Two of Hazon’s Tuv Ha’Aretz groups - New York and Long Island - went out to the Garden of Eve Farm today to glean produce (green beans, eggplant, sweet potatoes, and beets) for Island Harvest and build a sukkah - better late than never!  Check out below 1. sukkah construction 2. sukkah close up 3. Farmers Chris and Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht with Forest and Shira.

Thanks to Abigail Schade for the great photos.  There are many more great photos here by John Feinberg here!

Thanks to Cong. Ansche Chesed’s Social Action Committee for joining in on the fun and Temple Sinai for piloting the gleaning event last year!

In a pinch, I call myself a vegetarian. Over the years, I have found the term socially useful–simpler to explain than my complex eating habits–and accurately describing my diet without meat. But am I a vegetarian? Rebecca, a teen on an Israel trip I staffed this summer, wondered just this. And while at the time I responded in the affirmative, I realized that I wasn’t being entirely honest. There is an asterisk that I hadn’t thought much of: I eat fish.

What I’ve come to realize is that, to some degree, my categorization of fish as not-so-meatish is an internalization of the laws of kashruth. According to traditional Jewish law, fish is neither here nor there–it is neutral. And though there are restrictions on eating fish and meat on the same plate, this tends to be irrelevant outside the observant Jewish community. Any list of cultural Jewish foods surely includes: a) tuna melt with American cheese; b) lox and cream cheese; and c) gefilte fish neighboring brisket. As far as kashruth is concerned, fish is less of an animal than cattle or chickens.

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A Jewish food and grammar lesson from The Forward 

Rashi Fein from Boston writes:

“For some years I have had a dispute with a dear friend. I say that the plural of bagel is bagel. He says that the plural of bagel is bagels. I explain my position by arguing that bagel is a Yiddish word and that ‘two bagels’ in Yiddish would be tsvey beygl. He says that in English the plural has to be bagels. Who is right? Is there some general rule that might apply?”

There is indeed a general rule, and it says that Mr. Fein is wrong and his friend — as well, I might say, as the rest of us who say “bagels” when speaking English — is right. Simply stated, the rule is this: When a word borrowed from a foreign language has become domesticated in the borrowing language, the speakers of which are no longer conscious of its foreign origins, it obeys all the borrowing language’s grammatical rules, including those governing the formation of plurals.

This is why English speakers say “kindergartens” and “cappuccinos” instead of “kindergerten” and “cappuccini,” as they would be required to do, using the German and Italian plural forms, if Mr. Fein were to have his way. It is also why — if they are among the few who use such terms — they say “gastarbeiter” and “gelati” rather than “gastarbeiters” and “gelatos,” since they quite rightly sense that German Gastarbeiter, “foreign worker,” and Italian gelato, Italian-style ice cream or ices, have not been widely accepted as English words. And since “bagel” is clearly in the category of “kindergarten” rather than that of “gastarbeiter,” it should be pluralized in the English fashion.

Read the whole response here.

Enlitened Kosher Cooking
Nechama Cohen
Feldheim Publishers (October, 2006)

Nechama Cohen’s Enlitened Kosher Cooking attempts to strike the elusive balance between healthy eating and traditional Jewish cuisine. 

As a nutritionist and mother of five who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, Cohen originally intended her cookbook to be focused towards other Jews struggling with the disease.  Ultimately, however, Enlitend Kosher Cooking makes the broader connection between diabetes and obesity.  While enjoying meals is an important part of Shabbat and the holidays, Cohen suggests that these simchas can lead to overindulgence that contributes to weight gain and an unhealthy lifestyle.

Cohen’s book toggles between Torah (You shall be very careful of yourselves” Devarim 4:15) and the detailed nutritional charts around which her recipes are based.  She draws from the traditional canon of Jewish cooking, but her recipes are not limited to Ashkenazi fare.  In addition to Fat-Free Knaidlach and Classic Golden Chicken Soup, the book includes recipes that lighten up the familiar (Vegetarian Stuffed Peppers, Tofu Chopped Liver, Zucchini Kugel, Halva Frosting) and ones that draw from other Jewish cultures around the world (Sephardic Spicy Fish in Red Sauce, Spicy Yeminite Soup, Orange and Fennel Salad).

Cohen relies on heavily on the “ingredient swap” method of healthy cooking.  Instead of creating innovative new dishes, some of her recipes simply replace eggs with Egg Beaters, or use low fat milk or cream cheese instead of the full-fat versions.  While this approach seems slightly unsophisticated, her book is ultimately still useful for cooks who prefer traditional-feeling dishes (or are cooking for friends and relatives who do) without the extra fat and calories. 

Find out more or purchase Enlightened Kosher Cooking HERE.

Quick Bite is a new segment on The Jew & The Carrot which offers pithy reviews of today’s Jewish cookbooks. If you have a cookbook you would like to see reviewed, email tips@jcarrot.org

Members of Berkeley’s Tuv Ha’Aretz learned a hard lesson in CSA farming last week. I had two Israeli cousins in tow — they were staying with me for a few days as they took their two teenaged kids on a jaunt through parts of the U.S., and incidentally, just as they looked at me in astonishment when I told them I lit candles and said kiddush every Friday night, they were equally incredulous when I told them that I picked up a box of organic veggies every Wednesday from my synagogue — as soon as I took my box, I felt it was much lighter than usual. I didn’t stop to find out why; I was in a rush to get my cousins to the car rental place.

If we were disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t be getting our gorgeous tomatoes last week, it was heartbreaking to read what is happening on our farm. A vacationer returned from Hawaii to the Dixon area (where our farm is located, right outside Davis, CA) with the dreaded Meditteranean Fruitfly. The whole area of Dixon has been quarantined, and no produce that the fruitfly likes can leave any farm. Read more »

Growing up, I loved preparing for Sukkot.  I looked forward to decorating my synagogue’s sukkah - stringing up bumpy gourds and looping paper chains through the open ceiling beams.  Even now, I associate the smell of fresh pine with the boughs we wove into the sukkah walls, and crave the sweet apple cider we drank while swatting away yellow jackets. 

These days, synagogues and Hillels across the country are jumping onto a new Sukkot craze - Pizza in the Hut.  Playing off the name of one of America’s most ubiquitous restaurant chains, this program ties together the mandate to dwell in a sukkah, with pizza’s undeniable power to bring people together.  (Google ”Pizza in the Hut” to get a sense of how widespread this phenomenon has become.)

The program certainly has it’s heart in the right place - but in practice, it’s incredibly backwards. 

Read more »

Days after Yom Kippur and it is already happening again: another pork establishment in Israel was set on fire.  Ynet reported the news, though they have yet to report for sure whether or not the arsonist was an ultra-Orthodox Jew; nevertheless, this is just one of many recent related attacks and one more part of the ongoing battle over pork in Israel (see Ben Murane’s post on such battles in Netanya).

I just arrived in Israel one day before Yom Kippur and will be here for the year exclusively researching pork in Israel.  I am specifically analyzing the tension between religious and secular Israelis, and am interested in how certain Israelis raise and eat pork as a form of political and cultural protest.  It is still illegal to raise pigs on Jewish land, though through a series of loopholes, a few kibbutzim have emerged as major producers of Israel-raised pork products.  I’ve been following this topic very closely and when attacks like this most recent one occur, I take notice . . . and feel surprisingly conflicted.    Read more »

I have not held back on my love of all things cheese on this site.  Today is no exception.  I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love…with 5-Spoke Creamery. 

5-spoke cheeses are:

• handcrafted / artisinal
• made from raw milk of grass-fed cows
• pesticide and hormone free
• KOSHER! (Kof-K)

The best part is, they’re available to accept my love.  You can find 5-Spoke at Whole Foods across the Northeast and at specialty food marts in NYC like Zabars, Fairway, Bierkraft, etc.  Not in your neighborhood yet?  Contact 5-Spoke and tell them to share the love in your community.  As for me, I’m off to make some of my very own 5-Spoke Pasta with Arugula Pesto.  ummm….cheeessseee.

Upon contemplating my impending annual trip to the Lower East Side to purchase my lulav and etrog (anyone in jcarrot-land know of a good source for organic ones?) , I began channeling my Russian immigrant ancestors, eyed a giant fresh beet from last week’s CSA pickup, and had an irresistible craving for borscht. I decided on an adventurous detour from the traditional recipe, checked the usual sources and made a fabulous roasted beet borscht that is great hot or cold, served with a garnish of sour cream and grated apple.

During the process of cooking this dish, I stumbled across my first New Year’s food resolution:

NEVER USE A HAND BLENDER TO MAKE BORSCHT

My second food resolution, lower my cholesterol, will have to wait until after I try this recipe…

In an update to the previous post about the JCPA’s Food Stamp Challenge this past week, the New York Jewish Week reports that, in search of cheap food while participating in the $21/week Food Stamp Challenge,

“McDonald�s Dollar Menu fit the bill for Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.”

Closer to the action, the Washington Jewish Week reported that Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), in fact, did not take the Challenge in the end, but hopes to participate with the Washington JCRC later this fall.

JCPA Director Steve Gutow also referred to some of the problems underlying food injustices in that article, and the need for Jews to be more involved in addressing them:

“We are no longer connected to the communities from which the poor usually come,” Gutow said. “We’re not as close to the Hispanic community or the African American community, and we need to regalvanize that. Part of our strength as American Jews is that we have always been able to connect with different groups, and we need to get back to that.”

(x-posted to Pickled)

I grew up in a household with a Christian dad and a liberally observant mom, so there wasn’t much fasting going on in my house on Yom Kippur. Throughout my teenage years, I would go to synagogue and watch hungry, repenting Jews sneak off to the bathroom to eat the baggie of Cheese Nips they hid in their purse. My family would come home from services and eat warm corned beef with mustard, purchased from a nearby deli. I had no sense of guilt. I knew that some Jews fasted, but my family (and apparently a solid handful of other congregants) didn’t.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York after college that I started to get the sense that fasting was kind of a big deal. I was invited to a “pre-fast” meal before Kol Nidre - a concept that didn’t really resonate with me since I was still planning to have breakfast the next day. I was struck during that meal at how reverent and aware people were of their food. The dinner guests filled their dishes with knowing looks, as if they knew they’d never eat again, not just abstain for the next 25 hours.

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The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has posted several compelling narratives of Jewish leaders, including JCPA and JCRC leaders, Rabbi David Saperstein of the RAC, and Congressmen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who’ve been participating in its Food Stamp Challenge on its new blog.

In the latest post, JCPA Director Steve Gutow says “To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity” of his experience spending only $21/day or $1/meal on food this week, to replicate the real lives of many food stamp recipients around the country.

“Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.”

An earlier post by a participant in CA alludes to one of the reasons why the obesity epidemic has taken root so strongly among low-income households: “I found calories to be affordable. I did not find the wide array of food that I had expected to find when I prepared my shopping list.”

Gutow has also posted a copy of the transcript from the press conference JCPA held in Washington yesterday.

Wednesday’s Washington Times included an op-ed blasting the Food Stamp Challenge as a useless publicity ploy–a gross overgeneralization that does highlight a genuine problem with the Challenge. Read more »

Erev Yom Kippur / 20 / September 2007

Dear All,

I had one of the most astonishing and fascinating conversations of my life over Rosh Hashanah. It was about killing two goats, and I wanted briefly to share it with you ahead of Yom Kippur and Succot.

I spent Rosh Hashanah at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, and – after visiting the goats there – I sat down with Aitan Mizrahi, Freedman’s very own goatherd and the founder of the Adva Goat Dairy and Rachel Gaul, another goatherd friend of Aitan’s.  This Yom Kippur will be exactly a month since I posted a piece on The Jew & The Carrot, titled Schechting a goat at the Hazon Food Conference?  The conference will be at Freedman, and the key part of the conversation went roughly as follows:

-You know, of course, that if you want to schecht two goats at the Food Conference [in early December], you’ll have to pay to feed them from October till December.
-Why?
-Well, because otherwise they’ll be killed in October – that’s when bucks [male goats] get slaughtered.
-Why’s that?
-Well, goats give birth in the spring. The kids in due course give milk, so they live for a good number of years; but the bucks have no use, so they’re fed during the summer, when food is abundant, and then typically they’re killed in October, ahead of the winter.
-That’s unbelievable! That’s just incredible! You’re telling me that if we schecht two goats at the food conference, we’ll actually be extending their lives by two months – because otherwise they’d be killed in October?
-Yeah, Nige. You know – “no dairy without death.”
-NO DAIRY WITHOUT DEATH??!!

Read more »

The Jewish Week published an article this week that examines: The Yom Kippur tradition of kaporot, the Jewish ethical food movement. Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot both get significant shout-outs. Read the full article here (or below).

Swinging No More
Kaporos and the new eco-kosher movement.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer

Growing up out of town, in a non-Orthodox household, I never knew from kaporos.

It’s a post-Talmudic, pre-Yom Kippur custom in some traditional circles that involves swinging a live chicken three times over your head, reciting some verses that symbolically transfer your sins to the fowl — a rooster for a man, a hen for a woman — then leaving it behind to be slaughtered, in a kosher manner of course, and given to a needy family.

Kaporos is Hebrew for “atonements.” The custom is supposed to teach sensitivity for God’s creatures and awareness of one’s own transgressions. Orthodox, but a rationalist, I wasn’t interested. Then Tami called.

“Do you want to do kaporos with me?” she asked.

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