Ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed on how foodomics can improve global food systems

While she was doing field work in Morocco, ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed realized that she needed to pursue a PhD in biology. In 2003, she was in the country completing her master’s thesis on the role of argan oil in the livelihoods the Berber community. The farmers Ahmed spoke with told her that they could tell that the quality of their oils was affected by the environmental conditions in which argan trees grew. Could she, as a scientist, explain how the bioactive compounds in the oil were changing? “I was a master’s student in an ethnobotany program, so I absolutely did not have the capacity to provide any data on what it is in food that determines food quality,” Ahmed says. So she went back to school to learn how to characterize and quantify those biological molecules. The next step seemed obvious to Ahmed: take the tools she learned in her