From The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
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3.20.24
Krishna Ramanujan
ksr32@cornell.edu
Eating flours, burgers and fitness bars made from crickets, mealworms or black soldier fly larvae could help feed a growing global population sustainably, but it might hit resistance from those who follow halal or kosher regulations.
Joe Regenstein, professor emeritus of food science and head of the Cornell Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, will discuss roadblocks presented by halal and kosher regulations to using insect products in food and animal feed in a webinar, Kosher, Halal and Insects: How do They Relate? March 25 at 11 a.m.
“As the industry moves forward and thinks about its opportunities, it has to recognize that it’s going to run into some resistance,” Regenstein said. “Everybody’s not gung-ho for insects.”
Still, an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide eat insects regularly as they are high in protein and require far less land, water and feed to rear than traditional livestock.
In his talk, Regenstein aims to introduce halal and kosher dietary laws and then look specifically at how each religion views insects in the food and animal feed context.
Though Jews make up roughly 2% of Americans, some 40% of packaged goods in a typical supermarket are kosher. While Muslims account for about 1% of the U.S. population and halal regulations have had less relative impact on American markets, demand for halal foods is growing rapidly globally.
Kosher dietary laws mostly deal with three issues: permitted animals, the prohibition of blood and the prohibition of mixing milk and meat. Halal laws prohibit the consumption of some animals, blood and alcohol, Regenstein said.
“Kashrut and Halal are sets of religious laws and there are procedures that need to be followed in a food plant to make the product appropriate for Jews as kosher and Muslims as halal,” Regenstein said. The practice of a rabbi or imam inspecting how food is processed may account for the most ancient form of third-party food inspection, from a food science perspective, he said.
To be kosher, the edible portion of all fruits and vegetables needs to be free of visible insects. This can be an issue with regards to aphids on organic broccoli, for example. But the Jewish faith doesn’t bar the use of insects in animal feed.
Muslims divide food into halal and items that are not allowed, called haram. Within haram is a special category, najais, which means filth. Many insects are najais. “They also don’t want to give them to animals as part of feed, which is one of the big driving forces in the industry for use of some of these insects,” though which insects are halal is under debate, Regenstein said. Many species of locusts are allowed within Islam and Judaism.
“The assumption that there are traces of insects in food in general is accepted,” Regenstein said. “But again, Muslims don’t want it visible, they don’t want it intentional. They obviously accept the fact that animals on pasture eat what’s there, but when you’re intentionally feeding insects to animals, some of the leaders are concerned.”
The real-time Zoom presentation, hosted by the Northeastern Integrated Pest Management Center, is open to the public and will be recorded.
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As a premier institution of scientific learning, Cornell CALS connects the life, agricultural, environmental and social sciences to provide world-class education, spark unexpected discoveries and inspire pioneering solutions.
Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences tackles the challenges of our times through purpose-driven science that advances understanding and improves life.
Cornell CALS researches, teaches and explores the many aspects of discovery:
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Climate Change
Environmental Science
Fauna
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Health & Nutrition
Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.
Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.
On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.
Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.
Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.
Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. Nobel laureates,Turing Award winners and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, Truman Scholars, Gates Scholars, Olympic Medalists, Fortune 500 CEOs, and billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and many other countries.
History
Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.
Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.
Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.
Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.
Research
Cornell, a research university, is ranked very highly in the world in producing the number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and high in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission. Cornell annually spends more than $700 million on science and engineering research and development, very high in the United States.
Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell has been on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents. Cornell one of the nation’s top institutions in forming start-up companies.
Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.
Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].
The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.
In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.
Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.
During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.
Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation.
The International Linear Collider(JP) will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex (UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.
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