Challenging the Reputation of Hospital Food on a Rooftop Farm

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: October 18, 2012 NYTimes

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — The weather report said the first frost was coming, and the farmer and her three helpers skittered around the rooftop garden snipping the tenderest plants — basil, green peppers, a few heirloom tomatoes — so they would not be ruined. Over the next few days, they would be chopped into sauces and garnishes and served up in covered dishes by room service waiters wearing dapper black suits.

But this was not a hotel in the more trendy precincts of Manhattan or San Francisco. It was Stony Brook University Hospital, in the middle of Suffolk County, Long Island, where a rooftop farm is feeding patients and challenging the reputation of hospital food as mushy, tasteless and drained of nutrients. (No, Jell-O is not growing on the roof.) But the sick, who have bigger problems than whether their broccoli is local and sustainable, can be tough customers.

“Swiss chard went over well, kale maybe not so much,” said Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, executive director of the nutrition division at the hospital. “When people are not feeling well, they want their comfort foods.”

Hundreds of hospitals across the country host a farmer’s market, have a garden on their grounds that supplies fresh produce or buy at least some of their food from local farms, ranches and cooperatives, according to a survey by Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of health care groups.

But hospital rooftop gardens are still unusual in New York, Eileen C. Secrest, a spokeswoman for the organization, said. “It’s really sweeping the country, but New York is kind of a dry zone for us right now,” Ms. Secrest said.

There is little scientific evidence to suggest that fresh vegetables can help sick people in their recovery, though Dr. Connolly-Schoonen and her colleagues say that their antioxidant properties might do so. But at the very least, she says, serving fresh food has psychological benefits and sets a good example for patients for when they go home.

The first spade of earth was turned in July 2011 on a fourth-floor deck of an academic building. Since then the farm, which can be seen from some patients’ rooms, has expanded to 2,200 square feet from 800, with an $82,000, five-year grant from the State Health Department, shared by several community gardens.

Faculty members and workers brought bags of earthworms from home. Farmers — interns from the department of family medicine, where Dr. Connolly-Schoonen is an associate professor, and the sustainability studies program, run by her husband, Martin Schoonen — hauled 70 bags of compost and 20 bales of straw up two flights of exterior stairs.

Interns like Michael Geddes, a 23-year-old from Flushing, Queens, harvest crops daily and carry them down to the hospital kitchen, where they are weighed and put in cold storage.

The farmers make a note of the day’s crop on a white board so the chefs can incorporate it in their menu. In keeping with the good-for-you theme, the newly hired head chef, John Mastacciuola, has banished bacon, soda (well, there was some ginger ale in cold storage), hot dogs and salt packets.

Stony Brook has room-service style dining, meaning patients can order meals from a menu between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. When they call, a room service associate tells them of any daily farm specials.

But some of the sickest patients are least likely to get fresh farm food: many are on restricted diets that have to be computer-coded for compliance with dietary standards. No one has yet figured out how to recode items for those diets. But they are working on it.

More than 550 pounds of crops have been harvested this season. Recently, Iman Marghoob, who is the head farmer and the farm’s only paid worker, walked among the plantings and pointed out hakurei turnips, red and yellow potatoes, cilantro, spinach, tender young collard greens and rows of broccoli. The broccoli was more stem than flowers, but Ms. Marghoob said the stems made a nice fall soup.

Sunflowers were planted along the borders to attract bees for pollination. Soon, Ms. Marghoob said, she will plant garlic to harvest in the spring.

The kitchen has used one day’s lettuce harvest in 225 salads and one day’s radishes in 521 salads.

Still, the farm has a long way to go before it can truly sustain Stony Brook’s more than 500 patients. Even at 500 salads a day, it accounts for only a fraction of the 1,200 to 1,300 meals a day that the kitchen produces for hospital patients.

“It’s creating a culture,” Dr. Connolly-Schoonen said. “We’re not going to meet the patients’ vegetable needs with our farm.”

The farm food seems to go over better with adults than children. In pediatrics, said Denise Malandrino, a sous-chef, “they love the personal pizzas with toppings and baked fries.”

The other day, the kitchen turned a bumper crop of turnips into whipped turnips to accompany grilled chicken with spinach as a special of the day. Ms. Malandrino sautéed the spinach (which was not from the farm) in olive oil. She mashed the turnips with some butter, milk, salt and pepper and scooped them onto plates with an ice-cream scooper. “Mashed turnips have actually been a favorite,” Ms. Malandrino said. “We get 25 to 30 orders of the turnips on a weekly basis, depending on the harvest.”

Two plates were ferried up to the cardiac unit, where Cheryl McAndrew and Barbara Ryder, roommates, had ordered the dish at the urging of a hospital dietitian.

“To be honest, I’ve been sticking with the pasta,” Ms. McAndrew said. Ms. Ryder said that she normally only ate turnips at Thanksgiving.

Yet after a cautious start, both women devoured the decorative dollop of turnip as if it were ice cream. “I did eat all my vegetables,” Ms. McAndrew said, pushing away her leftover chicken and wan-looking iceberg lettuce (not from the farm). “When they’re good, they’re good.”

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A Rogue Climate Experiment Outrages Scientists

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: October 18, 2012 NYTimes

A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials.
Related in Opinion

The entrepreneur, whose foray came to light only this week, even duped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States into lending him ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.

Canada’s environment ministry says it is investigating the experiment, which was carried out with no government or scientific oversight. A spokesman said the ministry had warned the venture in advance that its plan would violate international agreements.

Marine scientists and other experts have assailed the experiment as unscientific, irresponsible and probably in violation of those agreements, which are intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change .

Though the environmental impact of the foray could well prove minimal, scientists said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that might unintentionally put the environment at risk.

The entrepreneur, Russ George , calling it a “state-of-the-art study,” said his team scattered iron dust several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in exchange for $2.5 million from a native Canadian group.

The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr. George, a former fisheries and forestry worker, said might allow the project to meet one of its goals: aiding the recovery of the local salmon  fishery for the native Haida.

Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by burying carbon, they could also sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.

Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques  — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

But tampering with the environment is risky, they say, so any experiments must be carried out responsibly and transparently, with the involvement of the scientific community and proper governance.

“Geoengineering is extremely controversial,” said Andrew Parker , a fellow at the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “There is a need to protect the environment while making sure safe and legitimate research can go ahead.”

Mark L. Wells , a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George did “could be described as ocean dumping.”

Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton and called it “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met the goal of permanently removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

NOAA acknowledged that it had provided the project with 20 instrument-laden buoys that drift in the ocean for a year or more and measure water temperature, salinity and other characteristics. Such buoys are often sent out on what the agency calls “vessels of opportunity,” and the data they provide, uploaded to satellites, is publicly available.

But a spokesman said the agency had been “misled” by the group, which “did not disclose that it was going to discharge material into the ocean.”

The nature of Mr. George’s project was first reported this week in an article in The Guardian, a British newspaper, after it was revealed by the ETC Group , a watchdog group in Montreal that opposes geoengineering.

Mr. Parker, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, said it appeared that the project had contravened two international agreements on geoengineering, the London Convention  on the dumping of wastes at sea and a moratorium declared by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity  — as well as a set of principles  developed at Oxford University on transparency, regulation and the need for public participation.

Mr. George, said that his experiment was not related to geoengineering, and that 100 tons was a negligible amount of iron compared to what naturally enters the oceans. “This is a community trying to maintain its livelihood,” he said of the Haida.

He said his team had collected a “golden mountain” of data on the plankton bloom. Mr. George, who described himself as chief scientist on the project and said he has training as a plant ecologist, refused to name any of the other scientists on the team.

Scientists who have been involved with sanctioned iron fertilization experiments strongly disputed Mr. George’s assertion about the quality of his experiment, saying that it was roughly 10 times bigger than any other but that the fishing boat used and the science team were clearly insufficient.

Victor Smetacek , an oceanographer with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research  in Germany who recently published an analysis  of sanctioned fertilization research conducted in 2004 in the Southern Ocean, said Mr. George’s project would give a black eye to legitimate research.

“This kind of behavior is disastrous,” he said, describing Mr. George, with whom he had brief contact more than five years ago, as a “messing around, bumbling guy.”

Mr. George, 62, of Northern California, was previously in the public eye when, as chief executive of a company called Planktos , he proposed  a similar iron-fertilization project, in the equatorial Pacific west of the Galápagos Islands, whose purpose was the sale of carbon offsets. Under cap-and-trade  programs in various countries, polluters can offset their emissions of greenhouse gases by buying credits from projects that store carbon or otherwise mitigate global warming.

The project was canceled in 2008 after what his company called a “disinformation campaign” by environmentalists and others made it impossible to attract investors.

Mr. George said that during that period he was contacted by the Old Massett Village Council,  one of two Haida groups on Haida Gwaii, about “wanting to do something about their fish,” which had suffered population declines.

But John Disney, the council’s economic development director, said he had worked with Mr. George on other projects before, including one to generate carbon credits by replacing alder forests on the islands with conifers. That project never came to fruition.

Mr. Disney defended the iron sprinkling project, saying that it had been approved by Old Massett’s villagers and cleared by the council’s lawyers.

He said at least seven Canadian government agencies were aware of the project. But a spokesman for Canada’s environment minister said Thursday that the salmon group was twice warned in advance that its plan violated international agreements Canada had signed that would prohibit an iron-seeding project with a commercial element, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Mr. Disney also said that the marine science community, including researchers at the Wegener Institute in Germany, had known about the project.

But Mr. Smetacek disputed that as well. “I’ve had no contact with this guy on this,” he said, referring to Mr. George.

Ian Austen contributed reporting from Ottawa.

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Counterfeit ketchup caper: Exploding bottles leave major mess in Dover

By Dan Goldberg/The Star-Ledger


DOVER — It looks like a grisly murder scene. Red splotches pooling on a warehouse floor. A rotten smell. Insects swarming. Crates knocked to the ground.

But no one died here.

This wasn't carnage. This was condiment.

Inside a privately owned Dover warehouse are the remnants of an abandoned Heinz Tomato Ketchup counterfeiting scheme.

The ketchup appears to be real but the labels on the plastic bottles are a fraud, according to a Heinz spokesman.

Company officials, who visited Dover last week, believe someone purchased traditional Heinz Ketchup and transferred it from large bladders into individual bottles labeled "Simply Heinz," a premium variety made with sugar instead of high fructose corn sweetener.

The 7,000 square feet of space on Richboynton Avenue in Dover had hundreds of crates holding thousands of bottles of ketchup.

Of course, without any quality control, it is impossible to know what, if anything, else was put in those bottles.

Heinz does not believe the scheme got too far.

"The site of this operation was abandoned and had produced only a small quantity of bottles, much of which was still on site," said Michael Mullen, vice president of corporate & government affairs in an e-mail.

The thing is, you can’t just walk away from something like this. Tomatoes and vinegar, both acidic, combined with sugars, which ferment when left unattended in the heat, build up pressure inside the bottle and then ... explode.


Thousands of bottles of ketchup were found in a Dover warehouse. Heinz believes these are the fruits of a fraudulent repackaging scheme.
Dover Police
That leads to a pretty big mess and a feast for flies, which is what caught the attention of other tenants who rent space in the warehouse, Dover Public Safety Director Richard Rosell said.

If this all sounds a bit unusual, it is.

"These incidences are rare for Heinz," Mullen said. "As the world’s leading manufacturer of ketchup, Heinz has stringent manufacturing and packaging practices in place to ensure the safety of consumers."

Dover police are not yet involved. They are aware of the situation, Rosell said, but nothing has been reported stolen.

Heinz is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigation, Mullen said.

"As a company dedicated to food safety and quality, Heinz will not tolerate illegal repackaging of our products and we will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who engages in such illicit behavior," Mullen said.

The space is leased by Wholesome Foods, LLC, which is registered to Joseph Carrera, according to state records. A man answering Carrera’s cell phone repeatedly hung up when he learned a reporter was on the on the line. Voice messages were not returned.

Rutgers University food science professor Don Schaffner said counterfeit food operations in the U.S. are rare, though scams have popped up with greater frequency internationally in recent years.

In 2008, a chemical used to make concrete, fertilizer and plastics called melamine sickened 300,000 children in China and killed at least six infants when it was used as filler in Chinese milk and formula products.

Schaffner said it’s impossible to know what health consequences the counterfeit ketchup could have caused without knowing what kind of filler might have been added, but said it’s unlikely someone making counterfeit food would follow even basic food safety regulations that govern food products in the U.S.

"If you’re opening ketchup containers and pouring ketchup into other bottles, God knows what you’re diluting it with," Schaffner said. "Ketchup is thick, so it’s possible you would not use a food-grade ingredient to replicate that texture. I can’t begin to imagine how bad it could be."

Star-Ledger staff writer Jessica Calefati contributed to this report.

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Iceberg Hunter: Weather Channel

The Richards family starts to worry as they have to travel farther and farther out to sea in order to find an iceberg. Follow the crew as they continue the hunt.

About The Show
Each spring the Arctic Circle releases thousands of skyscraper-sized icebergs that flow into the North Atlantic Ocean. Strong currents push these dangerous icebergs toward the coast of Newfoundland, where they form the most densely-packed gathering of icebergs on earth: a deadly obstacle course known as "Iceberg Alley." The treacherous waters are avoided at all costs by boat captains, except for a little-known group of "iceberg hunters." These brave men search out, wrangle and harvest the ice, bringing it back to land and selling it to water bottling plants.

Series Premiere
Tuesday, September 18th @ 9/8c.

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Using Coffee Grounds Correctly

Q. I don’t put much ‘green’ material in my 12'x7'x4' compost pile; just a lot of coffee grounds. (We drink a LOT of coffee!) Is there a recommended limit? I don't want my plants to OD on nitrogen (or caffeine!).

---Ken; just outside of Philadelphia, PA.

I am spreading coffee grounds from the local Bagelsmith under my five-year old pines and spruces with the idea that it will acidify my lousy clay soil. Based on a number of enthusiastic 'testimonials' on a recycling website I have spread several bushels of grounds so far. Am I deluded? Worse, am I doing harm?

---Richard at Rutgers University, New Jersey

Mike: I live in a part of the world that’s so young geologically it was recently covered with glaciers. There isn't much soil, so I make a lot of compost. Besides the usual stuff (kitchen scraps, newspaper and cardboard), I can receive 30 pounds of grounds a week from the only coffee shop on Prince of Wales Island…

---Jay in Craig, Alaska

A. First, a few extraneous words to Craig up in Alaska: I know that many uninformed sources advise using shredded newspapers and cardboard as the ‘dry browns’ in a compost pile, but: 1) newspaper ink is more toxic than these people realize; 2) newsprint is bleached, creating cancer-causing dioxins; and 3) cardboard contains nasty glues and other chemical ‘fillers’. More importantly, these things contain zero nutrition for your plants. If you don’t have enough leaves, experiment with wood shavings or sawdust. They can be difficult to compost, but are far superior to heavily processed paper products.

Now, on to coffee grounds! When we first started doing this show, we warned people to only spread coffee grounds around acid-loving plants, like azaleas, rhododendrons and blueberries, because the grounds were bound to be acidic; and not to overdo it on those and other flowering plants, as the grounds were certainly high in Nitrogen, which makes plants grow big, but can inhibit the numbers of flowers and fruits. 

But then we were sent some test results that showed grounds to be neutral on the pH scale! To find out what gives, I called Will Brinton, founder and Director of the Wood’s End Research Laboratory in Maine, the definitive testers of soils, composts, and raw ingredients used in large-scale composting. Will solved the mystery instantly. Woods End, it turned out, was the source of that neutral test! Ah, but some follow-up investigation later revealed that it hadn’t been coffee grounds alone, as the person submitting the material for testing had stated, but grounds mixed with raw yard waste, the classic ‘dry brown’ material that is the heart of a good compost pile. 

It turns out, as expected, that “coffee grounds alone are highly acidic,” says Will, who saved all the grounds from his Lab’s break room for a week recently just to test for us (“Eight o’ Clock” coffee, which I remember fondly from our old A & P neighborhood supermarket). They came out at 5.1, a perfect low-end pH for plants like blueberries that thrive in very acidic soil. “But that’s the most gentle result we’ve ever found,” Will quickly added, explaining that the other 31 samples of raw coffee grounds they’ve tested over the years all had a pH below 5, too acidic for even some of the so-called acid loving plants. 

“And in some ways, the grounds are even more acidic than those numbers imply”, adds Will, who explains that the coffee grounds they’ve tested have also had a very high residual acidity; so high he recommends adding a cup of agricultural lime to every ten pounds of grounds BEFORE you add them to your compost pile. (High-quality hardwood ashes could be used instead of the lime, and would add more nutrients to the mix than the lime would.) 

But I had to quickly sputter that I never recommend adding anything to raw ingredients before composting for fear of upsetting the apple—eh, compost—cart. “Neither do I,” said Will; “this is a unique situation.” 

And he certainly doesn’t think grounds should be used in their raw form. First, he explains, they are so acidic andso Nitrogen rich that you risk creating a ‘mold bloom’ where you spread them. And second? “There’s no life in those grounds; its all been boiled or perked away.” Instead, he suggests doing what the guy with that original sample did—adding the grounds to microbe-rich yard waste and composting that perfect combination. Will liked my suggestion of four parts shredded leaves to one part grounds by weight, but adds that even having grounds make up 10% of a pile of otherwise shredded leaves would create great compost. 

Nutrient content? Will explains that the kind of coffee grounds a typical homeowner would produce or obtain are around 1.5% Nitrogen. There’s also a lot of Magnesium and Potassium, both of which plants really like; but not a lot of phosphorus (the “fruiting and flowering nutrient”) or calcium, a mineral that many plants crave, and whose lack helps explain that recalcitrant acidity. (“Lime” is essentially calcium carbonate, and wood ashes are also very high in calcium; click HERE for a previous Question of the Week that goes into great wood ash detail.) 

So mix those coffee grounds in with some lime or wood ash and then into lots of shredded leaves; you’ll make a fine, high-quality compost. The only exception I can think of is our listeners out West cursed with highly alkaline soil; you could try tilling in some grounds alone and see if it moves your nasty soil towards neutral with no ill effects. 

Otherwise, we can’t recommend their raw use; the acidity could be high enough to damage even acid-loving plants. And yes, this means that our poor New Jersey listener could be harming his plants with all that uncomposted coffee. Unfortunately for him, Northeast soils are ALREADY acidic; that’s why many homeowners in the North lime their lawns. And when I scrolled through those ‘testimonials’ that so swayed him, I noticed that they all seemed to be from California, where the soils are highly alkaline. And you can’t improve clay soil by making it more acidic or alkaline; the only way to REALLY improve clay soil is to dig it up and toss it into the woods!. 

For lots more info about high quality testing of soils, composts and raw ingredients, visit the Wood’s End web site: www.woodsend.org 

Helpful Products from Gardens Alive!

Gardener’s Gold^TM Premium Compost- Compost is one the very best things you can put in your garden. Compost adds beneficial microbes, protects plants during drought, buffers pH imbalances, and enhances your plants growth.

Compost Digester- Gives you the compost you want without the mess… and takes up less space! Throw in your shredded leaves, kitchen scraps, and coffee grounds for a meal your plants will love!

Redworms- These worms won’t help your garden directly, but put them in your compost bin and you’ll see the results! They make their weight in castings everyday!

This article was orginally posted here: http://www.gardensalive.com/article.asp?ai=793

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