The Daily Evergreen | Feb 5, 2014
The princess who felt a pea through 20 mattresses would have a hard time even tasting the peas used in Shyam S. Sablani’s food engineering research project.
That’s because Sablani’s peas have been reduced to a fine powder of microscopic pea proteins that could help people get more nutrition in their diet.
Sablani, an associate professor and scientist in the Biological Systems Engineering Department, and two food engineering students are researching the use of yellow peas to create microscopic containers. In a process Sablani called microencapsulation, the pea protein can preserve micronutritional compounds beneficial to human health.