Culinary science program director champions lifecycle of food

Growing up in Ireland, Mark Traynor didn’t love to eat peanuts. But now that he lives in Alabama, he can’t get enough. 

“I’ve had a lifelong dislike of peanuts, but then I learned boiled peanuts are a Southern delicacy,” he said. “I went down to Dothan and took part in the harvest, and my palate was just blown away. I absolutely love Alabama-grown boiled peanuts.” 

And when it comes to food, Traynor knows what he’s talking about: he is the director of the Culinary Science program in Auburn’s Horst Schulze School of Hospitality Management, part of the College of Human Sciences. As a champion for farmers and locally grown food, he designs the school’s curriculum to ensure students have a holistic view of food. 

“Traditionally, you would learn about preparing, cooking and serving the food, but here, we teach students about the entire food lifecycle,” Traynor said. “We incorporate growing food, procurement of food, preparation, cooking, serving and then — probably one of the most important parts — the disposal of food.  

“Our student learning outcomes are really built on that foundation of this entire food lifecycle.” 

As a fan of locally grown food, Mark Traynor designs the culinary science curriculum to ensure students have a holistic view of food.

Traynor ensures all students learn the entire lifecycle of food, from growing and preparing to serving, sharing and composting.

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Growing and preparing 

With that focus in mind, Traynor ensures all students in the school get to hear guest speakers, participate in field trips and work with local food products in the state-of-the-art culinary labs at the Tony and Libba Rane Culinary Science Center. 

Traynor and his colleagues work closely with Auburn’s Horticulture department to teach how food is grown, and students visit Horticulture’s vertical gardens, raised bed gardens and rooftop garden at the Rane Culinary Science Center, all of which contain composted food scraps from the culinary labs. 

“When we visit the horticulture gardens, our students are touching the soil, picking vegetables — some of them even are trying hot chili straight off the plant,” he said. “They’re learning from experts about how food is produced. 

“We can talk about that in lecture, but when you’re actually putting your hands in the soil that is fully composted from inedible food waste produced in our culinary laboratory class six months ago, you can’t put that into words.” 

Traynor believes the fresher the ingredients, the better the results, so he invites local farmers to the classroom to introduce their products, whether that’s produce, mushrooms, microgreens, meat or something else entirely. 

“We have a local producer, Robert Griffith of Nourish Farms, just 15 miles away who grows artisan mushrooms,” Traynor said. “He does a lecture on mushroom growing and donates products students are utilizing each week, and it really sparks creativity and innovation. 

“It’s just critical we support our farmers — the most important part of the food supply chain.” 

Serving, sharing and composting 

When culinary students cook in the labs, they are often preparing far more food than they can consume. So, as part of the university’s FoodU initiative, the culinary faculty use the extras as an opportunity to teach students about minimizing food waste.  

“We’ve got 22-33 billion pounds of food wasted in the restaurant industry annually in the United States alone,” Traynor said. “We have, in one hand, food that’s been wasted, and, in the other, we have people who are in need of nutritious, wholesome foods.” 

The Campus Kitchen Project, a student-run organization, works to distribute excess food across campus and to the community. Two or three times a week, student volunteers pick up the surplus high-quality foods from the culinary labs and then repackage and deliver them across the county. 

For the food that can’t be shared, students learn about the magic of composting. Inedible food waste, peelings and trimmings are collected in bowls on the lab counters, and at the end of each week, Facilities Management takes 20-30 gallons of food waste for composting.   

“It’s ending up in the horticulture teaching gardens,” Traynor said. “It’s turned into healthy soil, which is used to produce nutritious food we then use in class, which closes the loop of the food lifecycle.” 

Practicing what he preaches 

As Traynor has changed the culinary curriculum over the past six years, he’s also changed the way he does things at home. He has a dozen garden beds and a flock of chickens to produce fresh eggs, and said his colleagues in horticulture have taught him a lot about producing food — and have given him a greater appreciation of it, too.  

“Most of my life I’ve been focused on the preparation and serving of food,” he said. “Food is my life, so to have a greater appreciation of both ends of the food lifecycle — learning how it’s grown but also learning how it’s disposed of — has been great for me. I think it’s really important to have a good appreciation of farmers and producers, because really, they are the most important people in the entire food lifecycle.”