Eastern Iowa Farmer Spring 2021

gate to plate
“We’d take bones
and make stocks
and make flavors.
We’d use collagens
and use blood
plasmas to make
functional proteins
for different food
products.”
— Darin doerscher
“I always like to refer to us as the technical
folks, the geeks in the basement,” he said.
Doerscher — and the five employees who
work for him — oversee a bevy of food-related
charges. They work on purchasing food products
for different nutrition assistance programs
and — perhaps most notably — the national
school lunch program.
In other words, Doerscher and his team are
responsible for about 20% of the meat served
in U.S. schools and ensure it meets nutritional
guidelines while also being delicious.
“One of our charges is to focus on the red
meat and aquatic commodity specifications,”
he said. “So, ground beef, hams, pork loins,
pollock, catfish, walleye, canned chili. Stuff
like that.
“We cover the whole gamut, from gate to
plate.”
Doerscher also oversees animal welfare rules
to make sure the livestock is handled humanely
and follows that food through processing to
labeling and shipping.
“There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it,” he
said. “We’ve done a lot of good work over
the years, and it’s cool to be one of the branch
leads in doing something for our society, and
specifically the kids.”
Learning the science of food
Doerscher grew up on his family’s farm in
rural Davenport and attended North Scott High
School.
He went off to Iowa State to study what he
thought was agriculture engineering. However,
on his second day of classes, a friend suggested
he check out an ag sciences class.
“Biological sciences always made sense to
me,” Doerscher said.
That whim paid off, as he turned it into a
bachelor’s degree in animal science and a master’s
degree in meat science muscle biology.
While obtaining his degree, Doerscher
worked for a meat producer called Proliant Biologicals
in Ames where he developed a variety
of foods with meat products.
“We’d take bones and make stocks and make
flavors,” he said. “We’d use collagens and use
blood plasmas to make functional proteins for
different food products.”
He began traveling and teaching other meat
processors how to use the products that were
intended to be both tasty and save companies
money.
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34 Eastern Iowa Farmer | Spring 2021 eifarmer.com