PULLMAN, Wash. — Joshua Bernin is a doctorate student at the School of Food Science, focusing on extrusion and meat analogs.
Can you tell me about your background both professionally and personally?
I grew up in White Bear Lake Minnesota and I graduated high school there and then I went to Southwest Minnesota state where I pursued my bachelor’s degree in Culinology. Being from Minnesota and interacting with farmers it shows how important that system around food is to the surrounding community. You’d talk to [farmers] all the time about how life’s going, and they’d always have these issues about the milk going bad or the corn having mold on it or whatever it might be. It was always interesting to me to be able to figure out solutions around those issues, especially from a food standpoint. That’s what spurred me into my undergraduate which was making people happy and figuring out what to do with food.
I decided to go and get my masters. I applied to a couple schools and eventually the University of Wisconsin Stout accepted my application. So, I went there, and there they kind of installed the more in-depth understanding of things, but it was still weird because it was during Covid. And with the masters, I thought there was still a lot of details missing from the food science aspect, and I didn’t feel ready to be in the immerging, after-covid sphere of food science, so that’s when I only applied to WSU.
I got a call from Girish asking me if I had time for an interview. [During this time], I was working three jobs while I was a masters student and one of them was being a cleaner for houses and schools. He called me when I was actually in a school cleaning the toilets. And I’m like “I can’t stop cleaning, but you can definitely ask me questions, and just a heads up you might hear some really weird things.”
Eventually, I got an offer letter from him asking for me to come here and that’s how I [got] here. And now it’s getting to that point where graduation is right around the corner.
Can you go into a little more depth on your research? What specifically have you been working on and what made you want to pursue it?
It kind of starts back in my masters. So originally, I went there to get a non-thesis option because I didn’t want to get a PhD and didn’t want to have to do all that research, if I’m being completely honest, but they cancelled the classes I needed for a non-thesis option and I had a year to write a thesis. I got into extrusion there and made a product that wasn’t fantastic, but we got through it, and we wrote that thesis in that year which was fantastic. That’s what got me into extrusion. Since my time here, it’s grown on me.
Extrusion is something that is 70% science, we know what’s happening 70% of the time, but 30% of the time, its art, where you have no idea why it’s behaving the way it is.
Logically, it shouldn’t be happening like this, your pretests show it should be working, and everything says you should be getting a good product but it’s not. So, you do it literally the next day, same conditions, same bag, same everything, and it works and that’s the art.
A lot of my research right now is to figure out how does that texturization happen? Trying to chip at that 30% of that art. How do you create this thing that feels like meat made from something like plants? Why do people want it? Why do people don’t want it, is probably the better question to ask. That is what I’m trying to tackle is, how is that happening? Everything from protein interactions to starch interactions to the engineering of the machine itself, to how do the flow dynamics affect it, to everything in between.
What has been one of your favorite moments during your time here at WSU?
My favorite moments are when I’m teaching. We get the opportunity to have workshops come and those are the favorite moments when I’m here because it allows you to present your knowledge and teach people which I love doing. To me, those are the best opportunities.
Is there anything you’re looking forward to after graduation?
To be concise, what I want is to get a job and then eventually I want to teach. What I really want to do after I graduate is… I like going hunting, I like waterfall hunting and enjoying nature. It’s not even going out there to hunt its going out to find peace. My dad and I have been talking about going up to Canada on a guided hunting trip. So, when I graduate, I want to be able to go up there and go hunting, enjoy nature, and find that moment of peace after your PhD.
Is there any advice for any undergraduate students looking to pursue either a master’s or doctorate degree?
If you’re an undergraduate student looking for a graduate degree, don’t be scared, and that’s the biggest thing that I can say. I guess the advice really morphs into follow your dreams and don’t be scared to attack them. If you really want to get your PhD in graduate school or drop out and become a waitress because that’s just how you love interacting with people, do it. Don’t be scared.
Any parting words?
There’s going to be a lot of things that get in your way to be able to graduate, or get to the next step in your life, and you just have to keep going.