One of his collaborators is Rasmus Munk, head chef and co-owner of the Michelin two-star restaurant Alchemist in Copenhagen, who serves a dessert—orange-colored Neurospora mold grown on rice—inspired by Hill-Maini.

For the past two years, Hill-Maini has worked with Andrew Luzmore, a chef in charge of special projects for Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Tarrytown, New York, to generate tasty morsels from Neurospora mold grown on grains and pulses, including the pulp left over from making oat milk. At Blue Hill, you may soon be able to order a Neurospora oat pulp burger with a side of moldy bread—orange Neurospora grown on rice bread that, when fried, smells and tastes like a toasted cheese sandwich.

That's only the beginning for Hill-Maini, a Miller postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Working in the lab of Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, he has 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 (pronounced ahn' cham) from soy pulp—so it can be adapted broadly to Western food waste and Western palates.

"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. "What happens to all the grain that was involved in the brewing process, all the oats that didn't make it into the oat milk, the soybeans that didn't make it into the soy milk? It's thrown out."