Eskin earns lifetime achievement recognition

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2022 (1475 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FORT GARRY

RIVER HEIGHTS

Driving in summer along southern Manitoba’s highways, one sees fields of canary yellow stretch out and ripple under every sigh of prairie wind. It’s canola — a hallmark of the province, and one in which 81-year-old food scientist Michael Eskin takes personal pride.

“When I do go out there and I look and I see it, I really get a sense of great satisfaction, not just for myself, but for the team of people who worked together so well and so consistently,” the River Heights resident said.

Eskin came to Winnipeg from London, England in 1968, as people here worked to modify rapeseed into a crop that yielded, among other qualities, a more nutritional and functional oil. Eskin joined a team at the University of Manitoba, where he stayed for 54 years until present day, that worked with breeders of the crops that would eventually morph into what is now called canola.

“We had no idea of the impact of that work,” Eskin said. “It essentially put Winnipeg on the world map.”

Manitoba canola and canola products gained worldwide notoriety and have become the province’s main agricultural export, bringing in approximately $2.3 billion in 2021, some $800 million more than the next highest grossing export, pork and pork products.

For his contributions to this work and his 17 books on food science (he’s currently penning his 18th and 19th), Eskin will be receiving the Institute of Food Technologists’ 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award in Honor of Nicolas Appert.

The author of one of the first textbooks to focus on the biochemistry of natural foods, Biochemistry of Foods, which has become a standard reference in the field, will add the award to an already packed mantle.

In the past 10 years, Eskin has won 12 awards for his body of work, including the American Oil Chemists’ Supelco Research Award in 2020, which Eskin seemed particularly tickled to have won: “Three Nobel Prize winners have won that, so that was quite a humbling experience.”

Other awards include the Order of Canada in 2016 and the Order of Manitoba in 2021. And for the Order of Canada ceremony, Eskin rang in the occasion by doing something perhaps unexpected for a food scientist, at the time in his mid-70s. He rapped.

He’d written a rap about lipids — a large category of organic compounds including oils, fats, and waxes — for the American Oil Chemists’ Society called Lipids Get a Real Bad Rap: It’s Just Not Fair. The organization posted it on YouTube, and it took off as a learning tool in classrooms everywhere, to the point that the governor general’s wife, Sharon Johnston, insisted Eskin perform it at the Order of Canada ceremony.

“So, I did,” he said.

Eskin said finding joy in his work has been crucial to his longevity and success.

“I really love what I do,” Eskin said. “I used to tell my colleagues — they said, ‘Aren’t you going to retire?’ And I said, ‘I’ll probably drop dead over a manuscript.’”