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She finds she isn’t alone in her thoughts. There is an entire cadre of academics, humanitarians, and policy makers around the world also thinking about underutilized crops and new potential sources of nutrition in places acutely affected by malnutrition, such as Africa. One candidate that many of these people had begun exploring was a plant called Amaranth.

Amaranth is an ancient crop indigenous to South America and Africa. Fast growing and hardy (“amaranth” comes from the Greek word for “un-withering”), it was a staple in the diet of the Incans and Aztecs. The seeds can be consumed as a grain and the leaves are edible as greens, but overall Amaranth is bitter to the taste and labor intensive to prepare. And once European crops flooded the world, the rancid-flavored plant was largely cast aside. These days, it grows seemingly everywhere in dry, scrub climates (exactly the climates most affected by famine), where it’s known more as a nuisance (the American variety is known as “pigweed”). Find a ditch, a vacant lot, or an uncultivated patch of land, and you’ll probably find Amaranth there, too. Several languages even have pejorative colloquialisms that translate to “not worth an Amaranth.”

Although there seems to be worldwide agreement that it’s not a dining option, it remains an edible food, incredibly rich in nutrients, particularly vitamins A and B. Amaranth is, in other words, a perfect candidate for the kind of project Wilson has in mind.

It turns out that there is the Amaranth Institute, which is devoted to studying how the weed might be better utilized. As Wilson peruses the staff list, she discovers one of those strange coincidences that seem almost common within Carnegie Mellon’s international community. The president of the institute, one of the world’s leading experts in Amaranth, who runs a nonprofit that helps grain farmers in Latin America, is—of course—a 1996 Heinz College grad. Pete Noll earned his MS in Public Policy and Management. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer who became involved in humanitarian work in Oaxaca, Mexico, and says he pursued his MS to become better equipped at running nonprofits, which he now does as executive director of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria.

When Wilson gets in touch with him, he fills her in on Amaranth’s massive potential to combat global hunger. Wilson realizes that if—like the five-star chefs who tinker with chemistry to get better-tasting food—she changes the way the weed tastes, it could have a global impact on nutrition and hunger. All that’s needed is a dash of applied cellular mechanics, and suddenly the world might have a delicious new staple vegetable, and the African mother pondering ways to keep her child fed might have a solution growing just outside her front door.

Wilson types up the two-page proposal and writes a summary of what an 18-month exploration of the topic will entail. A few months later, she gets a jubilant email from LeDuc. The Gates Foundation thinks it’s a good idea. Grant awarded.

Bradley A. Porter, of Philadelphia, has been a regular contributor to this magazine since his senior year at Carnegie Mellon.

Related Links:
Carnegie Mellon's Philip R. DeLuc Discovers New Protein Function That Could Save Lives
Carnegie Mellon's Philip DeLuc and Mary Beth Wilson Receive Prestigious Gates Foundation Grant for Fighting Child Malnutrition in Africa

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