There’s no question - the 2007 Farm Bill, which will be voted on by the Senate at the end of September - is serious stuff that will impact farmers and consumers alike. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be funny video about it where a do-gooding apple chases an mischevious snack cake around the city, right? Right?

Click here to watch the video.

In other weird news, PETA - the veggie sensationalists of the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign - is at it again.  The New York Times reports in “Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change:

PETA is outfitting a Hummer with a driver in a chicken suit and a vinyl banner proclaiming meat as the top cause of global warming. It will send the vehicle to the start of the climate forum the White House is sponsoring in Washington on Sept. 27, “and to headquarters of environmental groups, if they don’t start shaping up,” Mr. Prescott warned.

I don’t really have the words for this - but something tells me this stunt won’t bring much credibility to PETA’s cause…

Read the article here.

One thing I hate about living in California is having to wait until Wednesday to get The New Yorker. When I lived in New York, receiving both that and New York on Mondays made the beginning of the week a little bit brighter. My friend Deborah used to refer to it as “Magazine Monday.”

I admit it, I’m a total New Yorker junkie, and it hasn’t abated since I left. (Did anyone catch Roz Chast’s full-page cartoon recently of ‘The Museum of One’s Kitchen?’ It’s up on my fridge right now, and absolutely everyone who has seen it has chortled in recognition of their own ‘Cabinet of Too Many Teas…’) Well, given that it only came yesterday, I haven’t had time to read it yet. But I noticed that in the double issue which is entirely dedicated to food, readers of this blog will find several articles of interest; most notably, there is a Jane Kramer profile of Claudia Roden, author of one of my favorites, “The Book of Jewish Food,” and an exploration of eating from the five boroughs by Adam Gopnik. If you are not a subscriber, I’d go get a copy, it looks to make for some excellent holiday-weekend reading.

Cross-posted to the Kosher Blog
For many of you, having guests at a shabbat meal means often juggling various dietary restrictions preferences that guests may bring to the table. Michael Pollan makes the interesting point that the French consider it improper to impose your diet onto your host, and yet how many of you can recall meals in which you were left with virtually nothing to eat as a result of your kashrut/vege- pesce- ovo- lacto- tarianism/ or any possible allergies. Peter Berley’s The Flexitarian Table may hopefully solve at least some of the issues. Read more »

Since Tuv Ha’Aretz started here in Berkeley, I’ve gotten to know Adam Edell quite well. We sit and chat while waiting for members to pick up their boxes of produce. We talk, we schmooze, we inspect the zucchini and tomatoes. I’ve even met his dad. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen him “grinning grubbily.”

That’s how Adam was described in this article called “Sustainable Synagogue,” published this week one of the area’s free weeklies, the East Bay Express.

I’m sorry, I’m a journalist too, so I know how tempting it can be to put in that perfect alliterative phrase, even when it doesn’t fully apply. I’m not even sure what a grubbily-looking grin looks like. But after reading this otherwise very complimentary article about us, I couldn’t help but fixate on that one line. Then again, maybe it’s only natural to grin grubbily when talking about composting.

Leadership of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) will be participating in the now-famous Food Stamp Challenge during the Days of Awe period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Sept. 14th-21st).

Executive Director Rabbi Steve Gutow and JCPA Chair Lois Frank will stick to the $1 per meal or $21/week budget of an average food stamp recipient, as part of the organization’s new Anti-Poverty Campaign, to highlight the connections between Jewish teachings surrounding poverty and the current Food Stamp reauthorization component of the Farm Bill.

JCRC leadership and Jewish communities around the country are being encouraged to also ”Take the Challenge,” coinciding with the Locavores’ September Local Food Challenge. Do any of us dare to take the double challenge? I think this would result in nearly an 11-day long Yom Kippur fast, or perhaps subsistance only on apples, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and the remains of nectarines and melon.

Ideally, an organized Jewish participation in the Food Stamp Challenge, including Rabbis and other national Jewish leaders, could have an impact on federal legislation, if it is publicized appropriately for advocacy. Hopefully, continued action surrounding Food Stamps will have an impact on the Farm Bill, which has yet to pass out of the Senate Agriculture Committee (expected in mid-October).

As Hazon’s New York Ride approaches, everyone here at Adamah is excited. For one, we’ve been training for the Ride and it so happens that our program culminates with the awesome shabbaton followed by the Ride itself. That means Anna’s in the kitchen baking bread to help us load up on carbs this week and we’re all making pancakes with goat’s milk every morning. We’re also doing last minute maintenance and repairs on our bikes and scrounging around for extra bike shorts. In two days we look forward to welcoming hundreds of riders to our community and showing off our three months of work. Can’t wait for you all to get here.

Isabella Freedman is also gearing up for the 400+ people who will help make the New York ride the largest retreat to be held at the center. We’ve stocked up on new items, such as silverware, plates, wine glasses, as well as new pots and pans. In order for these items to be used in our kosher kitchen, we need to do a whole lot of toiveling. Toiveling is the practice of dipping kitchen accessories in a mikveh (ritual bath) to purify them and make them kosher before permanent cooking use. Read more »

In preparation for Rosh Hashanah I have been thinking about what I always seem to be thinking about …. namely food. This year I will be preparing meals for a yet to be determined number of family and friends (quite a feat in my tiny only semi-functional kitchen with a mini stove that has not worked properly in 2 years and burners that seem to go on strike every few weeks). As this New Year approaches, I’ve been mulling over the significance and symbolism of food in our tradition. For much of our collective history, Jews were an agricultural people, maintaining the delicate balance of give and take with the earth. They nurtured the land that sustained them and directly reaped the benefits of their labor. Even if you yourself were not a farmer, you likely knew your neighbor who was. Nothing was taken for granted, the rainfall, the fertility of the soil, the well preserved seeds passed down from generation to generation, the livestock, the fruit trees, and the grain - it was all very real to the Jews who came together to celebrate their feast days. Simply put, food was holy.

Needless to say, today our relationship with food is very different. We are much farther removed from our food sources. Even when we try to support local agriculture, we are not dependent upon it. We are part of a thriving global economy that makes almost anything available to us at anytime (at a price of course). So if there is a hailstorm in northern New York, or Pennsylvania, or New Jersey, and crops are decimated - most New Yorkers would not even notice. We have been conditioned to associate food with hermetically sealed plastic packaging instead of the soil, plants, and aimals that are the true sources of our sustenance (which is why I believe that so many people who do eat meat are sqeemish about witnessing an animal being slaughtered ala hazon’s schitah debate - or even making the mental association that their “cutlet” in all of its skinless boneless glory was once a living breathing bird)

What I have decided to do this Rosh Hashanah is to focus on the local and seasonal bounty and blend in the traditional foods symbolic of the goodness, sweetness, and fruitfulness we hope to be blessed with in the year to come. Read more »

…The Jew & The Carrot style!

The holiday of Rosh Hashana (and the month of Elul leading up to it), is a time for shedding your spiritual and relationship baggage.  It’s a time to open up to new possibilities and be grateful for everything you have.  A time to let the blasts of the shofar shake you awake.  More than anything, Rosh Hashana gives us the opportunity for tshuva - to return to our best, most full selves.  As we turn inward this month, we have the chance to ask, what impact do we want to have on our communities?

 In honor of the coming holiday, The Jew & The Carrot created two great resources for Rosh Hashana.

• Rosh Hashana menu A delicious menu filled with vibrant, seasonal recipes for your holiday table.  (Try heirloom baked apples with candied walnuts!)
• Resource page filled with ideas to add a healthy, sustainable twist to your holiday. (Pure maple syrup on your apples?  That’s just the beginning…)

Keep an eye out for even more recipes from The Jew & the Carrot blogger and chef, Linda Lantos.  And look out in the days before Rosh Hashana for an exclusive interview with award-winning cookbook author, Joan Nathan!

Be open-eyed to the great wonders of nature, familiar though
they be. But men are more wont to be astonished at the sun’s eclipse than at its unfailing rise. - Hayyim Luzzatto

I’m watching the lunar eclipse at this early hour, 3:00 am PST, as I put together this week’s newsletter for the Berkeley Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA. 18th century kabbalist and astrologer Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto reminds us that witnessing rare shifts in the cosmic gears gives us a lot of bang for our buck, but that there is power too in the regularity of the 24/7 revolution.

Consider our attitudes as we greet the contents of our weekly boxes. They can have the ability to inspire gasps of awe with a new arrival (concord grapes!) or remarks of displeasure as one pushes past the old standby (oh look, zucchini…again). Believe me, with all my aphid- and ant-infested corn, water-stressed eggplant and bitter cukes, I’m actually quite grateful for my indefatigable squash plants, who have churned out a steady crop unscathed by pestilence all summer long, k’naina hora. As sure as I can count on a new crookneck poking out from underneath those broad leaves the minute I turn around, oh constant squash has sustained me through the diminished returns of other crops I’ve grown less successfully.

Read more »

Ask the average American to name a Jewish bread and there’s a 50% chance they’ll say bagels. But what is it that has made bagels a poster-child for Jewish baking? There is more than one answer to this question, the most popular attributing the creation of bagels to a Jewish baker living in 1683 Vienna. According to folklore, this unnamed man invented the bagel as a tribute to King John III Sobieski of Poland, who had saved the city from Turkish invaders with a daring cavalry charge. This story has led some to believe that bagels were originally U shaped like stirrups. However, other historians dispute this claim, arguing that the Yiddish word ‘beygal’ has been traced to 17th century Crackow, Poland. It is here that an official document of ‘Jewish Community Regulations’ - dated to 1610 - listed ‘beygals’ among the approved gifts for women in childbirth or midwives. These beygals were circular like our modern bagels, and the shape was thought to symbolize the eternal cycle of life, with no beginning and no end. Whatever their origin, what we do know for certain is that bagels were brought to North America by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in the late 1800’s where they quickly gained popularity in New York City. Yet the bagel appreciation that is so much a part of American culture today didn’t begin to take shape until the 1950’s, when Lender’s began selling them to supermarkets. Hard to believe America’s love affair with bagels & cream cheese is only fifty odd years old, but there it is!

Click here to learn how to make bagels in your own home - it’s surprisingly easy! (Also don’t forget about the Baking and Books raffle - only 8 days are left!)

Dan Barber - my own personal food hero, and one of the featured presenters at Hazon’s 2007 Food Conference - was recently interviewed over at Salon.com.   The topic: agriculture, oil, and the 2007 Farm Bill.  Barber said:

In this country alone, food - from growing to processing, transportation and fertilizer — accounts for about 17 percent of all oil we use, a little less than automobiles. Not only is there an ecological cost to transporting food, because of fossil fuels, but there is a huge ecological impact from the way we grow our food - whether it travels 10 feet or 10,000 miles.  

And…

The typical American cow is just an oil barrel. It’s [fed] corn. And that corn is fed fertilizer and pesticides, meaning oil. It is trucked from a cornfield in Iowa to a feedlot in Colorado, or wherever, again oil. And then that hamburger meat is processed … in oil. And then that hamburger meat is shipped to all the fast-food restaurants — more oil. [The process is] a gas guzzler.

Read more »

Over the last couple of days, I’ve watched with interest the growing debate around whether or not Hazon should schect a goat (or two) at the Hazon Food Conference. Last night, however, I was faced with my own “meaty” challenge: whether or not to eat it.

I have been a vegetarian for the last eight years and was vegan for two. Over that time, I have never particularly craved meat aside from an occasional urge for a corned beef sandwich from this amazing deli near my parents’ house in Chicago. (Even then, I’m not sure if it was the meat itself I craved, or the comforting memory of my mom coming home with a warm corned beef bundle wrapped in hefty white paper.)

Last night, however, was a different story. I found myself tagging along to dinner at a kosher Bukharian restaurant on 108th street, also known as “Bukharian Broadway, in Rego Park, Queens. (To read more about Bukharian Jews and their culinary delights, read Julia Moskin’s great article in the NY Times Dining & Wine section.)

Up until last night, I had certainly never had Bukharian food and to be honest - I barely knew that this sub-group of Central Asian Jews even existed. So I didn’t realize right away what my friend meant when he said to me, “you might want to have a snack on the way.” Turns out, he was referring to the menu which was filled with chicken and lamb kebabs, lamb samsi (like an Indian samosa), sweet breads, and special pulled noodles…with spicy lamb.

Read more »

Get out your sustainable, local, affordable healthy food calendars, folks….

Because Farm Aid has released its lineup of HOMEGROWN Happenings surrounding Sun Sept 9th’s Farm Aid Concert on Randall’s Island in NY. The events, in partnership with many other local food and agriculture organizations, include a festival at Union Square from 10-4 on Sept 8th, and a week of farmfresh menu options at several NYC restaurants.

While the Farm Aid concert, for which tickets are still available, is the real peak of the homegrown happenings, don’t think it’s all over when the leaves drop from the trees- the festival will be culmniating with the theatrical debut of KING CORN, an amazing documentary about two twenty-somethings from Boston who decide to drive to Iowa and grow 1 acre of corn for 1 year, looking at the complexities of our food system in a nuanced and witty manner all the while their crop is growing. The film screening opens at Cinema Village on October 7 and runs for nearly 2 months.

Full Farm Aid NYC Calendar available here.

How local is your Shabbat? Many people set themselves the challenge to “eat local” for a meal, to focus on what’s available in a given place and season. My experience of eating local this summer so far transcends the cliche that I have to pause to remember how unusual this experience is, how much I have learned from it.

I’ve been growing food on 5 acres of land with a dozen or so other young Jews this summer at Adamah. Tonight is our last Shabbat together as a community, and we’re in the process of cooking a feast. The food is abundant, fresh, & for the most part, grown right here. The question is not, “What shall we make for dinner” but, “What shall we do with the tomatoes?”. It’s a relationship with the earth and the weather, and we’re learning that all things are possible — but not all the time. And noticing the results of a particular blend of sunny and rainy days, or the earth tilting away from the sun, or the summer winding down into fall, reinforces our awareness of the awesome diversity of edible plants.

Finally, if it’s true that “you are what you eat,” this meal is made with the sweat of some of the most talented, beautiful, caring, inspiring people I have ever met. The conversations while weeding, the grunting from behind the tiller, and everytime two people share the load of a heavy harvest bin full of zucchini — these are all in the food we eat. I don’t have to tell you it tastes damn good! Don’t let the concept of “eating local” get you too caught up in the number of miles or the gallons of gasoline. Eating local means eating the world you want to live in, the world you do live in. It means your food is a reflection of your experience of time passing, and a way to celebrate it. It means that instead of being nourished by proteins and vitamins, you’re being nourished by the people and the energy and the world around you.

So here’s what’s on the menu for tonight — shabbat shalom!

Read more »