Kalamazoo Coffee Co. is Well Received on Campus

Photo By Willina Cail

Barista Hannah Bogard throws a cup and a half of beans into the grinder. She holds a personal pizza-sized filter up to the spout and waits about thirty seconds while the grounds pour out. She slams the side of the grinder to get every last bit. “The flavored coffee sticks,” she says. She puts the filter into the orange handled tray marked ‘flavor’ and sticks it in the Bunn coffee brewer. A slightly sweet aroma wafts from the steaming pot. Bogard is making a fresh batch of Moonlight — Kalamazoo Coffee Co.’s maple walnut blend.

Last week, Kalamazoo Coffee Co. replaced Water Street in the Book Club. Manager Kelly Kribs thinks the transition went really smoothly. “We haven’t gotten any complaints, which is rare,” Bogard agrees.

“I love it,” Vishakha Choudhary ’17 says about the changeover. “This is so different,” she says, moving her hand over the six pots, car wash-style. “I know Water Street had French Roast, but [Kalamazoo Coffee Co.] has flavors.” She loads up an iced Sumatra with half&half, a dash of vanilla powder and two packets of Sweet and Low. An avid coffee drinker, Choudhary usually gets the Crème Brulee. “I’m a flavored coffee person,” she says.

K students are excited about options like Moonlight, with hints of maple, hickory and walnuts. “The flavored coffee has become really popular,” Kribs says.

To achieve that popularity, Kalamazoo Coffee Co. has done a lot of flavor experimentation and countless taste tests. Owner Darren Bain describes the complexities in achieving just the right flavor. “For a huge amount of beans, you use about this much flavor,” he says, stretching his thumb and middle finger to indicate about a cup. For each broad flavor category, cherry for example – one of the hardest to get right because of our associations with medicine – Bain says there are 2-20 individual flavor options he can choose from (the list includes ‘Cherry Flavor,’ ‘Fresh Cherry Crème,’ ‘Cupid’s Cherry Crumble,’ ‘Chocolate Cherry Cordial,’ and ‘Cherry Vanilla’). They play around with different flavors, making batch after batch. “You have to test it and test it and test it,” he said.

While the beans are still hot from roasting, flavoring oil and nuts are mixed in, adding flavor dimension and perhaps distinguishing the blends from more synthetic tasting flavored coffee. Bain is looking for subtlety; he wants to attain “a really nice coffee, plus that extra flavor.”

Even students who prefer unflavored coffee are happy with the new options. “I can actually tell the difference between the different roasts,” Josh Foley ‘16, says, “which I didn’t feel like I could before.”

“I drink coffee black,” Willina Cain ‘16 says, “Since the change, I can finish a whole cup.” She likes having more medium roast options – “it’s the happy medium between light roast and dark roast, middle amount of caffeine, middle amount of bitterness and sweetness…”

Shannon Haupt ‘16, an avid coffee drinker, is also happy about the switch. The Backpacker Blend is her go to, though she likes a light roast like Bambino for her early morning cup. It’s not just the taste of the coffee that Haupt appreciates. “I think they’re really clever, and the Black Owl downtown is really cool,” she says, “It’s the whole package.”

Professor Amy Newday, former coffee-drinker, now black tea junkie, is happy with the new tea selection. She likes the Tangerine Ginger and English Breakfast, though she liked the Water Street teas just as well.

Photo By Willina Cain

I asked Bain if this has happened before, if he’s replaced Water Street at other accounts. He said that making enemies was the last thing he wanted to do in going into business. “We’ve never gone out looking to get an existing Water Street account,” he says, “Ever.” They offer different products at more affordable rates.

The Book Club sells Kalamazoo Coffee Co.’s whole beans by the pound; $10.99 for a 12oz bag. It’s about three dollars cheaper than the Water Street blends they sold before.

“If it’s cheaper and good quality, then that’s a good thing,” says Luke Winship ’15, coffee drinker by necessity.

Nicolette Hahn Niman @ K

In opposition with much of the current talk about how to mitigate diet related disease, soil degradation, and climate change, Nicolette Hahn Niman is defending beef. A K grad, class of ’89, she returned to campus last Monday to make her case in Stetson Chapel.

In her new book, Defending Beef, Hahn Niman complicates the tendency of to vilify beef. She argues that, with the right practices, raising cattle can help build carbon-sequestering soils, increase biodiversity, prevent erosion, and provide a nutritious food source.

Professor Amelia Katanski introduced Hahn Niman, remembering her as a fervent debater in the Political Science class they took together at K. Through her presentation, Hahn Niman hoped listeners would be able to “rethink things we think we already know.”

She advocates for methods of cattle ranching similar to those she uses on her roughly 1,000-acre ranch in Marin County, California; “Our cattle are never fed grains and live their life year-round on grass…We do no plowing, no planting, no chemical applications to our land, and no irrigation,” she writes in Defending Beef. She references ecologist Allan Savory who advocates “that animals be kept in dense herds and moved often; that grazing simulates biological break in the soil surface, press in seeds, and push down dead plant matter…that all of this generates soil carbon, plant carbon, and water retention; and that this is the only way to stop and reverse desertification the world over.”

Before her presentation in Stetson, Amy Newday’s Slow Farming Senior Capstone class had the opportunity to eat dinner with Hahn Niman. She asked about our post-grad plans and listened intensely, bright blue eyes narrowed, nodding her head of auburn hair pulled back in a silver barrette. She then shared a bit about her life after K. A French and Biology double major, Hahn Niman moved to France to teach English after graduation. She earned her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1993 and went on to become an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation. Much of the experience she sites in her book comes from her years as a senior attorney for Robert f. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance, where she was responsible for the concentrated livestock reform campaign.

Class member Annie Gough asked a seemingly simple question; how old are the cows when they go to slaughter? Hahn Niman clarified – by cows Annie probably meant cattle? She went on to explain that what we classify as ‘beef’ should be the meat of heifers (a female that hasn’t had a calf) and steers (castrated males). ‘Cow’ actually describes a female mother. Hahn Niman noted that the meat of these animals is typically used in ground beef or a cheap steak at restaurants like Ponderosa, after they put in eight or nine years providing milk. She gestured widely, the rolled up sleeves of her charcoal sweater revealing the tanned and beefy forearms of a farmer.

“Language is important! Clarity is important!” she said, banging her had on the table, rattling the cutlery.

 In her book, she strived to “Present very very complicated ideas, but not dumb them down,” she said. She dedicates an entire section to soil, examining microscopic specifics. She describes how glomalin, a glue-like, carbon-based molecule, is essential in transferring nutrients from the soil to the plant, and carbon from the plant to the soil. Glomalin also catalyzes the formation of soil aggregates – key to soil health and carbon sequestration.

“My whole purpose in writing this book was to respond to oversimplification,” she said.

“It was convincing,” senior Laura Manardo said, “As soon as I finished this book I went and got a burger.” Hahn Niman herself actually doesn’t eat meat. She’s been vegetarian since her college years and told curious student Lucy Mailing that she just doesn’t have the urge to eat meat.

This and her personal ties and investments in the beef industry feeds skepticism of Hahn Niman, but she comes armed with data. I read the book, critical of the context, but appreciative of the efforts she makes to thoroughly complicate incredibly complex and often simplified ideas about the implications of raising and consuming beef.

Composting at K

Sammy Jolly gets behind the wheel of the FacMan cart, loaded with seven 5-gallon buckets. She reverses expertly out of the garage and down the parking lot behind the Athletic building. I hop in next to her and we bump along, up academy, in front of Hoben, behind Hicks, and down a packed, icy trail to the center of the Grove.

Sammy spends 10 hours a week hauling buckets of rotting food around campus. She drives a cart from the coffee shop in the library to the President’s house to the grove collecting hundreds of pounds of food waste every day. It’s heavy, sloppy, and pungent. She’s invested in her work composting; turning the forgotten apples that became soft in your refrigerator’s crisper, the extra pans of lasagna uneaten in the caf, the crusts and extras we return to the kitchen on the revolving racks because we’re too full, into nutrient-dense plant fertilizer.

According to the USDA, Americans waste enough food everyday to fill a 90,000-seat football stadium. That’s 141 trillion unconsumed calories per year. We throw away tons of edible food at the levels of production (on farms), processing (in factories and kitchens), and consumption (out of our refrigerators and off of our plates). The 133 billion pounds our country wasted in 2010 was worth about $16.6 billion.

In a perfect world, composting would exist only to repurpose inedible food scraps – banana peels, carrot tops, onionskins. It now functions as one way to lessen the impact of mass amounts of perfectly edible food waste. Our campus food waste program was developed in 2006, when data from an audit showed that we were sending nearly two tons of food to the landfill per week.

Sammy is one of two compost interns who works for Facilities Management. She spends hours carting and dumping food scraps to enable our campus food waste operations to function. All post-consumer food waste from the caf is composted in the two Earth Tubs in the Facilities Management parking lot, and food waste from off-campus student housing, and a few sites on campus, is composted in piles in the grove.

My fingers are stiff from the bitter air by the time we heave the buckets out of the cart in the grove. Sammy weighs each bucket with a small, brass suspension scale she attaches to a cable dangling from a branch. Five buckets of coffee grounds from the Book Club, one with papaya peels discernable among sweet, fermented-smelling fruit scraps from President’s W.O’s house, and one with a few whole apples and onions from an off campus house add up to 112 pounds.

We dump the potpourri of food waste, bucket-by-bucket, on the ground in front of the wooden structure built three years ago. I use a flat-edged hoe to chop up the food scraps. I slice grapefruit peels, coffee filters, avocado skins, an apple missing a few bites to pieces. Smaller food particles create greater surface area for the microorganisms to feed on, and ultimately, a more homogenous final product. Cutie clementine and Chiquita banana stickers peek out of the sludge. I continue to crunch eggshells and stab at the stubborn, fibrous coffee filters while Sammy sticks a thermometer into the belly of the pile.

Temperature is a good indication of the health and efficiency of a compost heap. The bacteria and fungi eating the particles can increase the temperature up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit – hot enough to kill pathogens and weed seeds. Though the air temperature is less than 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the pile is up to 99, still a bit cooler than usual. Sammy speculates it’s due to the increased volume of food scraps she’s added in the last week, or the excess moisture from the snow.

 “We have this makeshift pallet and plastic garbage bag thing to keep the snow off,” Sammy says, pulling at a scrap of gray plastic atop the wooden frame housing the pile. There are three compartments, each about 4X4X4 feet, separating ready-to-use compost, curing compost, and the freshest, most fragrant pile that we’ve been working with. Each pile will be rotated to make space to start a fresh pile for spring quarter. “We try to do one pile per quarter,” Sammy says, “but we’re kind of outgrowing our capacity.”

In 2010, a FacMan student intern initiated a program to collect food waste from the cafeteria and truck it to Lake Village Homestead Farm, 11 miles from campus, to feed to their pigs. “It was pretty successful and very easy to manage, except that it was not entirely legal,” Paul Manstrom, Asscociate Vice President of Facilities Management, said.

They realized this about a year after the program started when the Department of Agriculture came across the promotional video students had posted on YouTube. A few days later, “We had three people from the DA on campus nosing around,” Manstrom said.

There were two problems with the program: FacMan didn’t have a license to transport food waste, and it’s illegal to feed animal products to livestock. (Rob Townsend, Recycling Coordinator and truck driver at the time recalled picking out a chuck of ham, still wrapped in foil, from the pile he dumped for the pigs. “I remember thinking ‘this doesn’t seem quite right…’” Townsend said.) The Department of Agriculture shut the program down and FacMan and Dining Services had to reevaluate.  

Another FacMan intern, Monica Cooper K ’13, created an on-campus composting program for living learning houses in 2012. She provided each house with a bucket to separate their food waste from the rest of their garbage. Vegetable and fruit scraps, grains, coffee grounds and eggshells could be deposited in these buckets - no meat or dairy products. Every Sunday, she picked up the buckets and left empty ones. She dumped the food scraps in the structure she built behind the living learning houses in the grove. Since the program has expanded to off-campus houses and coffee services on campus, FacMan built another structure to increase capacity.

Sammy takes a pitchfork to the pile, her long braid falling over her shoulder, sturdy tall frame bent in half. She pulls heaps off the top to mix in with the fresh scraps we’re about to add. Steam smelling of funky blue cheese rises from the depths. She explains the difficulty of getting the proportion of food waste, ‘brown matter’ (leaves, straw, or woodchips), and moisture. “Just trying to figure out what your compost recipe is takes a lot of work,” she says. “And when it’s not right it’s really obvious because it smells really bad.”

She continues pitchforking. Aerating, or ‘turning’, the pile increases the rate of decomposition, but too much oxygen will dry out the pile. Adequate moisture makes the nutrients in the organic matter available to the microorganisms. It’s a tricky balance, and the pressure’s on when an imbalance is so obvious and unpleasant to a passerby. The FacMan employees give her a hard time about the smell emitting from the Earth Tubs in the parking lot, a program she initiated in the spring of her sophomore year.

After research conducted through an independent study, Sammy and then-senior Alicia Pettys made a recommendation to the college on the best way to run an on-site composting program. They hoped to increase capacity to compost all pre and post-consumer food waste from the cafeteria.

As recommended, the college purchased two Earth Tubs from Green Mountain Technologies. The enclosed composting containers, about two times the size of a standard hot tub, power mix and aerate the food waste. According to the company’s website, they can shred and mix a ton or more of compost in 10-15 minutes.

“One of the tubs will take about three weeks worth of compost from the caf,” Manstrom said. “Then it takes two to three weeks to bake, then another four weeks to cure on the ground.”

Sammy has noticed that the majority of food waste on our campus is untouched food from the cafeteria kitchen. It’s a consistent challenge to provide meals for a varying number of students with varying tastes, and the tendency is to over-estimate so no one leaves the caf unsatisfied. That means a lot of perfectly edible food goes to waste. “One time I composted a whole bucket of just one rice dish,” Sammy said.

Other campuses in Michigan have student organizations dedicated to recovering and redistributing extra food from dining halls. At the University of Michigan, students have partnered with the national Food Recovery Network (FRN) to implement a food waste solution in five of their seven dining halls. FRN provides them with funding for freezers, the key appliance in food waste recovery. Cafeteria employees fill aluminum sheet pans with extra food from each meal. This food hasn’t gone out on the buffet in the dining hall; it could be an extra pan of lasagna, pot of soup, or platter of roasted vegetables. They slide the pans in the freezer for student volunteers to pick up the following day. Students take the pans of food to a local distribution organization, Food Gatherers, where it is weighed and distributed to one of 150 non-profits in Washtenaw County.

Though we’ve yet to devise a similar system on our campus, the composting program is an impactful, semi-solution.

The new composting program took a beating this winter; accumulated snow collapsed the tent that sheltered the tubs, and frigid temperatures inhibited the breakdown of the food waste. “I think we’ve got a couple more years to get it to run perfectly,” Manstrom said. The pulper – which ideally grinds the food and drains excess water – has hasn’t been functioning properly, so there’s been a slow start-up with the Earth Tubs this spring.

Dylan Polcyn, K’16, will be taking Sammy’s place in heading up the program next year. He plans to get more students involved through first-year forums and work to solidify a consistent system. “I want to make our presence known from the get go,” he said, “and really establish ourselves as a fixture on campus.”

Finished compost is available for campus community members. “Our idea was not to sell it,” Manstrom said, “but to provide compost for staff and neighbors to use on their gardens.” The first batch from the tubs was added to the soil in the landscaping around the Arcus Center during its construction last spring; a nice way to close the loop of the composting system.

Cooking Class 1: Sushi

            

          Eight gloved hands pull gobs of sticky rice from a container on the center of the table.

         “It should be about the size of a baseball,” Grace Chiang says, “But don’t pack it!”

         She uses her loosely formed rice ball to pick up a piece of nori and slams in on a saran-wrapped bamboo mat, spreading the rice in a uniform layer. She makes sure grains are pressed just off the edge of the rectangle of nori so they will stick and form a cohesive seam when rolled.

Last week, over 25 students squeezed around the island in the Arcus Center’s sleek kitchen to make sushi. Mina Chaing and Grace Yang, sisters-in-law and owners of Hunan Gardens, demonstrated the steps of the process from slicing the cucumbers to sprinkling toasted sesame seeds over the finished roll. Each participant assembled their own, customizing with spicy tuna, crab, or a heap of avocado.

Students proudly garnished their creations with ginger and wasabi (or what we think of as wasabi. In fact, most of the wasabi eaten outside of Japan is actually a mixture of horseradish, mustard and food coloring, which is, of course, cheaper to produce).

“There were so many people from different backgrounds [in the class],” senior Hang Nguyen said as she tucked in with chopsticks. “And I liked that we made a not American dish.”

          

Hunan Gardens, locations on West Main and Texas Corners, features Chinese, Thai and Taiwanese cuisine. The Chaing family, originally from Taiwan, moved to Kalamazoo from New York City in 1991 and started the restaurant in 1992.

Last year, Dining Services started purchasing sushi from the restaurant for the Richardson Room café. Grace Yang, and Jim and Mina Chiang donated their time and ingredients for Monday night’s class.

         The class was organized by staff at Dining Services (full disclosure: myself included) as the first of a potential series to be hosted in the Center’s space this quarter. In addition to bringing more local restaurant owners and chefs to campus, we hope to support student instructors as well.