good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll introduce you to a farm in Queens that grows mushrooms for its restaurants using food waste collected from the same restaurants. We will also learn more about Columbia University's decision to cancel university-wide commencement ceremonies.
“This is a farm,” Sierra Alea said.
It wasn't similar. There was no tractor in sight. There were no fields of asparagus, raspberries or strawberries in the 3,500-square-foot room, deep inside an industrial building across from an auto junkyard in Queens.
But it's a farm, an indoor farm that grows mushrooms for Manhattan restaurants.
Grow them with food waste collected from the same restaurants.
“This is how we keep food waste out of landfills,” Allaire said. That's the idea behind Afterlife Ag, a mushroom cultivation startup where she is her co-founder.
Food waste that rots in landfills produces methane gas, which is second only to carbon dioxide in climate warming. Winson Wong, another co-founder of Afterlife Ag, says that 80 to 85 per cent of what is thrown away by restaurants is “cooking waste” – “human waste” such as egg shells, lemon wedges and tomato peels. “It's something I would never eat,” he said. ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing food waste, said the restaurant industry sent 13 million tons of waste to landfills in 2022, the latest figures released by the organization.
Wong, whose family owned a food distribution company in Hong Kong and worked for a tech startup, said Afterlife Ag was born out of an effort to arrange composting for restaurants in New York. However, he and his team decided against composting in the city due to the increased amount of food waste to be processed and the limited space available.
“But we had a lot of restaurant customers who wanted to compost,” Wong said.
The team investigated ways to break down food waste and create products that could be given back to the restaurants where the waste was generated.
One idea was insects eating food waste in nature. “The world is not ready to eat insects,” he said. “Restaurants don’t want that.”
The best idea turned out to be mushrooms. The team began an experiment to grow them and ask restaurants if they would buy them. That led to Afterlife Ag's model, picking up restaurant waste (from the chefs who prepared the meal, not the scraps customers left on their plates) and taking the mushrooms home.
Soon, Afterlife Ag was using wood chips and shavings from sawmills, sometimes sawdust from fish smokers, and sometimes cannabis from hemp farms to create substrates for farming and growing mushrooms. I began to tackle the complex task of creating.
“Food waste varies from day to day,” says Aaron Kang, Afterlife's production manager. “The first step is to shred it.” That explains the noise from the machines near the front of the startup's space. The peels of dozens of oranges are finely ground and eventually packed into bags along with wood chips and put through a sterilizer. Kang says the high temperature steam and pressure “kills anything that might be living in the food waste” and inhibits post-injection growth of fungal mycelium, the network of fungal threads that give rise to mushrooms. He said it could be a hindrance.
Bags of substrate are sent to the shelves, where fungal mycelium digests the waste, and after a few weeks mushrooms can break through.
Afterlife Ag harvests mushrooms daily and packs them into 5-pound boxes for delivery to restaurant customers. It also sells to schools and hospitals, but not to retail customers at this time.
At State Grill and Bar (21 West 33rd Street, inside the Empire State Building), one of the Empire State Building's restaurants, Chef Morgan Jarrett uses ingredients from Afterlife Ag to create a dish made with pink oyster mushrooms and Black King. I made four dishes starting with the mousse. Trumpet mushrooms are topped with jangaji, a type of pickled mushroom. I asked Florence Fabricant, who writes the weekly Front Burner and Off the Menu columns for the New York Times food section, to join Wong and me for a tasting.
“The mushrooms themselves don't have much flavor,” she said. “The mousse was pretty bland, but contributed a nice buttery texture. But the pickled mushrooms on top sharpened the flavor and brought everything into focus.”
weather
Mostly sunny, with a high near 76 degrees. A chance of showers overnight with a low of 59 degrees.
Alternate parking lot
Valid until Thursday (Solemn Day of the Ascension).
Columbia University cancels major graduation ceremonies
Columbia University has canceled its major graduation ceremony following weeks of pro-Palestinian protests.
However, the school plans to hold smaller ceremonies at each of its 19 colleges, mostly at athletics stadiums 100 blocks from the main campus. The campus has been largely on lockdown since police removed 46 protesters from occupying Hamilton Hall last week.
Columbia University has repeatedly said Hamilton Hall remains a crime scene, and questions remain about how the approximately 15,000 graduates and guests will be easily admitted to the May 15 commencement ceremony. . University spokesman Ben Chan said Monday that Columbia University has taken extensive action. Despite efforts to identify alternative venues, we were unable to find a venue capable of hosting an event of this magnitude.
Instead, the university said in a statement: “We have decided to center our graduation activities on school days and school-level ceremonies, where students are recognized as individuals along with their peers, rather than university-wide ceremonies.”
The school said it is still considering holding a “celebratory event on May 15th” and will provide further details at a later date. The various university celebrations will begin on Friday and continue until May 16th.
metropolitan diary
BMT
Dear diary:
One Saturday night in February, I was walking alone down Canal Street to the East Broadway F station when two older men approached me near Eldridge Street. One person asked for directions to the subway.
I asked him which train he was looking for.
“We're trying to get to 46th and 5th, what is that, BMT?”
I laughed.
“When was the last time you went to New York?'' I asked. “1968?”
“1970,” he replied matter-of-factly.
I am happy to know that the train lines are now just numbers and letters, that the F station is nearby, that it will take me close to my destination, and that I am willing to take the train because I am going there myself. I explained that I would be showing them around.
As we walked toward the station, the man who asked about BMT immigrated to New York from France when he was 14, attended City College with the man he is now dating, and drove a taxi in the city. He said he was doing it. A moment before leaving in 1970.
As he marveled at how much Chinatown had grown since he left, I explained that Manhattan's Chinatown was now smaller than those in Queens or Brooklyn.
When we arrived at the station, the man asked me how to pay the fare. He was impressed when I showed him how to tap his credit card to pay.
“How much is the fare these days?” his friend asked.
I told him it was $2.90.
“No!” he cried.
— Aaron Chase
Illustrations by Agnes Lee. Submit your submission here and Click here to read more Metropolitan Diary.