Gathering leaves for compost

There’s no gardening going on at our house these days. That all went poof! in August when we sold our house with the huge kitchen garden and moved around the corner to another building we owned as a rental property. The new (old) row house is north facing and has little or no room for food gardening. My wife has suggested starting a garden on a roof deck. But we don’t plan to be here long and I shudder at the idea of hauling soil  up two flights of stairs through the house.

As a result, my gardening in an ironic twist of fate has been reduced to my favorite activity–making compost. Composting, or turning dead stuff into new soil, is like being present at the creation. Bacteria and all sorts of other critters do the dirty work, breaking down organic matter like apple cores and carrots peels and dryer lint. Instead of sealing it up in a plastic bag and sending it to the landfill, we feed the planet by returning our debris to the soil whence it came. This is our way of supporting the circle of life–even here in the urban environs of the District of Columbia, two miles from the White House.

For the last couple of months I’ve been saving kitchen scraps in one of our metal cans. That gets to be a little stinky after a while. Thankfully, we now have dry leaves we can add to the pile.

Passing leaves through the chopper

My favorite “brown” material for compost is straw. Straw bales stack conveniently for storage and chopped straw makes a great mulch for tomato plants. But fallen leaves are more convenient this time of year. We rake them into a trash can, then pass them through our Flowtron “leaf eater,’ which easily grinds them small. The device is really just a line trimmer set inside a big can. Be sure to wear a mask and eye goggles for protection. When the leaves are very dry, the machine does create dust, and bits of twigs can go flying.

Whole leaves tend to mat together. Chopped into tiny pieces, they mix much more easily with our kitchen scraps and decompose more quickly.

We filled three large garbage cans with chopped leaves–enough, I think, to get us through the next year.

Leaves mixed with kitchen scraps

We use metal cans for composting because rats will gnaw through plastic to get at kitchen scraps. Just be sure to maintain a proper balance of scraps to leaves to fuel the decomposition process. You may need to add a little water, but be sure to drill some holes in the bottom of the can for drainage. Too much wetness and the pile will go anaerobic, which is where all those putrid garbage smells come from. Your compost shouldn’t smell at all. If you have any concerns about the compost getting enough air, you can drill some holes in the sides of the can as well.

You should have beautiful compost in a few months, and the cans are an ideal place to store it.

Students serve themselves lunch

After years working as a restaurant chef in Stockholm, Michael Backman was ready for something different. He’d had it with complaining customers. He wanted to feel inspired by his work again. So the advertisement he stumbled across in a free weekly newspaper six years ago grabbed his attention: “Wanted: Head Chef for School Restaurant.”

“I had four teenage children who kept talking about how bad the food was at school,” said Backman. “I didn’t believe it could be that bad. But when I finally saw it, I realized it was.”

Meanwhile, the man behind the ad, a burly, no-nonsense school principal and karate instructor named Bjorn Grunstein, had been fighting his bosses in the schools administration to place the ad. According to their personnel book, there was no such thing as a “head chef” for his school. Grunstein was supposed to be looking for a “kitchen matron,” they said.

Grunstein doesn’t play by the book. He ran his ad anyway, adding “kitchen matron” in minuscule type. He figured the chef he wanted would get the message.

“Many years ago we took in a company to provide our meals. It was one of the largest catering companies in Sweden and they serve shit,” Grunstein growled. “They didn’t like me very much, because I’d walk around the cafeteria holding a plate of mashed potatoes upside-down. There was more glue than potatoes.”

As it turned out, Backman the discontented chef and Grunstein the iconclastic school principal were a perfect match. Working together, this pair of mavericks dumped the regular fare of gluey mashed potatoes and processed chicken nuggets and replaced them with gorgeous, scratch-cooked buffets.

The day I visited the Annersta School last week was ‘vegetarian Wednesday.’ The entree on display was something I’d never seen before on a school menu: leeks and potatoes in a curried cream sauce. Next to it was a baked pasta dish with a tantalizingly herbaceous tomato sauce, along with an array of salads: cole slaw, red cabbage, cottage cheese with pimento, creamy sliced apples, a pilaf of pearled barley and carrots. There was also an Iranian-style tomato and egg soup.

In Sweden, kids serve themselves. And at Annersta School, located in a a low-income community dense with immigrant families and refugees, they were really digging into the curried leeks.

“I told him [Grunstein] that if he did what I said, he’d have the best school food in Sweden within three years,” said Backman.

By many accounts, he does.

Lunch at Annersta School, Stockholm

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about lunch at Annersta School is that what many Swedish students eat pales in comparison. Sweden has had a school lunch program since the 1940s. In 1997 the national government declared that all  children–around 1.4 million–are entitled to a free lunch through primary school, or age 16. This year, the government mandated that those meals must be “nutritious,” although exactly what that means is still unclear.

But “free” lunch doesn’t necessarily mean good food, even in a country as progressive as Sweden. According to prominent Swedish school food advocate Annika Unt Widell of Swedish School Meal Supporters (Skolmatens Vanner), a group funded by the Federation of Swedish Farmers, some children get porridge or other cheap breakfast foods for lunch. In most schools, Swedish-style pancakes and tacos are the most popular items and the kind of leafy greens and other uncooked garden vegetables we in the U.S. usually associate with fresh salad rarely make an appearance.

Stockholmers were recently stunned by reports that at least 50 high schools in the city were not serving lunch at all, but instead give students vouchers to eat at local fast food outlets. Many high-schoolers routinely take their midday repast at McDonald’s.

Kids, meanwhile, complain they don’t have enough choice at lunch, that the food is overcooked or undercooked, or that it just doesn’t taste very good.

Still, many Swedes have fond memories of their school lunches and have good reason to believe they are much better overall than what children are fed in the U.S. “I tend to think of the Swedes as spoiled sometimes,” said Amy Leval, an American who lives in the Stockholm suburb of Solna with her Swedish husband and two daughters, five and seven. “They lose sight of just how amazing they have it and how lucky they are. There is a large sense of entitlement here which stretches into the school lunch program.”

Unlike here in the United States, where a tightly regulated school meals program is administered and paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, rules in Sweden are rather lax to non-existent, although most municipalities have a “dietary plan,” according to Unt Widell.

In the U. S., schools that participate in the meals program must offer children specified amounts from different food groups both at breakfast and at lunch. The USDA only reimburses schools for meals that are actually served, and only low-income children are entitled to free food.

In Sweden, schools are only required to offer a vegetarian option. Money for meals comes from the total education funding the national government metes out per pupil, around $6,000 per year, depending on age. How that money is used is determined first by 290 municipal authorities, who may well spend it on things other than education, and then by school officials, who may not be especially engaged in the school dining experience.

Grunstein demanded better food

What’s driving concern over school food in Sweden now are the same issues bedeviling parents in the United States. Even though commercial food marketing to children is forbidden in Sweden, kids there have grown much too fond of fast food, sodas, french fries and non-nutritious junk.

“The problem I have isn’t money, it’s getting the kids to eat the food,” said Grunstein. “In some families, dinner is McDonald’s. So they are not used to eating the kind of food we are now serving here. In their world, fast food is very important.”

Grunstein sees a healthy, attractive lunch as essential to raising successful citizens–part of his mission to address all the needs his students bring to school. “It’s an important part of everybody’s life,” he said. “If I want my pension to grow, they have to to out into the world and get good jobs. It’s part of every school to educate, not just teach. We teach for life, not just for school.”

I was invited to Stockholm to join a small group of journalists from Germany and Russia on a two-day tour of Swedish school food sponsored by the Swedish Institute, a government agency that promotes Swedish culture. The Swedish government has included public feeding programs such as school lunch as part of an initiative called “Culinary Nation,” conceived by the government’s rural affairs minister, Eskil Erlandsson,  as a way to celebrate Swedish cuisine and create 20,000 rural jobs by developing food exports, agri-tourism and artisanal farm products.

The government paid for my travel expenses to and from Sweden, as well as my lodgings in downtown Stockholm.

Two days is hardly enough time to fully explore what is happening in Sweden’s school cafeterias. But in 10 meetings in as many different locations–including lunch at two different schools and a visit to an organic dairy farm–we did cover a lot of territory. What I learned is that Swedish children are subject to many of the same pressures as their counterparts in the U.S., and many of them are benefiting from a growing intervention by professional chefs who see the school cafeteria as a place where they can find greater personal rewards by improving the food served to children.

School chef makes money stretch

In fact, injecting professional chef experience into school kitchens may be even more important than the extra money so many advocates assume is the answer to rehabilitating school food’s shabby reputation.

“It doesn’t matter that much how much money you have,” said Backman. “It’s what you do with the ingredients.”

Backman and the food service directors at a second school we visited said they spend around eight Swedish Kroner ($1.27) or a bit more on ingredients per meal.  Annika Unt Widell said the figure is closer to 12 Kroner ($1.90) nationwide. But dollars don’t go as far in Sweden as they do in the U.S., where the average outlay on food per school lunch is reckoned to be around $1.

Professional chefs, as opposed to minimally trained “kitchen matrons,” or even the housewives who used to run Swedish school cafeterias to earn “fur money,” bring a depth of experience making food dollars stretch. Preparing food from scratch, they can economize with ingredients and make appealing dishes for less than the cost of processed factory foods. Leftover salad dishes are mixed into new salads the next day, for instance. Uneaten entrees are frozen, to live another day as part of some other dish. Say, curried leeks with pasta.

“This is my favorite place in the kitchen,” says Backman, opening the door to the walk-in freezer. Plastic buckets of frozen leftovers, all carefully preserved by Backman, line the stainless shelves.

Freshly baked bread for school lunch

“In the restaurant business, you are working for someone who wants to make money. There’s no room for waste,” said Backman. “For the same amount as the school was paying that caterer, we are making two main dishes instead of one, plus a soup. We are baking our own bread. And we’ve raised the percentage of organic ingredients we are using from zero to 25.9 percent.”

Backman accomplishes all this–feeding 700 children and 100 staff every day–with help from four other kitchen workers. The local personnel office says he should have six.

I spoke to Backman in the cafeteria or what Swedes like to call the “school restaurant,” a huge room well-lit by a bank of windows and globe lights suspended from the ceiling. Students serve themselves at four long food bars, then sit in stylish molded plastic chairs at gleaming white tables. Swedes take pride in their reputation for sleek design  (think Ikea). But many of the country’s school cafeterias are cramped and congested, forcing children to eat in a hurry and on odd schedules.

As we talked, a young girl suddenly made her way toward Backman. She beamed up at him and said something in Swedish I couldn’t understand, then scampered away.

Backman smiled. “The kids here want to tell the chef what great food he makes,” said Backman. “I can tell you, you don’t get very many hugs from customers working in a regular restaurant.”

Next: Swedish schools struggle towards healthier eating.

Taubes, along with childhood obesity experts such as Robert Lustig, are convinced that prior generations actually had it right: we get fat by eating the wrong kinds of foods–sugars and starches–that trigger insulin and promote fat accumulation in the body.

This competing hypothesis–which I happen to believe is more likely to be correct–has enormous implications for children and the school meals program. It would mean, for instance, that the thinking behind Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign is all wrong. Avoiding obesity is not about controlling appetite and exercising more. It’s about shunning sugary beverages (including chocolate milk) as well as starchy foods, including “whole grain rich” hamburger buns, mashed potatoes and cupcakes.

The reason I recommend reading Taubes’ post is that he clearly sets forth how it is that theories like “calories in, calories out” become conventional wisdom, how difficult it is to challenge such theories once they have become incorporated into common thinking, but why we must devote resources to test such theories to either confirm or disprove their validity.

For instance, children now get more than 20 percent of all their calories from added sugars in food. According to the “calories in, calories out” theory (a theory much loved by the processed food industry), this fact holds little meaning if kids simply moderate the total number of calories they consume. But if obesity results from the insulin produced by all that sugar, then such dietary developments are truly horrendous. We desperately need to monitor the kinds of foods children eat, not just the total amount.

A growing body of science has now implicated sugar (or fructose) specifically in the mechanisms that cause hypertension, diabetes, and cardio-vascular disease. The American Heart Association now warns that children show signs of heart disease risk because of all the sugar they consume.

Do read this post by Taubes if you are concerned at all about the science surrounding the obesity issue:

http://www.garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-carbohydrates-kettles-pots-other-odds-ends-part-i/

(Apologies: I have not figured out how to hyperlink on my new IPad.)

We are mystified that Comcast can do this where Verizon cannot, especially since Verizon owns all the telephone lines. We are still mulling this over.

Meanwhile, I took the bus downtown for a 10:20 appointment with my optometrist at For Eyes. I was even five minutes early, but then waited half an hour with my not-very-patient wife, who insisted on being there as my style consultant on the eyeglass frames. There were at least three employees lolling around the front desk, but not one bothered to explain why we had to wait so long. So we left.

Now I am looking for an internet provider and an eye doctor. Apparently, the worst recession on record has not improved corporate America’s attitude toward customers. We’re still fungible.

Some readers have inquired why I haven’t posted to the blog for the past six weeks. A move into new digs, while simultaneously renovating the new digs, is part of the reason. The other part is that while we moved our phone around the corner, our Verizon internet service still has not activated after nearly a month.

We’ve now made about a dozen calls to Verizon–each taking somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour or more–trying to learn why we are subjected to this delay. First we were told it was because we upgraded the speed of our service. Then we were told the internet had been installed. Perhaps we should check our computer and modem.

We have now checked every phone jack in the house, rebooted the computer numerous times, tried at least two different modems. Another call to Verizon (1 1/2 hours) today finally revealed that while we’ve been “connected,” in fact the activation of our internet service is snagged in a long backlog. Remember the Verizon strike?

I waited maybe 30 minutes to be passed to a supervisor, who, after himself making additional phone calls while we waited, informed us that he could get us connected September 14. In other words, we will have been six weeks without internet after we notified Verizon we were moving–assuming the new activation actually takes place.

In the meantime, I purchased an IPad to at least maintain some connection to the internet. Until now, I have mostly resisted modern technology. I have to admit the IPad is a lot of fun, although I am loathe to blog from it.

So until we have an internet connection from our computer, I do not intend to blog, even though I have lots to report on. Please bear with me. And feel free to forward this on to your friends at Verizon. It seems that everyone we know has a similar story to tell. So much for modern technology.

No question: kids like chocolate better

Suddenly a debate over chocolate milk in school is heating up in the pages of The Washington Post. Or should I say our hometown paper has finally noticed there’s a food revolution going on in D.C. school cafeterias now that a first-grader has polled his fellow students and found–shock!–they are not drinking as much milk as some people think they ought to since chocolate and strawberry milk were taken off the menu a year ago.

Post columnist Mike DeBonis sounds downright sympathetic to the plight of these elementary schoolers in affluent Chevy Chase, 58 percent of whom (according to a 7-year-old’s poll of about 100 school mates) are not drinking milk. But here’s the good news: Apparently, 42 percent of the kids are drinking milk, and that’s a lot more than are eating the green beans.

Notice, this dispute centers on something kids love–sugary milk. Nobody is conducting any surveys to see how many kids are shunning the vegetables or whole grains the USDA says kids need more of to avoid becoming obese. Having spent the last year and a half monitoring what kids eat in my daughter’s elementary school here in the District, I’m here to deliver some bad news: obscene quantities of vegetables and whole grains are being thrown in the trash every day. In fact, I recently visited an elementary school cafeteria on Capitol Hill on a day green beans were on the menu. I did not see a single child in the lunch room eating them. But they were all eating the hamburger. (Quite a few were drinking plain milk.)

There is no real secret to all of this. If we allowed kids to write the school menu, it would follow approximately these lines: Chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, pizza, hamburgers, French fries, chicken nuggets, pizza, french fries, Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, chocolate milk. Those are all things kids love.

 Now, what are the adults serving instead? Bone-in chicken, whole grain buns, green beans, whole grain pasta, sauteed squash, roasted sweet potatoes, Caesar salad, bone-in chicken, plain milk. Which would you choose as the healthier menu? Would it surprise you to learn that the kids don’t eat it? Why do you think that is? But note, also, there are no adults in the cafeteria talking to the kids about the food. Nobody is marketing the new menu to the children who are supposed to eat it. In other words, the adults really aren’t following through to make this food revolution a success.

The real issue is not the sugar in chocolate milk. We already know kids love sugar. Look at the article I posted yesterday on the sodas and other sugary foods elementary school children bring to school from home. The problem is what chocolate milk stands for. More than any other item on the school menu, chocolate milk embodies our failure to pay attention to the way kids are eating, our surrender to a toxic food culture that embraces industrially processed convenience foods because they are easy shortcuts.

We teach children to expect sugar in their food, then we’re surprised we have an obesity epidemic?

Yes, chocolate milk pretty much sums up our failure as adults to engage children in the more difficult act of eating thoughtfully, our willingness too often to just let kids eat what they want. Getting children to eat more green beans and less candy is hard work. But nobody said it would be easy.

It’s high time we had this discussion. Hooray for first-graders researching the food question. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to bring back chocolate milk. It means parents (and maybe the Washington Post, too) need to pay more attention. If we want kids to drink more milk–and not everyone thinks that’s necessary–then let’s get kids to like plain milk.

Heck, while we’re at it, we could pony up some more money for electric milk dispensers in the schools–cool machines like the ones I’ve seen in use in Berkeley and Boulder and other progressive school districts–so kids can help themselves to as much cold, delicious, organic plain milk as they like.

There you go, Council Chairman Brown. Why not do a little research into how we might fund milk dispensers in D.C. schools so kids don’t have to drink the stuff in those cheap little cartons. I’m sure they would love pouring their own milk. And maybe if you offered kids really good plain milk, they would drink more of it. But that’s not going to happen as long as chocolate milk is an option.

Yes, getting kids to eat more healthfully means getting more involved–with our time and with our wallets. But as my wife likes to say, this is a process, not an event. This revolution is just beginning, and there’s lots more work ahead. Think about that before you try to undo the progress that’s already been made.

Soon to be deli-style dills

I haven’t even planted my cucumbers yet. I’ve scheduled June 15 for seed planting. That’s when the cucumber beetles life-cycle ends in the Washington area. But I’m not holding off making pickles. I’ve got a ton of volunteer dill plants growing in my garden. So on Sunday I brought two pounds of pickling cukes home from Whole Foods and this morning started my brine.

These are fermented cucumbers, the kind you traditionally find in a barrel at the delicatessen. The formula is easy: 3 tablespoons pickling salt (or kosher salt) for every quart of water. Then add plenty of garlic, dill and a few peppercorns, or whatever flavoring you like, such as red pepper flakes if you want a bit of zing in your pickles. As I explain int this earlier post, it takes about five days of fermenting this time of year to get a mildly sour pickle.

Perfect with a reuben sandwich. Now you just have to make some pastrami.

Ed and Priscilla Bruske, 1951

I flew out to Chicago-land yesterday to surprise my parents for a family reunion to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. They thought I was just being my usual non-communicative self when I didn’t respond to the original invitation. But my four sisters were all in on the scheme, which was to unveil me at a cocktail party last night.

Thankfully, nobody had a heart attack.

Here you see the young couple on their wedding day at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapel on the campus of Northwestern University, where my dad got a degree in business. They then moved all the way out to Tacoma, Washington, where I was born so that my father could get his legs in sales by peddling cosmetics and household cleaning supplies door-to-door for the Fuller Brush company.

Yes, it’s true. My dad was the original “Fuller Brush Man.” But he quickly graduated to industrial sales, learned how to fly so he could manage a huge Midwestern territory, and eventually started his own brush company outside Chicago that still exists. Even in their 80s, my parents still report to work at the factory.

How the country has changed since this photo was taken. My father’s best customers used to be the steel makers and auto manufacturers of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. Those industries have almost completely disappeared. We changed planes in Detroit yesterday and talked about how the city is closing entire neighborhoods it can no longer afford to service.

This morning the eldest sister and I took a long walk through the local forest preserve, rediscovering the youth we spent chasing crayfish and spring peeper frogs. We passed a coyote sunning himself in a meadow (apparently there’s quite a few in the neighborhood now) and locating pau-paus that are just beginning to leaf out, stinging nettles growing along a stream bank, and huge clusters of ramps that somehow have escaped the local gourmands.

Meanwhile, I see back in Washington the USDA plans to take up the issue of rebates in school food by performing some sort of audit,one year after New York State forced a $20 million settlement on Sodexo for failing to pass along rebates to its school district and other government clients.

More on that next week, I’m thinking….

This qualifies as a reimbursable school lunch

A few weeks ago WAMU radio’s education reporter, Kavitha Carodoz, interviewed me for a report on childhood obesity and what people are trying to do about it in the
District of Columbia. I appear in part four of the five-part series  that aired last week, talking about some of the nastier food D.C. schools have served and how much it has changed in the last year. Now the challenge is getting the kids to actually eat the improved meals (hint: they’re not big fans of vegetables or whole grains).

There’s a certain freak show aspect to these reports: kids grossly obese, and doctors trying to figure out what to do with them. And the approach hues to crusted-over ideas about obesity: if only we could get kids to eat less and exercise more. Hello! The latest science points to carbs–especially sugary sodas–as the metabolic villain in this epic story. What we really need is a national conversation about insulin, the fat storage hormone, and how we can change our diet to avoid the insulin response to eating too many carbs.

But give our local public radio station credit for devoting resources to expore this important topic. Just a small correction. It’s not a soda tax that’ funding the city’s Healthy Schools Act, which provides extra cash for school meals. That proposal went down in flames–as it does everywhere when the beverage industry sends in its artillery–and was replaced by extending the regular sales tax to cover carbonated beverages, which previously had been treated as food in D.C., meaning not subject to tax.

Anyway, after listening to the series you can watch some video of the reporters being interviewed about what they took away from this endeavor.

Nature has its ways of finding you

Some weeks ago tenants complained of a foul odor they thought was coming from inside a wall. Since there weren’t any walls where the smell was, I checked the basement but could find nothing where I suspected some animaly might have crawled into and died: the space between the Fiberglas insulation and the floorboards.

I reasoned that whatever had died would decompose soon enough and the odor would disappear. But this morning as my wife and a worker were cleaning out the basement they discovered the source of that smell: something had made a nest in an old wooden cabinet. They assumed there was a dead rat inside. Not interested in investigating the contents of the cabinet, they started wrapping it in plastic trash bags when they realized that whatever it was was still alive.

“This is on you!” my wife told me. Why it fell to me to dispose of this live rat wasn’t exactly clear. Yet I was supposed to think of some way of killing it. But when I started hitting the bags with a shovel and felt nothing like the body of a rat, I started to remove the plastic wrapping. That’s when the bottom drawer of the cabinet flipped open and I saw peering up at me not a rat, but a possum. Apparently it was a mother possum with what looked like a dead litter of pups. Hence, the smell.

Our bundle of possum waiting for animal control

I went back to the house to report we had an entirely different situation on our hands. What to do about our possum? I suggested we just open the cabinet door and let the possum find her way back into the wilds of the District of Columbia. The thought horrified my wife, so we called animal control instead. The agent who took the call seemed most concerned that we had not sealed up the cabinet with plastic that might smother the possum. No, I assured him. The possum had plenty of air and would be alive and well when they came to collect her.

Animal control guy inspecting possum

Sure enough, less than an hour later a guy arrived in a white van to check out our possum. His solution? Let the nocturnal mom stay inside the cabinet for now, then remove the plastic and open the cabinet door after night falls so she can wander away on her own. “Relocating them doesn’t really work,” he said. “You just remove them from their normal habitat and food supply.”

But isn’t our basement her “normal habitat?” He then drove off, saying he was needed elsewhere to deal with some squirrels.

This is a first for us and raises an intriguing question: How did a possum get into our basement?