Ethan Young-Hyun Lee has a different perspective on food than most of us. Raised on Korean flavors, trained to cook in the French style and focused on the molecular workings of ingredients, Lee sees cuisine as a complex mélange of comfort, culture and chemistry with a healthy dose of engineering thrown in.
A Master of Sciences student in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science, Lee is looking for molecular compounds in common spices that have “disease-blocking” powers. He and his colleagues recently found compounds in the extracts of both parsley and allspice that can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein from binding to cells. That work could one day lead to a new low-cost preventative for SARS-CoV-2 infection.
The concept of food as medicine may have been in stilled in Lee early by his mother, who was passionate about cooking and often soothed his illnesses with traditional Korean dishes like rice porridge. But it wasn’t a straight shot from childhood to food scientist, and tracing the path to his current career hinged on a few formative moments and chance encouragement.
Lee started school at UMD as a civics major, but didn’t feel inspired. After his mother died in his freshman year, leaving school to make a living in restaurants became a natural alternative. Beginning as a short order cook at Tastee Diner in College Park, Lee rose through positions at Fig & Olive, Bistro Provence and the Kingbird in the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. Eventually, he was running the kitchen as Chef de Cuisine at Milkboy Arthouse on Baltimore Avenue in College Park. But the life of a chef became unsustainable.
“I was working 70 hours a week, and I got pretty frustrated because I wasn’t learning,” Lee recalls. “My cooking wasn’t improving, and I wasn’t gaining anything, because I was just working to pay the bills.” That’s when a friend told Lee that UMD had a food science program and suggested he go back to school. From there, things seemed to click.
“There’s so much going on when you cook food,” Lee said. “Engineering, microbiology, statistics, chemistry, it’s all there in what happens as heat transfers into food and in what that means for us when we eat it.”
In addition to looking for antiviral compounds in herbs, Lee is also trying to understand how cooking affects beneficial compounds called carotenoids in spinach. So far, it seems like blanching is best for releasing some potential cancer-fighting compounds, but his next step will be to learn whether that actually makes them more or less available in the human digestive system.
As Lee said, food is complex, and there is much to learn.
by Kimbra Cutlip