institute of Culinary Education and then working in fine dining, Shelsky had previous restaurant experience. Additionally, he’d spent some

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Photo: Courtney Theberge of Courtney Elizabeth Media; Illustration: Mercedes deBellard

PICKLE BARRELS

mark diorio

time working in catering and doing freelancing for The Food Network. He opened the appetizing shop on those experiences, and without formal retail training. For those unfamiliar with the term “appetizing,” it “refers to the smoked fish and cream cheese — basically all the things you’d put on a bagel or bialy,” Shelsky explains. They decided to combine a delicatessen with the appetizing shop, selling all Jewish favorites like pastrami, corned beef, and chopped liver. Traditionally, appetizing shops and delicatessens were two separate entities because, due to kosher rules, meat and dairy couldn’t be sold in the same place. Shelsky decided not to be traditional, though, and to have it all in one place. “I’m a pretty lousy, nonobservant Jew,” he jokes. Shelsky’s started on a shoestring budget and outgrew its first shop within three years. He brought on a strategic partner — a friend who had been in the fresh fish retail business for decades — and they moved to a larger space in the Cobble Hill neighborhood, which is still their current location. On most weekends in the fall, when Brooklynites have returned from their summers away, there’s a line out the door. As people wait, they schmooze with friends and neighbors while ’80s and ’90s music pipes from outdoor speakers. “On a rare occasion, if I’m working behind the counter, I’ll put on the Colgate Thirteen,” says Shelsky, who was a member of the a cappella group and majored in sociology and anthropology. Inside, there are showcases of fish, with the biggest one displaying 12 types of salmon. In another rests whole whitefish (head and all). The third case holds various salads and schmears. The deli case is located in the back, with corned beef, tongue, chopped liver, and deli sides. “All the good, old-school stuff,” Shelsky says. (Another blast from the past on the menu: cans of Dr. Brown’s sodas.) Opening a bagel shop in 2018 was a natural extension. “Bagels in the city took a turn for the worst over the last few decades,” he says. “They got big and puffy and soft. I wanted to bring back the dense, chewy, not-sohuge bagel.” At Shelsky’s Brooklyn Bagels in Park Slope, bagels and bialys are made on-site daily. “We do a threeday fermented sourdough bagel, and they’re pretty awesome,” he says. The shops have done well during the pandemic because they are mostly takeout businesses. Shelsky’s grew its online ordering and nationwide shipping, “and that’s made a huge difference,” he says. This pivot makes up for the catering business they lost due to gathering restrictions. “Jews eat this stuff every stage of life,” Shelsky says. “Your baby is born, you eat lox. You have a bar mitzvah, you eat lox. You get married, you eat lox. And when you die, everyone gets around to talk about you and eat lox. It’s just how we roll.” The pandemic also prompted Shelsky and his family to move to Paris recently. They’d already been contemplating the move to be closer to his wife’s family, but COVID-19 made them scrutinize their priorities. “We want to be able to travel and enjoy our lives,” he says. “You only live once.” He’ll work from abroad while his partner continues handling the operations in the States. “I deal with the big-picture ideas,” Shelsky says.

Lox and bagels aren’t as available in Paris as they are in New York, but Shelsky says he’ll still be able to find foods he enjoys. “Because I’m a Jew, obviously the things I love to eat mostly include Chinese food.” Shelsky is only half joking. One of his multiple arm tattoos is Chinese writing that says “General Tso’s chicken.” Shelsky may just be the person to bring Jewish food to France. “I’m not making any business moves my first year there, because I don’t speak French and it’s going to take me a while to get a lay of the land,” he says. “But I definitely have some ideas. I think bagels would absolutely crush in Paris.”

---------Yom Kippur (Shelsky’s busiest day of the year) in 2020, they sold: → 300 dozen bagels → 900 pounds of cream cheese → 500 pounds of smoked salmon and lox → Also, hundreds of pounds of chopped liver, pickled herring, rugelach, babka, and honey cake Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 41

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Simple and Sweet Pie, cheese, and good beer. What more is there to life? The purveyor of these pleasures is Martha’s on Madison (MOM), which opened in downtown Hamilton in June. It’s the second village business for Brendan ’09 and Britty Buonocore ’12 O’Connor, who started Flour and Salt bakery in 2015. Divided into two sections, MOM is a specialty food shop and fromagerie on one side, and a cozy tavern on the other. While taking turns bouncing baby Sloane on their hips, Brendan and Britty talk about how they’ve been able to turn their admiration of the space at 3 Madison Street into a new business in only six months — while juggling new parenthood — during the pandemic. “We’ve been in love with this building for a long time, so when it came up for rent, we couldn’t resist the opportunity,” Britty says. “We signed the lease without a clear business plan.” The couple determined the direction of MOM the same way they decided on Flour and Salt: creating a place where they would

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have wanted to go as students. “It was important for us to also look at what gaps were in the village,” Brendan adds. Their curated grocery offerings, like canned organic mussels from Spain and Barely Buzzed Beehive Cheese from Utah, are items that Hamiltonians can’t find without driving an hour to Syracuse — and maybe not even then. Britty, who has become an inspiration for a generation of young Colgate bakers, makes both sweet and savory pies to sell. In addition, she prepares the daily salad, sandwich, and soup specials. Like the shop, the tavern provides a limited number of high-quality food and drink options. “It keeps the inventory tight so we know what we’re working with is always fresh,” Britty says. “And it eliminates decision paralysis. We’ve customized a singular sandwich and we know it’s really great. Just eat it.” To which Brendan adds: “Keep it simple.” → Martha’s on Madison is named after Britty’s grandmother, to whom she’s often compared. “She was a firecracker and you knew where she stood, and I am the same,” Britty says. Serendipitously, Martha is also the name of Brendan’s stepmother’s mother (“A woman who was the embodiment of kindness”), and Saint Martha is the patron saint of cooks.

‘When Life Gives You Lemons, Chuck a Watermelon at It’ After beer is brewed, you have to have something to put it in. This seems obvious, but it’s a predicament Carrie Blackmore ’08 and her crew at Good Nature Farm Brewery faced due to supply shortages starting in March 2020. “Now we have two huge trailers in our parking lot,” Blackmore says. They serve as storage for 12- and 16-ounce cans. “The only way we could get a vendor to agree to ship to us was to order a tractor-trailer load of each size,” she explains. Even that didn’t go smoothly. They had

to source the trailers separately, and the cans arrived before the trailers, so they had 18-foot-high stacks of cans throughout the brewery. “It was an adventure, and it was not how we would have chosen to do it, but we’re not going to be out of cans for a long time.” The pandemic prompted Good Nature to get creative in other ways, too. When customers ordered takeout from the brewery, they could also purchase grocery staples from local farmers. “[They could] grab a pizza to go, grab a six pack, and then a loaf of bread, some eggs, and a chicken,” Blackmore quips. Good Nature faced other shortages that you’ve likely read about in the news, from ketchup packets to PPE to labor. “We’re fortunate to have a great team and we had a lot of folks come back after COVID,” Blackmore explains, “but we’re routinely operating with two to five people short.” New brews and beverages have been one of the most positive outcomes. Summertime ushered in a line of hard seltzers and a watermelon gose called There Gose the Farm (Tag line: “When life gives you lemons, we say, chuck a watermelon at it!”). Autumn highlights include the traditional Great

Brenna Merritt (3; far left and right page); Mark DiOrio (left)

Chocolate Wreck as well as the Pumpkin Brown Ale. At a new small brew house, Good Nature has been doing research and development, making “some really unique beers that we may not have taken the plunge with on the big system,” Blackmore says. Because “IPAs are all the rage still,” the brewery has been releasing a new one every four to six weeks, sometimes even faster. “There’s always something really hazy, hoppy, and experimental on tap,” she says. This is the fifth year the farm brewery has been open, but Blackmore and Good Nature have been a staple of the Hamilton community for more than a decade. If major supply shortages can’t keep her down, nothing can.

tofu triumph “You all nailed it.” “Have to admit that I ate most of it directly off the pan.” “Mine just arrived today on the other side of the continent! I’ve been waiting 8+ years for this day!” “Three pounds of curry tofu were consumed last night to rave reviews from everyone including avowed tofu dislikers. The curry marinade is world famous for a good reason!” “Just started marinating my first batch and now my kitchen smells like HWF and I don’t think anything could make me happier than that.” Hamilton Whole Foods — HWF — delighted numerous customers when it made its curry tofu marinade available to be shipped in jars. There was a delay due to a bottle shortage (sound familiar?), but the release last spring ended up being well-timed with the natural foods store and vegetarian eatery’s 30th anniversary. “The alumni responses on Instagram were just phenomenal,” says Heather Dockstader ’04, who runs HWF with owner

and cofounder Monica Costa. The curry tofu is HWF’s signature product, served in a wrap, on a salad, and by itself. Alumni buy cartons of it to bring home after a visit to Hamilton, and Costa has delivered it to an alumna who is a former HWF staff member staff and customers — that’s part of why living in New York City. “It’s always been a she’s still there,” says Dockstader, who dream of mine to be able to share it further has co-run the store with Costa for more than in the store,” Costa says. than nine years and is also her partner. They make it in 4-pound batches, and the Dockstader was a women’s studies staff can’t help but eat some of it right out of program assistant when she met Costa, the oven, even if it burns their mouths. “We and then she began helping out at HWF frequently eat it when it’s too hot, and we’re when Carrie Blackmore ’08 left to start like, ‘Darn, darn, it’s too hot,’” Dockstader Good Nature. “We know people’s names says, “but then we keep eating it, saying, years after they’ve left, and we know ‘This is so good.’” their orders.” Costa and her partner at the time (who Costa adds: “The people we work with, passed away in 2007) started HWF when the students, local people, and customers there weren’t many shops and restaurants over 30 years — it’s been just amazing.” in downtown Hamilton. “So we just kept trying to fill little niches,” she says. “We sold pet food for a while, we had books and different clothes and gift items.” From day one, sustainability has been a cornerstone of the business. HWF has almost zero food waste, a meatless menu, and an inventory of mostly natural, organic, and fair-trade products. “It’s just part of what we do; it’s part of who we are,” Costa says. She’s also been locally focused and working with area farmers long before it Heather Dockstader ’04 was trendy. (left) and Monica Costa Costa has been able to keep a sustainable business — in the other sense of the word — through the relationships she’s built in the community throughout → Costa has employed approximately 65 the years. Students are customers, but many students in 30 years. have been employed there as well. And even → She has received 6 Torch Medals from if alumni didn’t eat at HWF as students, 5 student staff members and 1 student many return to Hamilton as adults with regular customer who honored her for having a meaningful impact on their lives. improved eating habits, making them new → HWF sells approximately 2,300 pounds or regulars during reunions. 55,200 cubes of tofu per year. “The connections, her treatment of the

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FOOD THOUGHT FOR

From a morning cup of coffee to an evening glass of wine, from buried pottery to planted seeds, Colgate professors are using food and drink as a lens to explore questions about humanity. By Eli zab eth Preston I l lus t r ation s by Mic h ael Waraksa

What Is Jewish Food?

ewish cookbooks have changed dramatically over the last hundred years, says Professor Lesleigh Cushing, who is writing her own book about what she’s found in her research. Cushing, who is the Murray W. and Mildred K. Finard Professor in Jewish studies and professor of religion, is a literary scholar. These cookbooks used to be “steeped in nostalgia,” she explains — immigrants trying to evoke their grandmothers’ kitchens through their matzoh ball recipes, for example. But more recent cookbooks have shifted in focus.

For one thing, Cushing says, the voice of Jewish cookbooks is becoming more masculine, as celebrity chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi pull the cuisine into a less domestic and more prestigious realm. “The food is leaving the home, becoming more chef-like in some ways, but also becoming more global,” Cushing says. Jewish cookbook authors nowadays might even suggest including pork in a dish, or defying kosher law in other ways. These changes point to ways Jewish identity is changing, too, Cushing says, and to questions about what it means to be authentic (and whether that matters). Are there foods that are Jewish, she asks, or just Jewish cooks who make food? Or neither? “Something radical has changed about how Jews think about food,” she says, “and how they think about what it is to be Jewish and an eater, a consumer, a giver of food.” Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 45

Searching for Soul

aryn Jordan, assistant professor of women’s studies, is also digging into cookbooks — specifically, soul food. But she’s most interested in the elements of a recipe that can’t be written down. “How does soul food communicate history through taste?” she questions. One answer lies in fried chicken. It’s “a stereotype,” she says, “but also, the reason the stereotype exists is that enslaved Black folks could keep chickens relatively easily.” After Reconstruction, Jordan says, Black women could help support their families by raising chickens. Later, fried chicken — a food that keeps well — became important for another reason. “A lot of times when people were traveling, they couldn’t stop just anywhere for lunch because they didn’t know if people were going to be racist or not,” Jordan says. With a cooler of chicken in the car, they could eat without getting off the road. Growing up, she often heard her parents tell the story of a time when fried chicken in the car may have saved their lives. Her father, traveling with her mother and older siblings before Jordan was born, had pulled off the road for a rest. A police officer knocked on the window. He told the family he had “called some people” when he saw them parked there, and they had better leave town in a hurry. There was no time to stop for food as they fled, but they had chicken in the car. Whenever she ate what her family called “traveling chicken” — a fried drumstick wrapped in white bread and covered in foil — on road trips, it “reminded me where we came from,” Jordan says. “It allowed me to taste history.” Jordan’s father was the first Black executive chef in Las Vegas, and Jordan worked as a caterer during grad school. “Food is in my bones,” she says. So she has plenty of firsthand knowledge of the subjects she’s exploring now as a scholar. As she visits archives and hunts down soul food cookbooks, she’s most interested in the domestic work of Black women in their own homes, Jordan says. She’s hoping to write a book that describes a “genealogy of soul,” looking at not just the food but also the kitchens it’s cooked in and the stories it conveys. Jordan uncovered one tantalizing story on a visit to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. She was there to see

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a collection of cookbooks that belonged to singer Ella Fitzgerald. In the collection, Jordan found a cookbook still in draft form: three file folders containing about 150 yellowed pages, some cut and taped together. It seemed to be an early version of a book called All About Soul: Cooking and Related Subjects by author Aldeen Davis. The manuscript was unusual. The recipes had no measurements, for one thing, Jordan says. “She wanted you to cook with your soul, with your heart, with your feeling.” And the manuscript had odd elements interspersed, such as narrative essays and a key to the meanings of flowers. It also had a handwritten inscription from Davis, wishing Ella Fitzgerald well. At the end of the note was a startling postscript. “It said, ‘I will never forget last night,’” Jordan remembers. “It made my skin tingle, and I think I teared up a little.” She doesn’t know what type of relationship the two women had. “This is the mystery of my career,” Jordan says. “And I don’t know if I’ll ever find an answer.” But the love and the shared memory conveyed through the taped-together cookbook perfectly illustrate the themes of her research on soul food, Jordan adds. “Food becomes a way in which to tell this history through taste and feeling,” she says. “It’s a language that doesn’t have a key; it’s unspoken ... it’s only felt.”

History in a Bottle

n a different archive, Rob Nemes, Charles A. Dana Professor of history, discovered his own puzzle. He started exploring the National Agricultural Library during a stay in Maryland more than a decade ago. There Nemes found a trove of historical agricultural manuals, books, and pamphlets

from around the world, including Eastern Europe, which he studies. Nemes was often the only person in the library, he says. “I discovered this fantastic material in suburban Maryland, opposite IKEA,” he says. Among the papers, there were numerous manuals from Hungary about wine-growing in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Nemes began to wonder: “What happened to this huge wine industry?” After a trip to the country in 2019, he published a journal article on the history of Hungarian wine. Although most people haven’t heard of Hungarian wine, the country used to be one of the world’s top five wine producers, Nemes says. But during the late 19th century, an epidemic began to spread across European vineyards. It was a tiny, sapsucking insect called Phylloxera, imported from North America. The pests ravaged grape vines. “It’s a little bit like coronavirus,” Nemes says. “They could see it coming, and they had some ideas about how they might stop it, and yet their response was really confused and uncoordinated.” Half or more of the vineyards in Hungary were wiped out. “A lot of people who had just a few vines were ruined,” he says. Those winegrowers became part of the wave of Eastern European migrants leaving for the United States. To beat phylloxera, winegrowers began grafting European vines onto the rootstocks of American plants that were naturally resistant to the bug. In one way, it was a triumph of science, Nemes says. On the other hand, “it sort of punished people who stuck to traditional ways.” Much of the local culture around wine-growing in Hungary and elsewhere shriveled up with the blighted vines. Knowing these histories makes Nemes keenly aware, when he holds a bottle of wine in his hand, that it’s not just something generic, but a product of real people in a certain place. “I’m very interested in the stories and the people behind the bottle of wine we drink,” he says.

“ This is the mystery of my career. And I don’t know if I’ll ever find an answer.” TARYN JORDAN, assistant professor of women’s studies

The Proof Is in the Pots

ome of the stories that food tells aren’t written in cookbooks or on wine labels, but in the walls of pots that have been buried for a thousand years. Kristin De Lucia, associate professor of anthropology, studies an archaeological site called Xaltocan. The site, near Mexico City, is dry today. But during the period De Lucia is interested in — about 900 to 1250 AD — Xaltocan was an artificial island in the middle of a lake. Pots and broken pieces of ceramic have taught archaeologists much of what they know about ancient societies like Xaltocan — or, at least, what they think they know. “Archaeologists tend to make assumptions about what those vessels would have been used for,” De Lucia says. A container with a neck probably held a liquid for pouring, for example. A flat pan probably made tortillas. To investigate the truth of those assumptions, De Lucia took a closer look. She worked with colleagues at the PaleoResearch Institute in Colorado to analyze microscopic particles called phytoliths from pieces of broken pottery. “Phytoliths are essentially fossilized plant cells. They can become embedded in the little spaces in the walls of ceramics because they’re so small,” De Lucia says. These fossilized cells have distinctive shapes that tell scientists what kind of plant they came from. The researchers also looked under a microscope at starch molecules from the ceramics to get more hints about what types of plant matter the pots held. Infrared spectroscopy revealed other molecular signatures such as fats from meats. The researchers published their results earlier this year in the Cambridge University Press journal Latin American Antiquity. Some of what De Lucia found was unsurprising — for example, corn. Its signature in jars suggested Xaltocan residents were making atole, a corn-based drink. The researchers were surprised, though, by where they didn’t find corn. Two of the fragments they analyzed came from flat pans called comales. Archaeologists tend to assume these were tortilla griddles, which meant they should have held corn starches. “But in fact there was no evidence,” De Lucia says. They did find a possible meat signature, though. That doesn’t mean comales were never tortilla griddles, De Lucia says. But they

likely had other functions, too, like a modern frying pan. Another type of vessel the scientists analyzed was a large, heavy-duty basin with handles. “I really had no clue what they were using them for,” De Lucia says. But the microscopic analysis turned up many fibers from corn husks. She thinks this is some of the earliest archaeological evidence for people making tamales. De Lucia and her colleagues also found that different vessels had different purposes. For example, atole with chili peppers seems to have been cooked in different vessels than atole with no peppers. This might have been a way to keep the spice from tainting other meals. Unlike just counting up the number of jars or pans at a site, this research helps De Lucia imagine the long-ago residents of Xaltocan more clearly, she says. “You can see all these artifacts as things people used.” They boiled or steamed tamales to feed their families; they added spicy pepper to their stew or chose to leave it out. De Lucia says, to her, that makes these ancient people more relatable. “Cooking, in many ways, defines us,” she says. “It makes us human.”

When a Coffee Mug Is a Window

ather than pots and pans, Peter Klepeis, professor of geography, is peering into cups and carafes. He’s teaching a sophomore residential seminar this year called What’s in Your Cup? The Geography of What We Drink. Through the lens of everyday beverages such as coffee, water, wine, and tea, students will learn about the effects of their consumption, as well as how the production of these beverages affects the environment and the lives of the people who make them. Ultimately, Klepeis hopes that both he and his students will learn how to live better in the world. “Geography is a funky discipline,” says Klepeis, straddling the natural and social sciences. He’s especially interested in relationships between humans and the environment. With this class, he says, he’s “using something we all consume daily to try to make a connection between our Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 47

consumption and these other impacts.” After taking the first part of Klepeis’ class this fall, students may be able to see firsthand how some beverages are made. He hopes to take the class to Colombia to meet coffee growers, but the pandemic and social unrest may necessitate a change of plans. Luckily, the themes he wants to explore show up throughout the world. Klepeis and his students will talk about the working conditions behind certain coffees and other drinks, such as child or slave labor. They’ll also discuss the displacement of indigenous people, forest loss and impacts on biodiversity from farming, and other environmental issues like pollution and waste. When he taught the class in 2020 as a first-year seminar, students were “surprised by the degree of social and environmental cost to what they’re consuming,” Klepeis says. “They generally don’t think about what they drink.” It’s not all bad news, though. In Colombia, Klepeis hopes to talk to farmers who are working to lessen their environmental impact and respond to climate change, or creating cooperatives that let them earn better wages. Klepeis doesn’t think we should feel guilt about everything we eat and drink, but aim to consume mindfully when we have the options and means. (He points out that FoJo Beans in Hamilton sells fairly traded coffee.) Although he personally has been careful about his consumption for a long time, preparing for this class has taught Klepeis new principles and reinforced others — for example, he says, “bottled water is something that we should all be avoiding if we have a better alternative.” He’s also learned how effective it can be in the classroom to address heavy social and environmental topics through a fresh lens. “You talk about climate change, and [students have] been hearing about this forever,” he says. But when you talk about a hot cup of coffee, he says, “it perks them up.”

From Farm to (Everyone’s) Table

conversation over coffee several years ago made professors Chris Henke (sociology and environmental studies) and April Baptiste (environmental studies and Africana and Latin American studies) realize they should

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“ There definitely were barriers to getting access to local food. The one that stood out to me was transportation access.” APRIL BAPTISTE, professor of environmental studies and Africana and Latin American studies

team up for a research project about how people buy food when money is scarce. Both professors were interested in whether eating local food might benefit people who experience food insecurity. Are farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) memberships only about pricy peaches and upscale arugula? Or can local food be a practical option for lowincome families? Baptiste and Henke started their project near home. They set up a tent at the Hamilton Food Cupboard and interviewed visitors about their food-buying habits. Students helped develop the survey questions. They learned that some people were interested in local options such as the farmers market. But, Baptise says, “There definitely were barriers to getting access to local food. The one that stood out to me was transportation access.” It was hard for people to even get to the food cupboard, much less the farmers market. Another barrier was that the Hamilton farmers market didn’t accept SNAP benefits, also called food stamps. Baptiste and Henke also visited the City of Rochester Public Market, a huge, yearround market that’s different in many ways from the Hamilton market. There, they found better accessibility for low-income

consumers, such as vendors accepting food stamps. They also spoke to farmers and found that producers themselves oftentimes are low-income consumers. Henke says, “There’s a joke a farmer told me, which I love: How do you become a millionaire in farming? Start out with two million dollars.” Farming is often economically difficult, and “A lot of the folks we talked to were pretty open about some of those challenges,” he adds. Financial insecurity can also make it harder for farmers to take steps that would make their food more accessible, such as letting consumers pay for their CSA membership in installments, rather than all at once. In price comparisons, Baptiste and Henke discovered that food from a farmers market or CSA membership is sometimes less expensive than food from big-box stores, depending on the season and other factors. So consumers might find some surprising deals, if they can get past the barriers. Henke recognizes those barriers himself, as a committed consumer of local food. He says he and his family spend a large part of each weekend driving around town to pick up items like milk and produce. “It’s a ton of coordination to eat that way,” he says. “I realized my locavore privilege from this research.”

Forbidden Fruit

ssistant Professor of Art and Art History Margaretha Haughwout is also thinking about local food that people can access easily — as easily as reaching out and plucking a plum from a tree. In her studio in the Village of Hamilton, plants used as food and medicine grow together and support each other. She calls it a food forest studio. (“I have a little bit of an allergy to the term ‘garden,’” she says.) Earlier this year, she used plants from that studio to build a permanent installation called Food Forest Futures at Bennington College. The installation started with a group of five hawthorn trees Haughwout found growing at the boundary between a mown lawn and a wilder wooded area. Around those trees, she planted two disease-resistant chestnut trees, along with other plants, including cherry trees, grape vines, peas, elderberries, and herbs. The plants are meant to help each other grow while providing food for people and other creatures. Her goal, Haughwout says, is “to inspire a radical imagination about what’s possible in our spaces.” What if a plot of land for growing food could also be a wild, natural place that didn’t need as much human intervention? What if apples and pears grew on city streets? Toward that end, she works with a group called the Guerrilla Grafters, which first sprang up about a decade ago in the Bay Area. Guerrilla Grafters find the sterile fruit trees planted along city sidewalks, such as ornamental pear, cherry, and plum. Then, during a brief window in the spring, they use a knife to slice branches from the ornamental trees and attach branches from actual fruiting varieties. The grafters work stealthily, since the act may be unwelcome or illegal. These branches often bloom in different colors than their host trees, Haughwout says, though they may not bear fruit for several years. Haughwout started working with the Guerrilla Grafters when she lived in the San Francisco area and now works with groups in New York City. “When I’m walking in the city, I’m constantly observing where the fruit trees are,” she says. She also hosts an annual exchange where grafters come together and swap branches to bring back to their neighborhoods.

“We hear from people all over the world who are doing this practice,” she says. If she encounters neighbors while she’s grafting a tree, Haughwout says, she’ll talk to them about what she’s doing. But in other cases, her creation may go totally unnoticed at first. That’s OK, she says, because the kind of art she’s interested in making isn’t only visible. Rather, she’s interested in art that inspires people to act or to change their perspective. Sometimes there’s conflict between the grafters and city officials, for instance.

“I tend to think if the government gets alarmed, then I’m on the right track,” Haughwout says. “As an artist, I have some ability to be antagonistic in a playful way.” If people read about these conflicts and start to think about different ways public spaces could be used, or if they visit her food forest installation and feel inspired to plant a seed in their own communities, that’s her real work, Haughwout says. “It’s not just the branch. It’s these larger conversations and actions that emerge.”

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We’ll Drink to Them A toast to alumni innovators in the beverage industry. by rebecca docter

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Photography by Justin Myers

There Is Truth in Wine

ate Norris ’04 isn’t good at keeping secrets. The wine industry, she says, is shrouded in them. And, with a select group at the helm of most companies, there’s little diversity in the players. So, with Division Winemaking Company, she’s working to level the playing field (vineyard). Young, women entrepreneurs are a minority in the world of wine. Just 14% of lead winemakers in California are women — the state that makes 85% of all U.S. vino — according to a 2020 study from Santa Clara University. “I want to pull back the curtains, and to have people fall in love with the process and really know where their wine came from and exactly how it was crafted — and for wine to be part of their story and everyday lives too.”

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At Division Winemaking Company, there are no secrets. The Portland, Ore., company makes natural wine with the mantra of full transparency. For Norris, that means creating the beverage with minimal intervention, regenerative farming, and no herbicides or pesticides. The company follows the circadian rhythm of the earth: a process that relies on the vine and ecosystem’s internal clock to help guide farming and winemaking decisions, leading to higher quality, more interesting, and more sustainable wines. That’s how Norris was brought up, with natural wine always on the table in her tiny French hometown of 300 people. The appreciation for the drink also came from her Malagasy mother and British father. “I like to say I’m a fifth-generation wine drinker,” she jokes. Norris graduated from Colgate with geography and political science degrees before entering the event-planning industry. Following the economic crash of 2008, she left that field and moved to the Beaujolais region of France to earn her degree in viticulture and oenology. She

“The earth is different every year. I’m different every year. Wine is different every year.”

honed her craft at wineries in Beaujolais, Burgundy, and the Loire Volcanique before moving back to the United States to open Division in 2010. She and her business partner, Tom Monroe, chose Oregon for its cool climate and culture. “It beats to its own drum,” Norris says. “It’s an incredible place to live and has a really welcoming and interested group of residents when you’re a maker wanting to create or craft something.” There, they lease and farm area vineyards, handling every part of the winemaking process. Natural wine is “as old as time; it’s just finally been named,” Norris notes. “It’s how wines were originally made thousands and thousands of years ago. They didn’t have harsh chemicals or unnatural additives.” But, in recent years, it’s become a more trendy option at high-class dining establishments, delivering what some consider more of the purity of the grapes and terroir in each bottle than conventional vinos. At Division, that philosophy is spread among many grape varieties, from the expected Oregon Pinot Noir to the more daring “l’Orange,” a skin contact wine. This type of wine is made from whites grapes fermented on their skins (in the style of a red wine), giving a distinctive texture and an orange hue. Division’s orange wine blends eight white grape varieties and has notes of fresh tangerine peel and a touch of peat (plus eucalyptus, connecting to the art on its label). There are no recipes for wine, Norris stresses: “The earth is different every year. I’m different every year. Wine is different every year. Wine is different every day as it’s aging and also after you open it; a bottle is alive. And that’s just how it’s supposed to be.” Next on the horizon: A building of their own. Division invested in a 10,000-squarefoot building in southeast Portland that will serve as the company’s new urban winery. The space will allow Norris to take the business to the next level, with a goal of producing approximately 15,000 cases of wine per year — that’s a large rise from the current 8,000. “It will hopefully be our forever home … as long as we don’t outgrow it,” she says.

justin myers

Norris moves grapes by shovel and hand from one fermentation vessel bin to another.

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Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 53

The Birth of Coffee in Williamsburg

Behind the Coffee When Scherr moved to Williamsburg in 1996, he paid $200 per month to live in an enormous loft. Now, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,000. At the time, “[Williamsburg] was the place that no one wanted to live in,” Scherr says. He saw that as an opportunity to build community. “I met an early internet guy, who wanted to promote local businesses through the web. We got to talking, and we decided there was no place to hang out in Williamsburg. We decided to open a coffee shop.” Together, they renovated Verb Café (which Scherr would use as the model for Think Coffee) by hand. He was still working as a lawyer in Manhattan, but when the coffee shop’s candidate for manager fell through, he decided to fill the role himself. “I really enjoyed the community aspects of it. When September 11th happened, [the coffee shop] was the place to hang out and grieve together and come together as a community. It became clear to me that coffee and coffee shops were great places to build human connection.” But one small coffee shop in a nontouristy area of New York City wasn’t enough to pay the bills. So Scherr scaled up. After a successful expansion to NYU’s campus, he continued opening new locations. “I took the lesson of the community and coming together and trying to build goodwill with our customers. I made that an integral part of our Think Coffee plan.”

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Courtesy of Think Coffee

ason Scherr ’87 was a lawyer in Manhattan when he founded one of the first coffee shops in Williamsburg (Brooklyn). He wasn’t a total stranger to the food and drink business, previously founding an artisanal cream cheese company. But when friend Chris James ’87 moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood and showed Scherr what Williamsburg was all about, entering the coffee space made sense. “I fell in love with the neighborhood; at the time it was a very creative community on a lot smaller scale than it is now,” Scherr remembers. See how he started Think Coffee, which now has 11 locations and its own line of coffee beans.

Spilling the Beans on the Beans Think Coffee offers blends from Nicaragua, Colombia, and Ethiopia, with a range of tasting notes. “We realized the best way to make great coffee was to travel to where it was grown and meet the farmers who grow it,” Scherr says. “We flew to Nicaragua and Honduras, we met people, and tried to find farmers who wanted to do the right thing by their workers.” That community aspect of the business was in the back of his mind as he explored ethical ways to produce beans for Think Coffee’s customers: He wanted to find coffee bean farmers who paid their employees fair wages and considered their well-being. In addition to working with farmers who care for their employees, the company takes it a step further by giving back to the communities where the coffee is made. Scherr and co. have taken on projects such as installing wells in a community where workers didn’t have access to clean drinking water. Now they’re working on a menstrual hygiene project in Ethiopia. “Our challenge is that it’s not easily scalable, but we hope that, in partnership with our farmers and producers, we’re able to do some good for the worker communities that pick the coffee [beans for] your cup. We’re trying to make that connection.” Pivoting in Current Times Like many physical café locations, Think Coffee has struggled during the pandemic. To keep the business afloat, the company launched a boxed cold brew, similar in looks to boxed wine. “We’re promoting the idea that people should have our cold brew on tap, either at their office to welcome them back, or to give them a café-quality coffee break at home while they’re working. We think that people miss that sort of coffee break.”

Courtesy of Harris Tea Company

What’s Scherr’s morning preference? Think Coffee’s Devoe blend, which is one of the more popular blends. “People are drinking what I like,” he jokes.

And That’s the Tea

into coffee?

efore the autumn leaves even fall to the ground, pumpkin spice coffees rule grocery store displays and drive-thru windows. But what if you’re not

What if you’re a tea drinker? “I’m currently drinking a pumpkin spice black tea,” says Bianca Koerfer ’12 McVaugh, research and development and commercialization manager at Harris Tea Company. “I always like to drink the new items, even if it’s not exactly the right season for it.” McVaugh hasn’t bought a single bag of tea (unless it’s to test a competitor’s product) since she started working as an associate scientist for the company, which is under the umbrella of Harris Freeman & Co., in 2016. She joined the business after earning her master’s in food science at the University of Wisconsin. The degree offered hands-on career options: “You can’t see molecules,” McVaugh says. “You learn all the theory, but I like more of the applied science.” She also liked the job security it promised: “The food industry is a field that’s never going to go away. People need to eat.” McVaugh’s days are filled with producing the tea you see on your weekly shopping trip. But, when you see a box of tea, you should envision a few people. There are growers all over the world, teams sourcing the leaves, groups handling the logistics of getting the tea to the factories, and the quality-control branch making sure that blends taste the way they should and bags aren’t accidentally ripping. McVaugh is on the research and development arm, and her main role is scaling up products from benchtop to full manufacturing. Two scientists report to her, and she assigns new projects (like new flavors of black tea). McVaugh is New Jersey–based, and many of the teas in her portfolio are herbal because, when it comes to tea, location matters. “[In] the Northeast, iced tea isn’t a thing,” she says. While some northerners might order tea in a restaurant, southerners drink sweet tea regularly. In the Northeast, on the other hand, the company can’t keep up with the demand for herbal specialty flavored teas. Aside from herbal options, much of McVaugh’s job involves working backward. Harris Tea Company manufactures both inhouse tea brands and fulfillments for outside customers. For example, big grocery store brands will come to the company to match another kind of tea so the store can release it under its own brand. “A lot of work in the food industry is matching other people’s products,” McVaugh says. “We have hundreds of blends in our portfolio, but we pack a lot of the same ones for different customers.” A lifetime tea drinker, McVaugh feels at home among the tea bags she touches each day. In the morning, she reaches for a cup of Earl Gray. “I like drinking black tea

in the morning just because it is a caffeine source,” she says. But in the afternoon, all bets are off. “I'm always excited when I see a blend that we don’t pack that often.” Next up, gingerbread. McVaugh became sold on food science after a conversation with Kashif Ahmed ’08, who had already started his career in the field. See p. 31 to learn more about his work.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 55

They Have a Can-Do Attitude

a can,” Veysey remembers. He got Biggar in on the idea, and the two have worked since then to fill a hole in the wine market. Now, the company produces Graham + Fisk’s Wine-in-a-Can and MANCAN Wine. But it’s not just any old business venture. Biggar and Veysey put themselves on the line with every can. Their names are on

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Courtesy of Firehouse Can Company

magine 1991. You’re at Camp Roosevelt on the shores of Lake Erie, spending the neverending days swimming and hiking to your heart’s content. Distantly, you hear Bryan Adams through a camp radio. Across the way, you see fellow campers Graham and Fisk meet and begin a lifelong friendship — a friendship that would culminate in an unusual business venture: canned wine. In 2015, Fisk Biggar ’05 and Graham Veysey launched Firehouse Can Company, “the first exclusively canned wine company in the United States.” The story goes like this: Veysey was working day and night to renovate a vacant firehouse in Cleveland to help revitalize the city. Covered in construction dust, he wandered over to the neighborhood bar, craving wine. “[I wanted] to give my beer belly the night off and was curious why there wasn’t wine in

Can a can support wine better than a bottle? Biggar (pictured sitting right) and Veysey think so: “The top two destabilizing factors for wine are light and oxygen,” Biggar says. “The can has a better seal than a bottle, and we also use nitrogen to displace the oxygen. An aluminum can doesn’t let any light in.”

full display, taking ownership with each sip. That firehouse Veysey renovated? It’s on there, too. And then there are the dogs, Gracey (who has the black-and-white coat of the typical firehouse dog) and Crosby (the office grouch). Every decision was made with the goal of creating a connection with the consumer. “We see our customers more like drinking buddies than anything else,” Veysey says. Though the business is based in the Cleveland firehouse, each can carries 100% California wine with “universal drinkability,” the pair says. “We want to make awesome wine,” Biggar says. “If we’re going to put wine in a can, there are going to be skeptics, so we’ve got to make sure we deliver a really high-quality product.” Each varietal is approachable, with simple options like red wine, white wine (with and without bubbles), and rosé with bubbles. The company mixes things up for holidays, with special boxes like the 2021 Advent Calendar, featuring 24 cans. Six years into the venture, Biggar and Veysey have earned seven Best Buy awards from Wine Enthusiast and have expanded to stores like Whole Foods and Walmart. But they still see this as the beginning: “Jeff Bezos said, ‘Overnight success takes 10 years,’” Biggar relates. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 57

Despite Her Last Name, She’s in Liquor

When she interviewed for the job, she didn’t drink whiskey. Her soon-to-be boss saw that as an upside: “He said, ‘That was actually one of the reasons why [I wanted to] hire you, because we can recruit non– whiskey drinkers.’” At Campari, she had to flip the script. Her previous job as associate brand manager at Colgate-Palmolive relied heavily on promoting the benefits of the company’s products (like toothpaste, where you can talk about how many times whiter your teeth can be). But it’s illegal to claim the benefits of liquor in marketing. “A lot of consumption moments are around unwinding after a long day or turning up for a social interaction. We know consumers seek out different types of alcohol for these reasons, but legally we can’t say that alcohol will calm nerves or that a certain alcohol will get you drunk faster or make you feel better in the morning.” She looks ahead to 2045. To predict future buying habits of consumers, her team utilizes trend forecasting. “We do long-term forecasting to determine, ‘What do we think the demand is going to be in 2025 and beyond, 2035, 2045?’” And because whiskey needs time to age, this forecasting helps determine what needs to be made today for release in years to come.

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Now, she’s at the wheel. “I came onto the team and I was like, ‘My to-do list looks massive.’ When you work in brand management, they say you’re the center of the wheel, so you touch everything.” Day to day, Beerman splits her time among the supply chain, communicates with brand managers in different countries, and

works with the innovation, packaging, and media teams. The best part of the job? “Having the opportunity to taste different liquid ages, blends, and cask finishes for innovation.” You read that correctly — she’s now a whiskey drinker.

It’s Important to Know That You Will Not Get High From This Drink

he dinner party was winding down, and as her friends moved into the nightcap portion of the evening, Talia Bennick ’08 popped a CBD gummy into her mouth. It was the first time she’d tried cannabidiol in that format, and while it provided relaxation, the fun of eating the gummy was short-lived. “The whole experience was over in two seconds in terms of ingesting it,” Bennick remembers. It would be great, she thought, if there were something equally relaxing that she could sip on during the after-dinner conversation. So she turned her kitchen into a lab and

began work on what would become Crisp & Crude, a line of nonalcoholic CBD cocktails. It was a long time coming. After earning her MBA at Yale, while working in hospitality technology, Bennick noticed trends of guests requesting nonalcoholic beverages. As someone who struggled with intense migraines triggered by alcohol, she knew that developing an alcohol-free drink would be both profitable and enjoyable. “I started figuring out how to mix hemp extract into drinks that I was either enjoying myself or serving while hosting, and then from there, developing

Courtesy of Campari

efore you finish reading this, grab a glass of whiskey. We’ll wait. Now that you’re settled, take a look at the bottle. There’s a good chance Stacey Beerman ’10 is behind the liquor you’re sipping. As global senior brand manager of American whiskey at Campari, she’s responsible for looking at the longer-term brand-building strategy of the drink. “The global marketing team puts together the vision for the brand and develops a lot of the assets for the campaigns that are going to be launched globally. It’s a way of consolidating resources and making sure that our brand stands for the same thing in every country.” Have a drink with Beerman.

“ When I learned about CBD and botanical terpenes and their ability to help relax, I became really interested and started playing around with those in nonalcoholic cocktails.”

Courtesy of Crisp & Crude

the recipes even more to what they are today.” Once she developed flavor profiles that tasted good, Bennick worked with a beverage scientist to balance them and create shelf-stable versions of the drinks. They also helped her build on the drinks’ initial notes by adding earthier elements like Siberian fir needle. The canned cocktails — crafted both with and without CBD — have flavor profiles akin to classic drinks: Mellow Mule (Moscow Mule), OG Tonic (Gin and Tonic), and Paloma Daydream (Paloma). While most consumers enjoy them straight from the can, they can be used as mixers for alcoholic cocktails as well. “When I learned about CBD and botanical terpenes and their ability to help relax, I became really interested and started playing around with those in nonalcoholic cocktails,” Bennick says. But, what you won’t get from these drinks: the psychoactive effects of marijuana. According to a 2020 article from Harvard Medical School, “While CBD is a component of marijuana (one of hundreds), by itself it does not cause a ‘high.’” Bennick is transparent about the ingredients in each can, with an FAQ on the Crisp & Crude website about the lesser-known ones, like Pineapple Express, “a strain defined by a terpene profile of tropical fruits and piney conifers.” “Much like how we use lavender to be calming, there are some of those same botanical compounds that you’ll find in our drinks for their relaxing effects,” Bennick says. “It’s with intention not just for flavor, but also because we know that these herbs or roots or fruits can inspire that mind-body connection to let us let go and chill.”

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 59

Entertainment

Kingpin Dale Schwartz ’83 is upping his game with Pinstripes, a rapidly expanding restaurant group.

Schwartz at the Pinstripes in Northbrook, Ill.

60 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

Matt Haas

Endeavor

s a boy growing up in Cleveland, Dale Schwartz ’83 spent his summers participating in weekly kids’ bowling leagues. He hung out with friends and ordered hamburgers, milkshakes, and fries from the burger place next door. The memories of the fun he had lingered with Schwartz even as an adult. But he thought he could improve the experience — which is why, in 2007, he founded Pinstripes, a Chicago-based restaurant group that combines bowling, bocce, and high-quality American-Italian cuisine. “The challenge from day one,” Schwartz says, “was to redefine the bowling space.” Turns out, he wasn’t the only one yearning for nostalgic fun and great food. Since opening the first Pinstripes in Northbrook, a suburb of Chicago, the company has expanded to 13 locations in nine states. In the next 15 to 20 years, Schwartz intends to open 100 to 150 more in the United States and overseas. A natural entrepreneur, Schwartz got his first taste of running a company at 17, when he started an asphalt seal-coating business with his brother. For nine months of the year, Schwartz was double majoring in political science and philosophy at Colgate (as well as being a “backup–back up” quarterback for the football team). In the summers, he and his brother ran the business. They sealed 11 driveways the first year, and continued running the business for 10 years, eventually doing about 1,000 driveways annually. After graduation, Schwartz’s career followed a varied path. He worked in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley for two years, earned his MBA at Harvard Business School, and then spent four years at the private equity firm Odyssey Partners. While living in New York and working for Odyssey, he tried to buy a bowling alley on the Upper West Side with a couple of buddies (including Glenn Taitz ’82). It didn’t work out, but he coined the name Pinstripes then, a play on bowling pins and the upscale pinstripe suits he wore to work. Schwartz eventually left New York and bounced around the country working in the biotech industry before cofounding Pharmaca, an integrative pharmacy chain in the late 1990s. Pharmaca now has 28 locations across the United States, but Schwartz left after seven years as co-CEO because he longed to run a business on his own. “I kept dreaming about Pinstripes,” he says. At that point, Schwartz was ready to get the ball rolling and spent the next two years putting plans in motion. He interviewed candidates for general manager

and executive chef and assembled an executive team. After visiting Campo di Bocce in Los Gatos, Calif., he decided to also include bocce, which was similar to the lawn bowling he loved during golf trips to Scotland with Colgate friends. He signed a lease for a 38,000-square-foot space, installed 18 bowling lanes and 10 bocce courts, and opened the Northbrook location in 2007. The menu includes wood-fired pizzas, maple-glazed salmon, and seasonal, house-made gelato, accompanied by a list of fine Italian and American wines. The company opened its second Chicago location on Sept. 22, 2008, a week after the subprime mortgage crisis began. “We survived 2008 and the economic downturn in a slightly similar way to how we survived COVID this last year,” Schwartz says. “We had to tighten our belts and work harder. We didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of our food or make the easy cuts. We just muscled through.” Schwartz has been pursuing expansion plans by entering into strategic partnerships with major real estate developers. These partnerships include plans to open a handful of new locations in 2022 and more thereafter. His plans are ambitious, fueled by a spirit that still lingers from his student-athlete days. “I like competing,” he says, “and, when possible, I like winning.” — Laura Hilgers ’85

Entrepreneurship

In SEAson Ben Eggers, BWE Coastal (TOP); Brandparents, Inc. (bottom right)

She’s putting a new spin on an old staple.

ily Dupont ’04 Leedom has come a long way from hauling 5-gallon buckets at high tide in Duxbury, Mass. Just three years ago, Leedom would drive her Volvo station wagon to the beach on clear, calm days with buckets, a hand pump, and her golden retriever, Colby. She’d wade out in the water in tall, black rubber boots to fill the pails with seawater. She’d then drive home and head to her kitchen to let the water evaporate. Leedom was harvesting salt. Through experimentation, Leedom taught herself how to make salt. Taking old methods of salt harvesting, and modernizing the process with technology, Leedom

Leedom harvests salt in Duxbury, Mass.

created a patent-pending proprietary process for what she deems the perfect salt flake. A lifelong salt aficionado, Leedom got started on this path because she was curious to see if she could make a better salt from the bay in her backyard than what was widely available in stores. “I love the fact that I can be so closely rooted to the source of the most essential food we all eat,” she says. “Salt is in everybody’s cabinet. And I love the fact that I know exactly where my salt comes from.” Leedom is the founder and CEO of SalterieOne, an artisan sea salt company founded in 2018. Her bucket-hauling days are behind her: Now the company is based at an 11-acre marine aquatic campus. She has direct access to water in Duxbury Bay through an underground pipe. And instead of 5-gallon buckets, Leedom now works with 5,000-gallon tanks. “My day-to-day has evolved from just experimenting in my kitchen to running a business,” she says. With the encouragement of family and friends, Leedom decided to set sail in uncharted waters. She quit her real estate job and turned her hobby into a business. “I felt that the risk of not pursuing the salt business was greater than the risk of playing it safe.” Leedom’s salt differs from the crystalline compound you may buy in the supermarket. While sea salt is made through evaporation, table salt is mined through salt deposits underground. According to the American Health Association, sea salt is minimally processed and contains minerals including magnesium, potassium, and calcium. Her grains are also much larger than table salt, and the texture differs as well. “We describe it as a fluffy, flaky, feathery salt,” she

says. “And they’re each unique, just like a snowflake.” Her company offers classic sea salt as well as blends. Last year, blends were inspired by the seasons. The Winter Blend, for example, included rosemary, parsley, and thyme. The Spring Blend included a touch of rose petals. “People use our blends on eggs, chicken salads, barbecue, desserts, breakfast, and coffee,” she says. This year’s blends are based on compass directions. For example, the North blend has maple sugar in it. Leedom says the different blends are something customers love. “They’re able to experiment and discover new flavors.” Like many businesses, Leedom had to change operations once the pandemic hit. That meant quickly switching from mostly selling salts in retail stores to selling online. “We adapted and focused on our digital business,” she says. She also saw a boost in sales as more people started cooking at home. Earlier this year when people felt safer about attending events in person, Leedom’s company started offering salt tastings at its waterfront showroom in Duxbury. Products can be found in grocery stores in New England such as Whole Foods, specialty stores throughout the country, on the SalterieOne website, and on Amazon.com. Leedom has come a long way — from a labor of love in her kitchen to her products being sold across the country. She hopes her customers (25,000 and counting) fall in love with salt like she has. “Salt has gotten a bad rap,” Leedom says. “I’m trying to change its reputation.” — Roxanne Scott Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 61

Endeavor

Online

One-Stop Shopping Grocery tech firm Chicory takes consumers from recipe to checkout with just one click. s Colgate seniors, Joey Petracca ’13 and Yuni Sameshima ’13 found themselves across the table from two of the most powerful people in the world. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, and Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO of Chobani, were the featured guests at the 2013 Thought into Action luncheon for young entrepreneurs in the student incubator program. Petracca and Sameshima hoped to walk away with a few new contacts for their fledgling concept: technology that would meet consumers online where they’re browsing recipes and automatically populate a shopping cart with the ingredients they’d need to cook the dish. All the consumer would need to do is click. “We looked around the room, and we looked at each other, and we were like, ‘This is a big opportunity,’” Sameshima says. Just before Colgate’s then-President Jeffrey Herbst could take the stage, Sameshima claimed the mic. He introduced himself and Petracca, gave an overview of their concept, and invited potential investors to meet with them.

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“I’m sure my voice was four octaves too high — but we ended up raising $30,000 that weekend,” Sameshima says. “That funding allowed us to kick-start Chicory.” Their boldness paid off. In the eight years since, the New York City–based company has facilitated more than $50 million in grocery orders each year and earned the partners a spot on the 2020 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Sameshima, originally from New York City, and Petracca, from Irvine, Calif., met by singing a cappella together in the Colgate Thirteen. They were drawn to each other by their shared sense of humor, which has been vital to their success as they’ve weathered the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Although neither has a business background — Petracca was a history major and Sameshima majored in molecular biology — they credit Colgate’s liberal arts education for endowing them with “critical thinking, problem solving, and thinking holistically,” skills integral to their career, Sameshima says. But why start a company in the first place?

I’m sure my voice was four octaves too high — but we ended up raising $30,000. Yuni Sameshima

mark diorio

Petracca (left) and Sameshima at the Chicory office in Manhattan

“It was a cultural moment,” Petracca says. With the rise of Facebook, publications covering start-up culture, and young entrepreneurs launching companies, the duo “felt empowered that we could pursue this path. We started brainstorming.” As foodies, Petracca and Sameshima noticed a growing trend of online grocery shopping with new companies like Instacart and Blue Apron. At the same time, food blogs, recipe sites, and digital versions of publications like Bon Appétit were taking over the internet. The partners saw an opportunity to capture those consumers by “making those recipes shoppable.” Petracca and Sameshima connected with existing food content creators like Delish, Taste of Home, and The Kitchn to embed Chicory technology in their sites. To facilitate the sales side of the platform, they built a retail network that includes nearly every major grocery retailer in the United States. Chicory’s “Get Ingredients” button is on recipes in their network of 1,500 food sites. From this button, customers can add the recipe’s ingredients into the online cart of their preferred retailer. Chicory also monetizes this technology through digital ads that run within recipe content across its partner sites, and by licensing software directly to brands, agencies, and retailers to power shoppable content. To build relationships with vice presidents and CEOs of major corporations like Kroger and Stop & Shop, the duo again took a bold approach. They turned their perceived disadvantage — youthful inexperience — into an advantage. E-commerce is disrupting legacy businesses, Sameshima points out. They are the ones at a disadvantage, and Chicory offers a solution. “The VPs and CEOs want a fresh perspective,” Sameshima says. “It’s about building trust, showing you’re smart, competent, thinking critically about their business, and that you’re serious. That’s how you ultimately earn respect.” Mic drop. — Lara Ehrlich

Endeavor

Health Care

The Doctor Will See You (Virtually) Now Pediatrician and parent coach Julie Kolakowski ’01 Sweeney uses digital platforms to empower families with food allergies.

n terms of Instagram accounts, the one Julie Kolakowski ’01 Sweeney maintains is pretty typical. Adorable family pictures with her three boys, check. Scrumptious food, check. But a closer look reveals there’s more to Sweeney’s story. The snacks she shows are free of allergens such as nuts and soy. There’s an artfully composed shot of an EpiPen. And, of course, there’s her Instagram handle: @allergymom.md. Sweeney is a pediatrician, but her job doesn’t involve a white coat or doctor’s office: “I am a pediatrician parent coach for food allergy families, and also the consulting medical director of Backstop, a virtual health care platform for pediatric food allergy,” she says. Sweeney always knew she wanted to be a doctor, but she didn’t plan to specialize in allergy care or consultation. It took a few formative experiences for her to realize what she was meant to do. After graduating from Colgate, she got her first glimpse of how challenging managing food allergies could be. She spent a yearlong stint teaching science to children. At the school where she taught, just one child with a peanut allergy was enough to trigger a peanut ban in all of the elementary grades. That memory stayed with her through New York Medical College and her pediatric residency at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital. She married her Colgate sweetheart Bill Sweeney ’01 and made plans to have children of her own. In her final year of residency, while pregnant with their first child, she worked closely with the director of the hospital’s pediatric allergy division. Even with that training, she was unprepared for the maelstrom of emotion she experienced when her infant son had a terrifying allergic reaction. After a feeding of rice cereal, the 5-month-old vomited so much so that he went limp in Sweeney’s arms. In that moment, she didn’t have the brain space to be a calm, cool, and collected

Laura Barisonzi

doctor. When it’s your child that’s in distress, she says, “it is really hard to be a pediatrician and a mom.” With help from an emergency room pediatrician and a supportive coworker, Sweeney diagnosed the rice cereal allergy. Little by little, she learned to manage her son’s diet. She finished residency and joined a private medical practice in Stamford, Conn. Eventually, two more boys came along, each with food allergies of his own. For 10 years, in her job as a pediatrician, Sweeney would see a cavalcade of patients for about 10 minutes each. She loved her work, but part of her ached for the families who’d just learned about their child’s food allergy. Ten minutes didn’t feel like enough time to help them. When the private practice group merged with a bigger hospital, it felt like a sign to leave and try something new. She launched her Instagram account in November 2020, along with a company by the same name. Soon after, she Sweeney consults on food allergies remotely from her home in Connecticut.

received a message from Matt Bomes, an entrepreneur whose own allergies drove him to improve the allergy care experience. Bomes is a cofounder and board member of Summit Street Medical, the start-up that created the Backstop allergy care platform. As Sweeney and Bomes discussed their respective business goals, Bomes asked Sweeney the killer question: “Do you know what you would love to do?” That was when everything clicked. She told him she “would love to be a parent coach” — a reassuring expert who empowers families so that they feel confident throughout the food allergy journey, from triaging Halloween candy to packing EpiPens for college. “The team went with it,” she says, “and it has taken off.” Today, Sweeney might have an hourlong virtual meeting with a food allergy family, followed by calls with dietitians she’d like to recruit to the Backstop platform. She also makes time to post tips for parents and recommend allergen-free snacks on Instagram. In her spare time, she volunteers for Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE), a nonprofit dedicated to awareness. Advocacy from FARE and other groups spurred a new law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, requiring that starting in 2023, sesame be labeled on all packaged foods the way peanuts and other common allergens are. Nearly 1.6 million Americans, including Sweeney’s middle child, are allergic to sesame. “Everything seems to have happened for a reason,” Sweeney says. “And it’s gotten me to this point where I feel like this is my ideal job.”

— Carmen Drahl Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 63

SALMAGUNDI James C. Colgate Student Union, 1939

body, so a new Boarding Hall was built, located where the currentday Huntington Gymnasium is. Oatmeal, pancakes, and bread were often on the menu. Its location meant students would have to walk down the Hill for meals, but access to produce and the village would be more convenient. Mid-1800s: Stewards and their wives helped care for students, maintaining clean dining spaces and providing food: “flapjacks, molasses, potatoes, and coffee for breakfast, meat and apple pie at noon; and bread and butter, apple sauce, cookies, and tea for supper,” writes Howard D. Williams in A History of Colgate University: 1819–1969.

By Lalana Sharma ’23

Send us your dining hall memories: magazine@ colgate.edu

Throughout the past 200 years, dining halls at Colgate have evolved from a single building to a vast network of options attuned to shifts in tradition, community, and the student body. Here are some highlights marking the development of campus dining. 1827: Daniel Hascall, one of Colgate’s founders and first teachers, completed the “Cottage Edifice” boardinghouse, with the cellar and kitchen on the first story and the dining room on the second. Built at a cost of $950, the Cottage Edifice was located between West Hall and current-day Alumni Hall.

Frank Dining Hall construction, 1983

104 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2021

Mid-1830s: By the mid-1830s, most of the 170 acres of campus was reserved for cultivation and pasture, which would then be used to supply the Cottage Edifice with dairy products, meat, and vegetables. The dining hall soon became too small to feed a larger student

1911: A dining commons was added in the basement of East Hall, which could feed 100 students. 1937: Coming on the heels of a faculty vote to defer fraternity rushing and pledging to the second semester, the James C. Colgate Student Union was built in 1937 to meet the needs of first-year men who would not be able to eat at the fraternity houses. “The freshmen’s thricedaily trek from the top of the Hill to the Student Union dining room began in 1937 and would endure for nearly four decades, wearying

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Dining Through the Decades

1874: The Boarding Hall was converted into apartments, so students were on their own at mealtimes. Some ate with private families, “but the prevailing trend was to eat at fraternities or ‘clubs,’ which occasionally bore such fanciful names as ‘Les Gens de Qualité,’” says Williams. President Dodge provided turkeys at Thanksgiving.

many but providing a memorable rite of passage,” Jim Smith ’70 writes in Becoming Colgate: A Bicentennial History.

1930

1950s: In an effort to make dining access more convenient, the University renovated East, West, Andrews, and Stillman halls, alongside the construction of new dorms, which provided first-years and sophomores with rooms, social spaces, and dining halls nearer the academic quad. 1966 and 1967: Two new residence spaces were built, named after Colgate presidents Cutten and Bryan. Each had eight houses and its own dining hall, providing accommodation for 400 students. 1967: Also in 1967 was the dedication of the O’Connor

Campus Center, which housed the campus bookstore and a coffee shop. 1984: Frank Dining Hall first opened its doors to students. 1984–92: Also in 1984, Colgate committed $100,000 to the construction of Donovan’s Pub, named in recognition of the donation of John M. Donovan ’52. The pub was open to students seven nights a week from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. and featured live entertainment, including bands, comedians, WRCU DJs, the Colgate Thirteen and the Swinging ’Gates, and others. The early menu included burgers, foot-long hot dogs, sub sandwiches, pickles and chips, and stir-fry vegetables. 2004: Case Library underwent construction and renovations, the expansion of which included the Hieber Café on the fifth floor. 2019: Following a partnership between Colgate and Chobani, the Hieber Café underwent remodeling and became Chobani at Hieber Café, offering a fullservice Chobani menu, Utica Coffee Roasters, sushi, noodle bowls, and sandwiches.

1973

Current Offerings: The Coop has been featuring a rotation of various menus as part of its dinnertime lineup, including Indian menus from Chaat House.

The C-Store, in the Coop, now has a new deli, with made-toorder sandwiches as well as a smoothie station.

13 Words (or fewer) Aliens, pumpkin heads, spies? We can only guess the intentions of the people wearing these costumes pictured in the 1982 Salmagundi. Readers submitted their ideas for our caption contest published in the summer issue. Here are some of our favorites:

Sono, Latin American cuisine including tacos, burritos, rice bowls, and quesadillas, is now within Donovan’s Pub. Colgate partnered with the Royal India Grill and Ray Brothers BBQ to bring food trucks to campus, which are located on the lawn of the O’Connor Campus Center. In February of 2021, Frank Dining Hall held a “Root for You” plant-based food event in collaboration with People and Our World. The dining hall featured plant and plant-based items like soy and vegetable proteins and root vegetables. Frank Dining Hall also introduced customizable stations, including omelets, stir-fry, house-made pizza, and build-yourown salad.

If this doesn’t help ace Dr. Bary’s astronomy final, nothing will! — Dave Lee ’71

The restaurant said that face masks are required. — Mary A. Molloy, MAT’76

“It doesn’t even taste like a pumpkin spice latte.” — Gordon Strunk ’78

The Wrinkle Brothers: Never met an iron they liked! — Mike Barnett ’67

Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers go trick-or-treating. — Gerald Jacobowitz ’55

sal·ma·gun·di

→ sal·ma·gun·di /salm ’g ndē/ The word “salmagundi” is derived from the French salmigondis, which essentially means “hodgepodge” or “jumble.” But, in English, did you know salmagundi is a dish of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions, and seasoning? It is a large plated salad that is elaborately arranged in rows and patterns, then later dressed with salad dressing.

Autumn 2021 Colgate Magazine 105

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Cheers! Have a drink with alumni in the beverage industry

Don a lab coat and learn the science of snacks p.30

p.50

Cook a mean spread with master tailgaters p.88

Harvest sea salt with Lily Dupont ’04 Leedom p.61

Learn where your produce comes from with Frank Barrie ’72 p.79

Hop into a 1936 Lincoln that will take you to the HiLife with Earl Geer ’80 p.35

Visit the Food Network kitchen with Miriam Garron ’83 p.85

Grab a fork and consume 7,000 calories with a Colgate football player p.26

Research food desserts in Utica p.21

Empower local dairy farmers through the Upstate Institute p.18

Uncover a hidden secret in singer Ella Fitzgerald’s cookbook collection p.46

jill calder

Roll into the Hear bowling, the dark side bocce, and of being the bistro joint New York Times owned by Dale restaurant Schwartz ’83 critic p.60 p.14