Psst! Wanna buy some mushrooms?: Nikhil Arora in the alley outside Back to the Roots’ warehouse. Photo: Bart Nagel

But Nikhil Arora and Alex Velez are on a different trip. Their business, Back to the Roots, turns coffee grounds into food, first as mushrooms they sold wholesale and now as grow-your-own gourmet mushroom kits.

It all started with a “random fact” tossed out by their business ethics professor in February 2009, in the last semester of their senior year as UC Berkeley business majors — that gourmet mushrooms could be grown in coffee grounds. That seed of an idea landed in the brains independently of both Arora and Velez, who didn’t even know each other at the time.

Fun guy: Alex Velez Photo: Back to the Roots“We both understood the potential scope for it,” Arora says. “This country is addicted to drinking coffee day in and day out. We knew if we could turn this waste into something of value, it could make a huge impact.”

Take mycelium and add chutzpah

Separately, they contacted their professor, Alan Ross, to learn more; he put them in touch with each other and when they decided to team up, referred them to the famous mycologist Paul Stamets. With his advice, they ordered spores, scrounged used grounds, and inoculated them with mycelium, turning Velez’s room in his fraternity house into a mini-science lab.

Soon, after some trial and error, they had their first crop. But were they tasty? they wondered. They decided to drop by Chez Panisse, the epicenter of the locavore/Slow Food movements and perhaps the most famous restaurant on the West Coast, and just ask the chef. He sautéed some right then and there — because really, why wouldn’t you want to eat mushrooms in a plastic bucket brought in by some strange kids in Cal T-shirts? — and pronounced them not bad. Pretty good, even.

Encouraged by the chef’s reaction, they headed over to Whole Foods with the same bucket, “walking in the front door, that’s how clueless we were,” recalls Arora. Clueless they may have been, but they impressed the store’s representatives. Randy Ducommon, the supermarket chain’s Northern California regional produce coordinator, became a mentor and backer. He told them, “if you figure this out, we’ll take you on.”

After they won a social entrepreneurship grant from the university’s chancellor for $5,000, “we decided we just had to run with this,” says Arora. “Before we knew it, we were full-time mushroom farmers. Our friends were like, ‘Whaaaat’? They thought we were crazy.”

Ross, the business professor whose chance comment started the whole thing, didn’t think so. “Nikhil and Alex are amazing guys. Very few of the thousands of students I’ve taught have followed their passion and taken a chance on a new endeavor such as Back to the Roots,” he writes by email. “And what makes their story more fantastic is that both of them had excellent, well-paid job offers [in investment banking and business consulting] that they turned down to start this venture. The future is unlimited for Back to the Roots. We will be reading about Nikhil and Alex for many years to come,” he predicts.

Grounds hog days

Maybe, but right now, a little over a year into the business, life at Back to the Roots is far from glamorous.

The two work from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., every day, for which they just started paying themselves $300 per week. They have five other employees, working in a nondescript old brick warehouse building right next to a busy overpass in Emeryville, Calif. (just over the bridge from San Francisco). It’s their fourth location: it took a few tries to figure out the mushrooms needed fresh air, and that carpeting was a bad idea. The rusty used van they bought to haul their “soil” is parked around the corner.

Since starting the business, they estimate they’ve diverted more than 10,000 pounds of coffee grounds per week from the waste stream. Peet’s Coffee & Tea not only saves the grounds for them, it pays them a little to take them away. Peet’s has also helped mentor the fledgling entrepreneurs, and will begin selling the kits in their stores starting on Earth Day in April this year.

On the loading dock outside are piled plastic shelves and other detritus, representing a shift in focus for the mushroom guys. In March 2010, Back to the Roots Ventures launched its grow-at-home mushroom kits, and has since dialed back on growing fresh mushrooms for wholesale. “The bulk mushrooms were incredibly labor-intensive, which made it not so scalable,” explains Arora. “We thought we could make a larger impact faster with the kits.”

The Easy-to-Grow Mushroom Gardens are available online and in more than 200 Whole Foods in Northern and Southern California; Washington, D.C.; Boston; and elsewhere. For the kits, they collect the grounds; press and dry them; pack them in bags; then inoculate the bags with oyster mycelia, storing them on well-ventilated racks in the warehouse. The mushrooms essentially stay dormant until someone buys the kit and exposes them to some moisture and light. In under two weeks, you can grow about a pound of fresh mushrooms just sitting on the kitchen counter, harvest and eat them, and get one to three more crops.

Arora and Velez are pitching the Easy-to-Grow Mushroom Garden not so much as a local, sustainable source for healthy food, but more as an educational tool and fun family project. Otherwise, the kit’s $20 price tag might seem pretty high for a pound of oyster mushrooms.

“We want to show people in households across the country that it’s not hard to live sustainably, to think about waste and grow your own food at home,” says Arora. “You get great food out of it, yes, but it’s more about understanding tangibly what this whole sustainability buzzword means.” They especially love the photos that customers send in of their kids with their mini-mushroom farms.

The newly redesigned mushroom-growing kitPhoto: BTTR VenturesThe kit would be a cool project for kids. I confess I started misting the one they gave me before the holidays, stowed it out of sight temporarily, then promptly forgot all about it. Rummaging around for something else in my pantry, I was surprised to find several-inch-long mushrooms! They were hard as cork from my neglect, but those are some feisty fungi.

The business is growing by leaps and bounds, as are the two guys’ profiles. Thanks to a friend with connections, they made it onto Last Call with Carson Daly (video below) and have since made a Tedx talk for the Young Social Entrepreneurs conference in Washington, D.C.

No longer are they surviving on two maxed-out credit cards. Whole Foods gave them a $25,000 low-interest loan from the $50,000 grant from the Hitachi Foundation, along with a few smaller ones.

Still, it’s been a slog, with many more tons of grounds to shlep and spores to sprinkle lying ahead of them. I asked Arora if he had to make the same choice over again, would he?

“A hundred percent more so,” he says. “We didn’t know what we were getting into, what it would take, which is more work than I could have ever imagined. When you have an idea, people usually say, ‘Wait and get some experience.’ But when you’re passionate, everything just comes, we’ve found. People start helping you out, because they see you want to learn.

“At some point you have to take the chance, take the risk. Everything about this business has been brand new to us — we’d never grown anything before, there were all these reasons not to go forward. You have to have faith that it’s all going to work if you believe in what you’re doing.”

Now that’s a good trip.

Watch the guys in action on the Carson Daly show:

The internets tell me that pecan was King’s favorite pie, as it is mine. Or at least it was until I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma a few years ago and freaked out about corn syrup. I pitched my bottle of Karo right into the trash, and resolved to make my traditional Thanksgiving pecan pie with honey or maple syrup or even just brown sugar.

Well, I tried all three variations, and they were all just … wrong. The consistency was grainy or powdery, and they tasted too much like whatever sweetener I was using. I missed the dark, rich caramel flavor of the pecan pie I’ve been eating all my life, that my Florida great-grandmother made.

Then someone finally clued me in that there’s a big difference between corn syrup like Karo and high-fructose corn syrup. The short version: Corn syrup, invented in 1882, is primarily glucose suspended in water. Using it in baking prevents sugar crystals from forming — as happened with my honey version. Meanwhile, high-fructose corn syrup, invented in 1957, is a much more industrial product comprising fructose and glucose in varying ratios, some of which the body may treat differently than table sugar. (This guy Brian Geiger at FineCooking.com explains the chemistry differences in interesting detail.)

I’ve decided to allow Karo back into my cupboard, although I’m tempted to try making my own cane-sugar syrup, as this corn-syrup-fearing recipe from Apartment Therapy suggests, just to see how that tastes.

So, in the spirit of “Peace Through Pie,” I share with you my great-grandmother’s recipe, which the Southern side of my family has been eating for decades and decades.

Myrtle Kosh, my nana, lived into her 90s. She was a sharecropper’s daughter from the Florida panhandle with a second-grade education. For years she grew a lot of her own vegetables, milked her own cow, caught and fried up catfish, and made fearsomely good biscuits and collard greens. She grew up dirt-poor and clawed her way into middle-class respectability, and she was not a fan of the civil-rights movement or affirmative action. She was cheap — as her daughter said, if she sent you to the store with $20 and there was a quarter left over, she expected it back — and not particularly cheerful, but she was always generous with her cooking.

I think the secret to this pie, which is nuttier and less cloyingly sweet than most pecan pies, is in the low-and-slow baking.

Myrtle’s Pecan Pie

1 pie crust (I use Mark Bittman’s recipe for Flaky Pie Crust; you should prebake 10-15 minutes for best results.)
3 eggs
1 c. white Karo syrup
1 cup light brown sugar
1 stick butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups pecans (1 cup chopped, 1 cup halves)
Pinch of salt

Prebake pie crust 10 minutes (pricked and using pie weights or something else to preserve its shape). Turn oven to 350.

Mix eggs with sugar, Karo, and butter.

Add the 1 cup chopped pecans and the vanilla, stirring to coat well.

Pour into pie shell. Add pecan halves, pushing under mixture to coat with syrup.

Bake at 350 for 10 minutes; turn heat down to 275 and finish off for about an hour or until pie center does not quiver when gently shaken.

Cross-posted with the Ethicurean

Say “tofu” to most Americans, and they’ll think of the rubbery, tasteless stuff served at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Even when I was a vegetarian, I ate a lot of it, but I didn’t love it. It was just protein filler to me. When I started eating meat again, I stopped buying tofu.

And then a few years ago I tried Hodo Soy Beanery‘s tofu at the Berkeley farmers market. It was a revelation. The soft tofu was creamy like a good custard. The yuba (tofu skin) was delicately chewy yet ethereal, eggy, and nutty. I realized I had simply never had real tofu before.

“If you get your conventional tofu here, and you served it in Asia, nobody would eat it. Because it’s not delicious,” says Minh Tsai, Hodu’s founder and tofu master, in this fascinating interview and video tour of the Hodo factory in Oaklad, Calif. by Liza de Guia of Food. Curated. He explains that he’s trying to make a tofu that the Asians in Asia would eat, the kind that’s made fresh and designed to be eaten fresh, not to “sit on the shelf for 90 days,” he sniffs.

Bay Area residents have long been the lucky beneficiaries of that quest. With chocolate maker John Scharffenberger now at Hodo’s helm (see New Agtivist Q&A), Hodo is poised to expand into new markets. If you happen to have an artisanal tofu maker in your area, let others know in the comments. Because as Tsai says, finding good tofu is “kind of like eating fresh bread. Once you eat fresh bread it’s hard to go back to eating stale bread or bread in the store.”

Many sighed with relief when the lame-duck 111th Congress pulled itself together and, like passing a Capitol-sized kidney stone, finally got the ill-starred, much-discussed Food Safety Modernization Act done and signed into law by President Obama last week. At last, the nation’s food safety laws will get their first update in decades: the FDA will gets the authority to mandate food recalls, plus legions of new inspectors, and the power to raise the standards for imported foods, among other things.

The bill comes with a $1.4 billion price tag — chump change in federal budget land. But even that seems kinda like overkill for the safest food supply in the world, says Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), the incoming chair of the Agriculture subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FDA. In this interview for Eye on FDA, a blog by a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist, Kingston blithely questions whether the FDA really needs any more power, and whether that’s too much money for the agency to absorb efficiently. After all, private companies do a heckuva job policing their own products. After all, it’s not good for business to be sickening and/or killing people, says Kingston.  

[If I were Grist's Dave Roberts, I'd embed a sound file here of tires SQUEALING and brakes SCREECHING, but you'll just have to imagine it.]

WTF? Really??? Yes, folks, the much-compromised-on food safety bill, having survived countless attempts to kill it from both Democrats and Republicans, may simply get starved to death by the 112th Congress.

Watch and weep:

(Bart Nagel Photography)

Good Food is a rich blend of gastronomical coverage and food politics broadcast by L.A.’s premier radio station, KCRW. Also on this week’s show: Jonathan Gold reviews The Border Grill,  Gustavo Arellano hits a donut shop in Anaheim, kitchen scientist Harold McGee answers listeners’ questions, and you’ll find out why you shouldn’t put grease and oil down the drain. (Of course if you watched this funny video, you already know why.)

Truckloads of Four Loko and other alcohol-laced energy drinks are being recycled into ethanol and other products after federal authorities told manufacturers the beverages were dangerous and caused users to become “wide-awake drunk.” – Associated Press, Jan. 6, 2011

Here in America, we don’t believe in wasting food. We manage to use almost a whopping 60 percent of what we produce. (W00t!) How do we do it? Well, among other things, our thrifty government buys up excess production of cheap cheese or meat to use in the National School Lunch Program. Food manufacturers and supermarkets send their leftover, messed-up, or dented cans and boxes to food banks — helping the poor and getting a tax break at the same time. 

And not only do we find a home for these unwanted “edible food-like substances,” but we rescue even potentially hazardous items. For example, those potentially salmonella-tainted eggs that Jack DeCoster’s Iowa hens were continuing to lay after last year’s massive recall? They got pasteurized and turned into things like Egg McMuffins.

But converting Four Loko into fuel represents new heights of creative reuse. MXI Environmental Services in Virginia is buying back cases of the recalled “drink,” distilling the alcohol and selling the fuel to be blended into gasoline and diverting the aluminum cans to a recycler. MXI is also recycling the nasty-tasting “blackout in a can” drinks’ water, cardboard packaging, and shipping pallets.

MXI is clearly onto something. The next time Froot Loops and Apple Jacks get recalled for something as minor as a weird, chemical smell, look for some entrepreneur to turn the cereal into, say, colorful, eco-friendly cat litter. 

A not-so-happy meal?Photo: Jason Whittaker

The new law, pushed through by San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar, represents the triumph of the “nanny state” to many GOP-ers — and to Mandvi. While it’s pretty easy to make fun of the city’s plethora of “counterculture rebels complaining about corporate hegemony,” Mandvi also interviews Mayor (and parent) Gavin Newsom, who opposed the ban because he thinks it oversteps government’s bounds.

In addition to the Happy Meal toy ban, the fast-food chain is also facing a lawsuit from a Latino mom in Sacramento, Calif. who’s pissed about this “sophisticated, high-tech marketing scheme that’s designed to put McDonald’s between me and my daughters.” The suit asks the courts to bar McDonald’s from advertising meals with toys.

The new Tropicana AppleWorld Tropolis snack.

PepsiCo is here to help. The solution? Make fruit more fun! And what’s more fun than puréed slush in a tube that you can hand your kid in his carseat to squirt in his mouth?

Move over, juice boxes and Go-Gurt: PepsiCo subsidiary Tropicana is introducing Tropolis “portable kids’ snacks” in select Midwest markets this month. Now, to be fair, the CherryWorld, GrapeWorld and AppleWorld pouches are at least filled with actual fruit, with no added sugars, high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners, or artificial flavors, colors or preservatives. That’s something. But really, aren’t apples and grapes already pretty portable snacks that’s “designed to fit in lunchboxes and small hands”? And the new Tropolises will cost $2.49 to $3.49 for a four-pack, says the Wall Street Journal — more than the unsqueezable fruit equivalent. Actual apple and grapes, by contrast, don’t require energy to puree, and conveyor belts to be injected into tubes, and don’t leave behind yet more plastic trash.

But hey, those are small prices to pay to get kids eating more healthily, right? Especially if “healthy” all of a sudden seems like it might be good for the bottom line.

Corporations here and abroad are getting on the nutritional bandwagon. In England, the new Tory government has unveiled a $390 million industry-financed plan to promote healthier eating with coupons, reports Reuters. Voucher books will be distributed that offer discounts on low-fat yogurt, whole-grain rice, frozen vegetables, fruit, and alcohol-free lager. (Yes, you read that last one right. Perhaps it will be distributed in a to-go cup with a straw for on-the-go convenience.)

The Journal has some pretty priceless quotes about PepsiCo’s reasoning behind the Tropolis line:

PepsiCo is best known for its namesake cola and Lay’s potato chips, part of its “fun-for-you” (Doritos, Mountain Dew) and “better-for-you” (Baked Lay’s, Diet Pepsi) portfolios, which make up $50 billion of the company’s $60 billion in revenue.

But Chairman and Chief Executive Indra Nooyi is staking her reputation on building out the company’s “good-for-you” portfolio, uniting the Tropicana, Quaker and Gatorade units under one umbrella and expanding their product lines. Ms. Nooyi has said she wants to build the nutrition business to $30 billion from $10 billion by 2020.

To that end, PepsiCo announced earlier this month it would buy Russian dairy and juice-maker OAO Wimm-Bill-Dann in a deal valuing the company at $5.4 billion. “We see the emerging opportunity to ‘snackify’ beverages and ‘drinkify’ snacks as the next frontier in food and beverage convenience,” Ms. Nooyi said. She cited examples such as kefir, a sour, yogurt-like drink that is popular in Russia and that some say aids in digestion. She said she expects to see dairy products mixed with juice, grains, fruits and nuts, all of which PepsiCo markets.

Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist who heads PepsiCo’s nutrition group, said in an interview that it’s outdated to think that snacks are dry and beverages are wet.

“Consumers don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to have a whole grain; I want a dairy product,’” Dr. Khan said. “They’re looking for combinations of those things.” Dr. Khan wouldn’t specify what combinations might come next.

I’m imagining “pourable porridge” and hard-boiled-egg paste.

I may have woken up on the cranky side of 2011, but it will never cease to amaze me what people will pay extra for if it’s just marketed as “healthy” and “convenient.” Not to mention “fun.”

Bonus: The Penny Arcade webcomic has a great graphic satire of Tropolis titled “The Globfather,” about Dr. Jacob Crunchner, the evil genius who’s set out snackify drinks. 

Hat tip to Kantha Shelke and Tracy van Cort of Comfood

OhmmmMG: Some of the Open Source Ecology members demonstrate the strength of the Lifetrac II prototype frame.Photo: Sean Church

One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against the sustainable agriculture movement is that its proponents want to send farmers back to 19th-century hard labor, with hand weeding and harvesting. Here’s an incredibly cool group of eco-minded “farmer-scientists” who aren’t in the least afraid of technology — and in fact believe in “creating industrial processes that are fully in harmony with ecologically responsible living.”

The Open Source Ecology team’s first, ambitious project is the Global Village Construction Set — a sort of life-size Erector set of the most essential machines for building a “small civilization with modern-day comforts,” including housing and the means for food, energy, and technology production.

The proposed set of essential machines. Eight prototypes have been built so far. Drawing: Courtesy of Open Source Ecology

Parts like engines and chassis can be swapped amongst the eight prototypes built so far, which include the Compressed Earth Brick Press and LifeTrack Multipurpose Tractor. The group claims that their DIY machines are on average eight times cheaper than buying them from the manufacturer.

The Global Village Construction Set is currently the leading contender in Make magazine’s Green Project contest: voting closes Dec 31 at midnight. It’s just ahead of two other interesting but far less radical projects, the Upcycle Exchange and FabMo, both of which seek to divert materials from the waste stream and into the craft communities.

Open Source Ecology’s home base at the Factor e Farm in Missouri. Photo: Sean ChurchOpen Source Ecology, by contrast, is about “hacking society” via permaculture principles. “We are proposing high-tech neosubsistence — or the capacity to live from local resources by use of advanced, appropriate technology, without requiring any compromise on quality of life,” writes Marcin Jakubowski, the project leader and “sparkplug,” on the group’s blog. “It is difficult to get people to think out of the box — that totally sustainable, regenerative, resilient economies are a choice — and that we are proposing a solution to implement these technologies.”

Jakubowski is a Princeton graduate who got a PhD in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin then started a hydroponic vegetable farm in Madison, Wisc., before founding Open Source Ecology to work on closed-loop manufacturing. He and the dozen other Open Source Ecology members live most of the year on Factory e Farm, a 30-acre former soybean farm in Missouri, “where we put the theory of Open Source Ecology into practice … We paid our last electricity bill three years ago. We are getting our power from waste vegetable oil and the sun. We drink pure free rain water. We grow most of our food. We are free. Welcome to our life. We want to help others do the same. Decentralization. Regain control of your life.”

Sound good? Check out Open Source Ecology’s two-minute explainer video below, get lost in their wiki (like I just did for two hours) and consider voting for them in the Make contest or becoming a True Fan and financially supporting their work:

This homemade gingerbread house was NOT part of the recall — it’s just pretty.Photo: Trey Ratcliff

On Christmas Eve, Whole Foods Market recalled gingerbread houses made by Rolf’s Patisserie, a “gourmet European-style bakery” in Illinois, and sold through dozens of its stores. Rolf’s makes a variety of pastries and holiday-themed desserts that have reportedly sickened approximately 100 people at “a company event, catered party, a restaurant, and holiday party,” said the Illinois Department of Public Health. The pastry maker has itself issued a voluntary recall of all its products made after Nov. 1, although consumers will be hard-pressed to identify them.

Rolf’s is a family-owned business founded 26 years ago, according to Baking Management; it has a 20,000-square-foot facility and a staff of 134. And one of those staff must have staph. Not to put you off your cookies, but staph gets into food most often through contact with an uncovered lesion or sore. Yum!

Staph is a particularly hardy bacteria, able to survive drying, high heat, and high salt — and thus hang out on those gingerbread houses just waiting to attack those desperate enough to eat one. Staph-related food poisoning usually comes on quickly, as little as one to six hours after you chomped on the contaminated item, and abates quickly too, although it can be more serious for children and older adults.

But soon we won’t have to worry about getting sick from innocuous things like holiday cookies, right, thanks to Congress finally passing the Food Safety Modernization Act? Wrong. While the new law will give the FDA authority to force a recall, should Whole Foods or Rolf’s have resisted doing so, and it will require a place the size of Rolf’s to have a food-safety and hazard-assessment plan in place (which other regulations have probably already ensured it does), it will not be able to prevent an outbreak like this one. The FDA won’t be monitoring pastry factories for workers with sores, or requiring them to test their streudels for staph. It will, however, be coming up with a better way to track products like Rolf’s as they get distributed across America.

This is not meant to may scare you, but to remind you that all food — and even edible “foodlike substances” like store-bought gingerbread houses — is alive and can harbor bacteria. The best defense against food-borne illness isn’t paranoia and Purell, it’s a healthy immune system that’s used to dealing with bacteria. It won’t necessarily defeat staph or salmonella, but it is likely to make your bout shorter and less painful.

To arm your gut, try adding fermented foods like sauerkraut, cider, and yogurt to your diet. Fermentation guru Sandor Katz, the subject of a terrific recent New Yorker profile, can show you how to make your own.