Chef-turned-chemist Vayu Hill-Maini has a passion: to transform food waste into culinary delights using fungi. “Our food system is very inefficient. A third or so of all food that’s produced in the U.S. alone is wasted, and it isn’t just eggshells in your trash. It’s on an industrial scale,” said Hill-Maini, former UC Berkeley Miller postdoctoral fellow. While studying in the lab of Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, Hill-Maini devoted himself to learning everything there is to know about Neurospora intermedia — a widespread fungus that is traditionally used in Indonesia to make a food called oncom from soy pulp — so it can be adapted broadly to Western food waste and Western palates. People from many cultures have long eaten foods transformed by fungi — grain turned into alcohol by yeast, milk curds turned into blue cheese by Penicillium mold, soy sauce and miso produced from soybeans by koji mold (Aspergillus oryzae). However, oncom, dev...