![Andrew Siebengartner
'03 excelled in the John Dewey Honors program and hopes to share his love of classical languages with the next generation of students and scholars.
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Paul Kindstedt, professor of nutrition and food sciences, enjoys the new Carrigan Wing of the Marsh Life Sciences Building with students Elissa Balentine (L) and Nicole Losambe.
(Photo: Bill DeLillo)
2.7.06 LEAVING CARRIGAN
With apologies to the internationally known circle of UVM food scientists who have plied their research in the Carrigan Dairy Science Building, the 57-year-old structure will be remembered by many alumni and locals not for, say, unlocking the complexities of Listeria monocytogenes, but for serving up the simplicity of a banana split.
Carrigan, home to UVM’s fabled Dairy Bar from 1950 to 1995, may have been a trove of ice-cream memories, but its days as a facility worthy of cutting-edge food science research were long gone. When Jean Harvey-Berino, chair of Nutrition and Food Sciences, is asked whether the department’s lab space in a newly built addition to the Marsh Life Sciences Building is an improvement, her expression suggests she has just heard the most self-evident question in the history of American higher education. Then she smiles and says, “Please.”
Harvey-Berino and colleagues moved into the Marsh addition in early January, vacating the Carrigan Building, which is currently undergoing deconstruction and slated to be gone from the campus landscape by the end of the month. Gone on the surface, that is — with 75 percent of the building being recycled or reused, the concrete and brick of Carrigan will become the sub-base for the Davis Center. Gone, but not forgotten — six vintage stools from the Dairy Bar, sponsored by UVM donors, will be used in a second-floor dining area in the Davis Center, and a permanent display in the building will trace the history of agricultural study at UVM.
Sweet Memories
When the new Dairy Science Building opened in 1949, it was a state-of-the-art facility for studying one of Vermont’s signature agricultural products. Professor Emeritus Henry Atherton recalls, “It came on line at a critical time when the dairy industry was adjusting to the use of refrigerated bulk tanks and our research team responded by doing studies on cold tolerant bacteria, milk flavor and shelf life. There was a world of possibilities in dairy foods that needed to be studied then, just as there is a whole new world of dairy foods options to be examined today.” Current faculty research such as Paul Kindstedt’s work on cheese production issues, Cathy Donnelly on food safety, or Mingruo Guo on use of whey by-product, to name a few, have continued this tradition and will greatly benefit from the next generation of laboratory space.
The Dairy Bar, student-run under the auspices of the Animal Sciences Department for most of its existence, was started up in 1950 by Atherton, 25-years-old and armed with a fresh UVM master’s degree. In the summer 1992 issue of Vermont Quarterly Magazine, Atherton remembered the early days. “It was a small operation, nothing fancy. We had seven or eight flavors of ice cream, cottage cheese, and later on, yogurt. We were no Howard Johnson’s by any means.” But could HoJos boast that the ice-cream food chain — pasture and UVM’s Holstein herd — nearly rolled up to the back door?
In addition to Atherton, Dairy Bar pillars included ice-cream maker Leon Lockerby and Mary Dion, who for nearly 20 years was the face of the operation where the cones met the customers. In the 1992 VQ, one student of the era called Dion “the righteous ice-cream lady.”
The production of UVM ice cream ended in 1992 with Lockerby’s retirement, but another Carrigan claim to Vermont ice-cream lore would come later in the decade, when Ben and Jerry’s used the test kitchens during a year when their own facilities were in transition.
Carrigan II
With the new Marsh addition, architect Wayne Walker of Burlington’s John Anderson Studio strove to design a building that would feel open, interactive, educational, and inspire researchers’ creativity. The glass façade offers clear views into the teaching and research labs, the glass itself patterned with designs that tell the story of food production in Vermont. The central entrance, where a staircase spirals around a column topped by a skylight, takes up the same theme through panels adorned with graphics that range from John Deere grain combines to Quarter Pounders with cheese, from frying pans to pyruvic acid to the food pyramid.
On a recent rainy Friday morning, Professor Paul Kindstedt was hard at work at his Mac, which displayed a graph of the “Effect of Packaging Tightness” on calcium crystal formation on the surface of cheddar cheese. It’s a tough issue for the cheese industry, often resulting in product returns, and the sort of problem that Kindstedt has researched and found solutions to in his twenty years on the UVM faculty. The new labs in Marsh, Kindstedt says, open up the potential for new equipment and new directions in his work on this and other questions. “It’s a considerable upgrade,” he says, “a lot more user friendly.”
Though they’re in new and improved digs, Kindstedt and colleagues will continue to go to work in “Carrigan” for years to come. Pending final approval from UVM’s Board of Trustees in February, the Marsh addition will be named the Joseph E. Carrigan Wing in honor of the 1914 alumnus whose service to the university included a decade as Extension director and 15 years as dean of the agriculture college.