Written and reposted courtesy of Y-Love.

It’s a common complaint about Orthodox Jews from their non-Orthodox MOTTs: Orthodox Jews are not concerned with anything outside of their own spheres of influence. Social justice, the Third World, and the environment are bypassed, with ever-strengthened insularity as the priority of the day.

However, this seems to be changing. YU was notably present at a Save Darfur rally this summer, and students from the Bat Ayin yeshiva were active not only at events but also in rhetoric following the Israel-Lebanon war.

Another nugget of Orthodox global consciousness graced the pages of the Jerusalem Post a few days ago:

Orthodox conservationists
By GAIL LICHTMAN

While many Israeli government organizations and private groups profess their commitment to multiculturalism, truly multicultural approaches to issues - especially with respect to engaging the haredi community - are few and far between. That is why a Torah essay competition on the environment in Jewish law and thought is being seen as such a welcome endeavor by both environmentalists and the haredi community.

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Food czarina Joan Nathan takes a fascinating look inside the insular Satmar Hasidic world — particularly at their dining tables.

Mrs. Appel’s everyday cooking includes dishes like sautéed cabbage and noodles, chicken paprikash with nocklern, stuffed cabbage and cholent with lima beans. Peppers, tomatoes and onions sat out on her counter, waiting to be turned into letcho, the ubiquitous Hungarian sauce, and a salad for a simple supper. Every once in a while, if she has been cooking all day for Shabbat meals or for other people, Mrs. Appel will serve her family frozen pizza.

Frozen pizza? Which frozen pizza has a hechsher? That’s quite awesome.

Read the full article here.

New York City is a curious place to be Jewish. It’s an undisputed homeland that attracts Jews from all over the country and world. But it can also be disorienting and alienating to search for a fitting niche within the many sub-communities: Chassidic, modern-orthodox, conservadox, eco-Jew, reform, conservative, renwal, reconstructionst…. The sheer density of Jewish population in New York creates situations that other Jewish urban populations don’t have to deal with on the same scale. It turns out that pluralism manifested in real life is not always easy.

One prime example of the pluralism-challenge centers around food and eating. One friend might be vegetarian but not strictly kosher. Another friend is strictly kosher and refuses to eat in the friend’s home because they serve non-kosher cheese. Or perhaps the vegetarian friend dislikes going to the meat-heavy kosher restaurants their friend prefers. Perhaps this sounds trivial, but I would argue that where friends cannot share a meal, it is all the more challenging for them to share anything else.

I recently discovered a blog - Two Heads of Lettuce - that attempts to bring all Jews to one table. The blog itself is simply a dynamic guide to creating delicious and inclusive vegetarian potlucks (for Shabbat or otherwise) - but they add a Jewish twist to the mix: The Two Table System. Dishes brought by guests are separated onto two tables:

Table 1 includes vegetarian dishes that do not necessarily use all certified-kosher ingredients and are not necessarily cooked in a kosher kitchen

Table 2 includes vegetarian dishes that are both completely certified-kosher AND were prepared in a kosher kitchen.

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Yesterday, the second shabbat of Chanukah, our horse Terra gave birth. Like almost every Saturday, we were getting ready to go to shul. By the time we noticed something - way out in the field we could see something white on the ground, like a bag that’d blown in from somewhere - and ran out to check, it was too late. Horrified, Pablo ran back to the house to tell me that it was ‘the baby’.

We spent the day first coaxing Terra - by now we had a vet and her assistant - to let us come near her, then lead her away to check her out and examine the little foal that never got a chance. This was our first experience with an animal’s birth - both Pablo and I grew up in relatively urban settings.

Certainly, I’d known about the steps involved in birth, but never seen it up close. This was a shocking and devastating way to start. As new animal keepers we were trying to do our best. The natural way, we have researched and were guided, was to keep the horses on pasture, which we have plenty of. The catch here is that there exists a type of grass, called Fescue, that is toxic to pregnant mares and their foal at the end of the pregnancy. If they’re eating fescue while late in their pregnancy, things get confusing. The mare may never develop enough milk, her alarm for ‘time to give birth’ may not signal her at the right time and she may overcarry the baby. The fetus may have trouble developing, may be weak at birth, or have some physical abnormalities. All this is to say, we were not prepared, and it took a tragic event to shake us.

By the time the sun was getting ready to set we got the placenta out, after much struggle on both the vet’s part and Terra’s, and on my part, strong prayer. She is a strong horse, and she did a good job through it all. We ended the night by burying the foal.

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While perusing the weekly farmer’s market on 48th and 2nd Ave, I stumbled across this stunning piece of vegetable — Romanesca cauliflower.

Bringing it home to the office resulted in a cacophony of opposing exclamations. Someone declared how ugly it was, while our top Fresh Frum the Kitchen contributor declared there was no greater proof of a divine design in nature.

This of course immediately led to speculation on whether this piece of vegetable was natural or a genetically-modified marketing ploy. Hybrid? Cross-bred? Genetically tinkered? Did it even matter?

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Someone made a comment at the Food Conference that ‘ethnic foods’ were unhealthy; take your pick between Italian (heavy sauces), Indian (full of butter), Chinese (high fat & sugar content), and nobody’s national dish is particularly good for you. Nigel countered this with an important distinction: what we think of as “typical” cuisine from other countries is often, in that country, reserved for special occasions, whereas we eat it any (and sometimes every) night of the week. Couple that with the fact that when we eat out we’re likely to eat more than we are hungry for, and still have dessert–and yes, eating special occasion food all the time IS bad for you. It’s the equivalent of having a Thanksgiving-type meal four or five nights a week.I hadn’t really thought about this before. Our culture assigns different kinds of foods and meals to different kinds of occasions, and more and more, the category of ’simple sustenance’ is giving way. Food plays a lot of different roles in our lives, and its importance for feasts, festivals, gatherings, important occasions cannot be understated. But in terms of what we need to stay healthy, our bodies require much less than society would like to feed it. We risk numbing ourselves by excess (not to mention getting fat, encouraging overproduction of our farmland, and increasing the disparity between this country and most of the rest of the world).

I do it all the time — I ‘treat’ myself. If I’m feeling sad, or stressed, or I woke up late, or even if I just happen to be biking past the bakery that gives a 50% discount on all its pastries if you arrive by bicycle (how do you turn that down!?)–I buy something yummy to get me through the day. But when I stop to tally up the week– the ‘treat’ hot chocolate, muffin, pastry, carrot cake… I’ve eaten something like that nearly every day.

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A bit belated, but still useful for those of us who are total slackers in our shopping:

By the numbers:

25: percent increase in the trash generated during the holiday season.
86: percent of TreeHugger readers who say their kids have too much stuff.
97: percent of restaurant gift certificate receivers who say they would like to receive a restaurant gift certificate again.
83,000,000: square meters of gift wrap which winds up on the UK rubbish heaps after the holiday season.
300 million: dollars spent in the USA on mass market women’s bath gift sets.

Want to cut down on your holiday waste (or regifting)? Read Treehugger.com’s Green Gift Guide and take advantage of their well-compiled advice. From top tips to greening un-green gifts to buying the eco-conscious ideas out there. As they say:

To help you in your quest to find organic chocolate for your vegan girlfriend, or eco-friendly golf tees for your not-so-vegan dad, or a hemp T for your fashionista sister; TreeHugger has put together an eco-gift guide to help you and your family have a greener holiday. We’ll be adding new ideas throughout the season, but here’s something to help you get a jump on your holiday green giving.

Post idea courtesy of Venture Cycling.

I received the cookbook, Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World by Gil Marks as a birthday gift this year, and it is a really fascinating book of Jewish history in addition to the compilation of recipes.

Marks mentions how our culinary habits were transformed due to the geographic areas in which we lived throughout the past 2000 years of exile, based on the different demographics of the countries in which we lived. Since they continued to change, as a result we don’t have one particularly distinct kind of Jewish cooking; rather we have a “mosaic” of cuisines from differing Jewish communities, each with their own history and customs. The largest ones are the Ashkenazic and Sefardic communities. The largest community of Ashkenazic Jews is that of the ancestors of the American Jewish community and the one most Americans relate with as “Jewish food.”

On the contrary, the Sefardic community, interestingly, were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 and there they grew into a large Jewish community. Today, there is a very large Sefardic community in Israel. However, Jewish cooking now depicts a blend of Jewish cultures throughout the world.

To me, these ideas depict the beauty of Jewish history and continuity. It takes something like food to show how rich are our culture and customs. Furthermore, it’s amazing to think that we are still making foods that our ancestors made hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. We have a strong dedication to customs, for if not, why then would we still be making latkes and sufganiyot on this lovely holiday of Chanukah? Although we may have altered some recipes to add a healthier twist on them, overall we have a wealth of diverse, wholesome and remarkable recipes.

I’ll talk about more of my findings from this cookbook next week, but until then – has anyone made any of the recipes they enjoyed from this cookbook that they would like to share with me? Feel free to email me!

Rabbi Shmuel responds to The Jew on why Eitan’s goat cheese isn’t kosher.

The bottom line - I wish the goat cheese venture much hatzlacha (I know what it means to be a good steward of baalei chayim) but it should be labeled according to what it is - kinda kosher, sorta kosher, kosher style or virtually kosher. We can sell or do or make or eat what we want, but the only thing we are allowed - legally and morally - to call pure Vermont Maple Syrup is just that
- pure Vermont Maple Syrup. So it’s really more of a disclosure/truthfullness issue than a kashrus one.

Surely within recent memory the almighty hechscher was less important: when we were peasants, when we grew and manufactured our own foods, we also had responsibility to see that ingredients and processing were kosher.

Is there a trend toward fetishizing the hechsher? Could it be a recent byproduct of our modern, industrialized and standardized corporate food system?

Tell us what you think.

• Sufganiyot, the new make-at-home treat. WaPo suggests they’re easy as pie. WaPo is so totally wrong. [WaPo]
• The Observer asks how much of a food geek you really are with a Foodie Quiz. 

A waiter says your lamb comes from New Zealand, you…

c) grab the waiter by his neck, shove him in a tiny crate, which you load into the hold of a plane bound for Auckland, while shouting: ‘How would you like it, you animal abusing spawn of the devil? ‘

[The Observer]

• Small farmers are “in” right now. Businessweek, cutting edge trend spotter, discovers locally grown produce.[Businessweek]
• Raw milk: unpasteurized poison or magic medical potion? [LATimes Magazine]
• Gary Hirschberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm yogurt, answers your organic questions. [ABC.com]

Nothing speaks to the variety of Jewish opinion as an attempt to create a Jewish community cookbook. As reported in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, Beth David Synagogue and the JCC New Haven produced their own cookbooks reflecting recipes new and old collected locally.

Beth David Synagogue’s cookbook is the brainchild of 11-year- old Shoshi Benjamin and 12-year-old Noam Benjamin, who concocted and coordinated the book as their bar/bat mitzvah project, the cookbook’s title “Across Time and Many Lands: The Beth David Synagogue Kosher Legacy.”

“We are all so different…from so many different places. People sent in family recipes from places like Morocco, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, New Orleans, Norway, Hungary, Russia, Israel, Greece, Britain…One page in the book has one recipe that comes from Moldavia, another from Turkey, another from what was, at the time, Persia and another from America,” says Benjamin.

…Maya Ungar, for example, reminisced about life in Irkutsk, Siberia, as she imparted her recipe for pelmanin mini pirogis n 10,000 of which were made just before the start of winter by teams of women who would take them from house to house, singing and exchanging them with all the families in the village.

Check out the recipe for Savta Yafa’s kosher Rishte at the bottom.

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Responding to accusations that AgriProcessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat processing plant and manufacturer of the Aaron’s Best brand, routinely violates worker’s rights, Conservative rabbis are stepping into the fray.

Conservative movement leaders said that they plan to establish a “tsedek hekhsher,” or a justice certification, that would ensure kosher food producers “have met a set of standards that determine the social responsibility of kosher food producers, particularly in the area of workers rights.”

Surprisingly, the OU did some tap-dancing on this one.

Reached this week, the head of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, applauded the Conservative movement for looking at labor issues, given the weight of Jewish law dedicated to the topic. Genack also said he had spoken with AgriProcessors and the United States Department of Agriculture about the working conditions at the plant. But Genack said that the Conservative movement should be careful not to blur the line between Jewish law regarding worker rights and Jewish law regarding the kosher standard of food.

“There are lots of social issues that are really important that could be subsumed under some sort of super certification,” Genack said. “But if we just move away from strict concerns about kashruth — if we talk about what they pay workers — these kinds of standards can be less than 100% clear.”

Genack also said that a major priority for the Orthodox Union was to make kosher food more widely available. “For us to set up a new amorphous standard in certain plants,” Genack said, “parts of the kosher industry are very fragile and could be adversely affected by this.” [emphasis added]

I get that kashrut is kashrut, and social justice is something else. But does R. Genack really want to be saying he’s too afraid of upsetting profits in the kosher market to make a stand for social justice?

Because that’s what he’s saying.

Workers in the AgriProcessors plant are, by and large, Mexican and Latin American immigrants, many undocumented. The recent heartbreaking news coming out of the Swift processing plant immigration raids should have our outrage pretty close to the surface on this one. It’s been shown that AgriProcessors is no different: Immigrants. Frightening working conditions. Abysmal pay.

Have you ever heard this story before? Maybe from your Zayde?

Without getting too much higher on the soap box - let us applaud the Conservative rabbis. Let us remember that our food is not an isolated item on the plate but part of a chain of events, and that it would make us a very cold people indeed if we were more concerned for the way an animal died than for the way a human lived.

Epicurious tells us about the best kosher wines. “Dry, balanced and delicious varietals from around the globe.”

On how they’re kosher:

The law specifies that for a wine to be kosher, it must be made under strict rabbinical supervision and with equipment that is used exclusively for the production of kosher wine. In addition, products used in the winemaking process, such as yeasts, must be certified kosher. The grapes and wine can be handled only by Sabbath-observant Jews — in other words, those who refrain from work of any kind from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

And why they taste funny:

Many kosher wines are also taken one step further. Jewish law states that for wines handled by the general public — for example, poured by waiters who are not Sabbath-observant Jews — to remain kosher, they must be boiled, or mevushal. The “boiling” of these wines is accomplished by flash pasteurization, a sophisticated technical process in which wine is held for a few seconds at an elevated temperature. Some wine experts believe that this procedure helps stabilize colors and tannins and can even enhance aromas. Other experts argue that while this process may not hurt wine in the short term, it does destroy bacteria that contribute to the aging of fine wine.

Shameless plug here: we’re game for a taste test. If you’ve got the samples, we’ve got the palates. Prove to jcarrot that kosher wine can outshine a more heathenly brew.

This afternoon I had lunch with Arthur Schwartz – better known in the five boroughs as The Food Maven. Arthur is a pioneer of the food writing genre, the former host of “Food Talk” on WOR in New York City, a cook book writer, and culinary instructor both in the United States and in Italy.

The conversation was fascinating, because Arthur is utterly fascinating. I don’t mean to over-sentimentalize the notion of authenticity, but how often does one come across a man who still renders his own shmaltz (chicken fat) to make traditional Jewish dishes like kishke? (Arthur’s version is encased in tinfoil rather than intestinal lining.)

Arthur plays a perfect foil to the flashy, celebrity chefs like Mario Batali and Wolfgang Puck, who have brought cuisine into the realm of pop culture. He prefers traditional unassuming cuisine (favoring Italian and Eastern European Jewish dishes), which tells a story and highlights the flavors of the ingredients, not the ego of the chef.

A full interview with Arthur, which I recorded over Middle Eastern delicacies at Mabat in Brooklyn, will be published in the February edition of Zeek Journal. Stay tuned…