This is remarkable, from the headlines in Britain:
Supermarket chain Tesco pledged last night to revolutionise its business to become “a leader in helping to create a low-carbon economy” with a raft of new measures to help combat climate change.
In the most significant step announced yesterday, the UK’s biggest retailer, which produces 2m tonnes of carbon a year in the UK, said it would put new labels on every one of the 70,000 products it sells so that shoppers can compare carbon costs in the same way they can compare salt content and calorie counts.
Tesco pledged marking all products shipped via airplane (counting for 13% of all CO2 omissions) and to reduce to 1% the amount of products flown from 2-3%. Other changes include halving the prices of low-energy light bulbs, converting Tesco’s truck fleet to run on 50% biodiesel mix and providing children with carbon calculators to show how simple changes, such as car-sharing, can cut carbon costs. At the bottom, it compares how
The U.S. has a long way to go in order to catch up. Full article below.
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“So how about coming back to my place and I’ll explain the Jewish dietary laws to you?”
I just got an email from someone about Walmart being accused of something called ‘organic fraud’. People seem to be genuinely concerned about labeling practices at a supermarket giant. It is not shocking to me, having seen what those ‘organic’ choices are at the large supermarkets, that labels are misplaced, and organic items are intermixed with conventional produce to make the presence of ‘organic’ more obvious.
From the few times I have looked for organic produce at our ‘local’ SuperTarget, I have seen some disturbing things, probably very similar to the Walmart fiasco.
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We’re coming at kosher from all directions now…. an eco-kosher hechsher from the Conservative movement might make it harder for folks who need an Orthodox hechsher to find good eco-groovy food! Kosher is about limits on desire and has nothing to do with factory farming! We’re not sure if Aitan’s goat cheese is kosher, with a big or little K, or just plain awesome…
But what I want to know is: why do you keep kosher?
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We’ve gotten a lot of calls at the office these past few days of people asking:
Do you know where I can get local organic food for Tu B’Shevat?
This is, of course, exciting that people think to call Hazon to ask these things, and that people are thinking about these things in the first place.
It’s problematic, though. Tu B’Shevat is February 3rd. That is, a globally-warmed season aside, quite squarely in the middle of the winter for most American Jews.
What, then, are our options?
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Among the joys of visiting my cousin Gladys is perusing her cookbooks, some 3000, collected over the last 90 years.
Though she had ample material for study, Gladys was never a good cook. As her sister used to say, “a million recipes in this house and they all taste like tunafish.”
On my recent trip, I focused on the 200 or so Jewish cookbooks, among them some 15 iterations of Hadassah cookbooks, and 2 copies each of the Italian-Kosher, Chinese-Kosher, and French-Kosher cookbooks (one for milk and one for meat?).
The recipes have a sameness to them – either oldworld favorites in jeopardy of being lost, or timesaving tips that involve cream of mushroom soup and a jar of pimentos.
But the book titles make me smile:
- Love and Knishes
- A Rage to Nosh
- Mazel Tov Y’all
- From Noodles to Strudels (parts 1&2)
- So Eat, My Love
- From Mama to Mousse
- Kosher Kitchen Capers
- Tradition in the Kitchen
- The Balabusta’s Best
- Food That Really Shmecks
I’m writing this post from Oakland, Ca at the “Adamah West” house. Here live 3 Adamah alumni doing their best to live the ideals that they developed at Adamah. Having spent a few days here, I can tell you that they’re doing a pretty solid job. First of all, the house is both dark and cold, which as I’ve learned is the first step in being an environmental household: no heat, no lights. Seriously though, they pick oranges from the tree in the backyard (and give them away as party favors), the cabinet in the living room contains at least 3 different strands of bacteria fermenting various types of vegetables and other goodies, and I just enjoyed a slice of fresh bread hot out of the oven….
Today I saw my first redwood trees while hiking in the Muir Woods with two friends. I wanted to see a redwood tree up close, and Ian wanted to forage for chanterelle mushrooms. At about one o’clock we pulled off the trail into a patch of “dappled sunlight” to sit down for our bagged lunch. Before we took our first bites, Adam asked for a communal blessing over our food so I said the “Hamotzi” and Ian offered some words of thanks to the Source of food, life, fresh air, and all growing things. Since we’re Jews, we didn’t just eat; we ate and discussed, and played variations of one of my favorite games, Amateur Geologist!
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Weighing in on behalf of the sybarritic side of the food chain, Dan Barber, chef owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns (which wins my award for single best dish in NYC - “This Morning’s Farm Egg” on the appetizer menu), lays into the unsavory complexities of the upcoming Farm Bill debate in Congress.
It’s a giant, confusing piece and deserves a read.
No one wants farmers to suffer, especially chefs. But if we’re spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat. And I mean eat, not process into something that resembles food. That means fewer subsidies for grains like corn and soy, and more help for growers of broccoli and tomatoes.
How do we do this? We could start by rewarding diversity over yield, basing subsidy payments not on how many acres of corn a farmer grows but on the number of varieties of crops he plants.
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I’m writing from LimmudNY, a volunteer-led, pluralistic conference of Jewish learning. For 800 people. At a resort in the Catskills. Feeding 800 hungry Jews is no easy task. And food at conferences, perhaps not especially but definitely including Jewish conferences, tends to be dismal, heat-and-serve fare.
For the last two years, there has been a small, but increasing effort to bring some organic, locally grown food to Limmud, in addition to it being glatt kosher. Two years ago, Hazon worked with two of our local partner farms (Adamah, and The Garden of Eve) who donated eggs, winter squash and potatoes - though could only provide enough to feed 150 of the participants, and only for one meal.
This year, there was a volunteer committee designated to expand our efforts to bring local, and at least organic, trans-fat free, wholesome food to Limmud (as Hazon did at our Food Conference in December). And the result?
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The most popular question we’ve been asked by far is: So, what do you do in the ‘off-season’? True, the person asking often has the intention of continuing the conversation. But implied is the idea that farming is our ‘day job’ and that among other hobbies and past-times, we enjoy a long ‘off-season’, searching for something fun and exciting to do. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Show me a farmer who spends months traveling the world during the ‘off-season’ and I’ll say, That is not what farming is about.
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Raised during the Great Depression, my father and his family grew a significnat portion of their own food in their (then) rural Chicago suburb. I recently asked him if he could recall what kinds of food they grew. Closing his eyes briefly to envision the plot of soil he once worked, he listed: “beets, potatoes, carrots, asparagus, watermelon, and fruit trees: apples, pears, and cherries - you know, typical things. A moment later he said, “I was paid 1 penny for every 100 potato bugs I removed from the garden.”
I was blown away that my 83-year old father, whose kitchen-savvy includes (exhaustively) microwaving canned soup and scrambling eggs, was once in charge of pulling bugs off of potatoes. At one point in his life, he was far more intimately connected to his food than I could ever hope to be as an apartment dweller in New York City. Read more »
Nigel Savage, writing for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, ponders kashrut and the modern food chain:
But the world, as we know, is changing fast. The way that most people in the West eat food has probably changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500. In general we have lost touch with the seasons; we eat an enormous amount of processed food; we cook far less from first principles than we used to. My late grandma, of blessed memory, died three years ago in Manchester, England, aged nearly 96. When she began her life, she got a kosher chicken by going with her mother to the kosher slaughterer, picking a chicken, watching the shochet slaughter it, then taking it home and plucking its feathers and purging it in the manner required by Jewish law. By the end of her life she had great-grandkids living in California who simply take a kosher chicken nugget from the freezer and put it in the microwave. The chicken that became the chicken nugget was killed in the same way that the chicken ninety years ago was killed: but the lives of those two chickens will have been very different, and the eating patterns of those who ate the chickens is very different indeed.
The pace of change in food production and distribution has moved faster than the rabbinical tradition can quite cope with. How do we infer laws from the Torah about whether GMO foods are ok or not? What does the Torah have to say about industrial monoculture? What does the Torah say about the extent of food packaging and transportation today? Or about obesity, or fast food, or vegetarianism?
[NCRLC Magazine]
Israeli company, Veterix, has developed a way to ensure humanely raised, antibiotic-free livestock using wireless computer technology. Sensors are implanted in a cow’s second stomach, reporting back data on heart rate and other indicators of stress levels.
Currently, when a farmer suspects disease in one member of a herd, she is often forced to innoculate every animal prophylactically. Veterix says its technology can help farmers locate animals experiencing trauma, either because they’ve been separated from the herd or because they’re suffering illness such as hoof and mouth disease, or just because they’re horny.
“Healthy animals mean healthy people,” says Eliav Tahar, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We have built a system that ensures animals will give better meat and milk.” The cost of the transmitter is about $75 per head.
Veterix hopes consumers will drive adoption of the technology, searching for Veterix stamped meat, in much the same way they look for other symbols such as Organic or Kosher.
