Ever wondered what eco-Judaism sounds like from a woman’s perspective? Think it’s all a bunch of spiritual, hippy-dippy hoo hah? Okay, that might be part of it - but it turns out, there’s a wider world of female, Jewish environmentalists out there than you may have expected.

Lilith Magazine’s latest issue features a section called “Women take on the Environment.” Hear first hand from seven women: “Leagle Eagle” Tzipi Iser Itzik, “Frying-Pan Bodhisattva” Betsy Teutsch, “Veggie Pioneer” Dr. Roberta Kalechofsky, “Outdoor Educator” Nili Simhai, “Activist/Executive” Barbara Lerman-Golomb, me as the offical “Blogmesiter,” and The Jew & The Carrot’s very own hard core “truck farmer,” Esther Mandelheim, as they discuss their own journeys - as Jews, as women, and as guardians of the earth.

Read the Lilith article here.

Thanks to Rabbi Ian Pear (Rabbi of the Shir Hadash community in Israel) for this guest post. It’s funny how things come in twos and threes - Rabbi Pear’s post picks up on the theme of simcha and meat that Avi included in his most recent post about Chef Frankel.

Cross-posted from (Joyous Judaism)

For vegetarians, one Talmudic phrase is particularly bothersome: “There is no simcha (joy) without meat and wine.” The customary way to deal with this dictum — that is, if one is a vegetarian — is to argue that the Talmud was speaking subjectively not objectively — i.e., it did not believe meat and wine were objectively the only means by which simcha could be achieved, but rather the most likely catalyst for the majority of people. Or to put it another way: If one genuinely feels simcha by eating meat and drinking wine, then such a person certainly should not refrain from doing so when mandated to celebrate life — like at a wedding, brit mila, Shabbat meal, etc.. He must enjoy himself! A puritanical asceticism is not permitted; the simcha requires meat and wine. On the other hand, if a person does not feel simcha by eating meat and wine, then he is certainly not obligated to do so, but rather must find an alternative source of joy and pursue that course instead.

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As the saying goes: “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  Well, in the case of one synagogue in Memphis, Tennesee, when life gave them BBQ, they made kosher BBQ.

Memphis is home to the annual World Champion Barbeque Cooking Contest, attracting over 100,000 attendees each year.  But with categories like “Patio Porkers” and “Whole Hog,” and more than 30 tons of pork cooked throughout the celebration, the event is far from kosher friendly.  Nearly two decades ago, the members of the Anshei Sphard – Beth El Emeth Congregation, asked the contest organizers if they might start a kosher barbeque section, and extend the festival one extra day, so Jewish BBQ aficionados could compete on Sunday instead of Saturday.

Undeterred when their request was rejected, they started their own BBQ contest in the shul parking lot, featuring kosher beef instead of pork.  This Sunday, they’ll celebrate the 19th annual Asbee/Kroger Kosher BBQ & Festival.

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Laura Frankel is not your typical kosher chef. For those of who have been reading her recent posts, she has little tolerance for fake foods and refuses to kowtow to clients who demand kosher versions of otherwise unkosher food. I recently had the opportunity to sit and chat with her about her thoughts on food and the nature of food in Jewish society.

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(cross-posted on US Food Policy blog)

Yesterday, the NYTimes reported on the difficult and rewarding nature of trying to get local foods into schools, by overcoming tangible barriers and bureaucratic obstacles in Local Carrots with a Side of Red Tape.

The article illustrates the large example of the NYC School System which has tried to use its tremendous purchasing power to help many of the struggling fruit and vegetable farmers of New York state. This video features a smaller scale example in MA.

The article makes brief mention of the policies which currently make it difficult for the 10,874 [and counting] schools across the country that are part of the Farm to School movement to source school food locally, which brings us back to…drumroll, please: THE FARM BILL.

In case readers of this blog don’t have enough other reasons to care about the Farm Bill–which is scheduled to be debated by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee next Tuesday, October 23–with farm and conservation payments, organic research, food stamps and the myriad other items up for negotiation, the ability for schools to request local foods for school meals is a small item of great import to be included in the draft of the Farm Bill due out any day now.

Specifically, all schools that receive federal dollars for school meal (lunch, breakfast, after-school, summer, etc.) purchases must follow a federal bidding process, also called procurement, Read more »

It’s old news by now that food is hot.  Not scald the roof of your mouth hot, but front page, all the rage, everybody’s talking about it hot.  Here are a couple of my favorite ”food in the news” stories from the week.  Come get them while they’re, well, you know… 

Israeli Slow Food
For a look into the emerging Slow Food movement in Israel, check out this article in The Jerusalem Post online edition called, “Taking time out from fast food game for some slow food” (the article is better than the title!) 

Kosher BBQ
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel talks Kosher BBQ, tailgating, and the Green Bay Packers in “Have prayers and Packers too.”

Carrots and Cafeterias
What happens when locally-grown food meets large institutions, like New York City’s public school system?  This week’s New York Times follows the trail of a farmer’s carrots to the lunch trays of school kids in ”Local carrots with a side of red tape.”

Thanks to Hazon friend, Devora Kimelman-Block for sending us her d’var Torah on last week’s parsah, Noah.  You may recognize Devora as the woman who pioneered a Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA at her shul, Tifereth Israel, or for her quickly-growing reputation as a “kosher, free range meat” pioneer.  Check out the “Meet your Meat” shabbaton Tifereth Israel is hosting at the end of the month.

In the story of Noah and the flood earth had gone to ruin and was filled with lawlessness and corruption.

“An end of all flesh has come before me and the earth is filled with wrongdoing through them; here, I am about to bring ruin upon them, along with the earth.” (6:13).

What constituted this lawlessness, corruption or wrongdoing is not specified. What did the pre-flood world look like? It seems that there was massive chaos and disorderliness in a number of ways.

In the beginning of Genesis, God creates (or orders) the world. The creation of the world really seems to be about putting things in place. First there was chaos, waters, darkness. God puts separates the light and dark, the waters above from the waters below (which enables land), God sets up a light for ruling the night and a light for ruling the day and so on. God also during this time makes “all green plants for eating” (1:30). Notably the green plants were the only thing that animals, birds, fish and human were assigned to eat. God perhaps hoped that setting all these things in place would be structure enough for the world. By the time of the flood, however, chaos and corruption reined.

By the time the flood came what did the world look like? Although this corruption and ruin is not specified, some possible scenarios can be suggested…

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Just one short day after Blog Action Day, is World Food Day, an annual celebration of The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.  The theme this year (and shouldn’t it really be every year?) is The Right to Food. 

I was struck by how the FAO’s framing of The Right to Food feels so akin to the Jewish obligation of tzedakah, which is often translated incompletely as “charity,” but actually comes from the root meaning “justice:” 

“The Right to Food is the right of every person to have regular access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable food for an active, healthy life. It is the right to feed oneself in dignity, rather than the right to be fed. With more than 850 million people still deprived of enough food, the Right to Food is not just economically, morally and politically imperative - it is also a legal obligation.”

In celebration of World Food Day, here are four resources for you to check out - an inspiring article by food activists, Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, and three Jewish organizations that are working towards food justice. 

• “The Right to Food“ - published in The Huffington Post
• American Jewish World Service’s sustainable agriculture projects
• Mazon - A Jewish Response to Hunger
• Tuv Ha’Aretz - Hazon’s Jewish Community Supported Agriculture Program

Last month, I had a great time at the Alternative Energy Festival run by the Beacon Sloop Club, an affiliate of the Clearwater organization. The club has done wonders in rehabilitating the waterfront area, and bringing environmental education and progressive culture to the city.

Pete Seeger himself has been a hard-working member of the club from the beginning, and his commitment to the Hudson river has been remarkable and unwavering over many years, and it is always a delight to see him there. I came to sing, and to demonstrate the ‘Veggie Voyager’, my vegetable oil-powered van.

After my concert, I wandered around the well organized, dockside Beacon Farmer’s Market (with lots of sustainably grown food) that runs there every Sunday.

There I met Seth Aaron, a student from the Newburgh Free Academy, and part of the winning team in the 12th annual Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge, a national competition. They drove from Texas to NY in July, and tied for first place with a team from Missouri. That qualifies them to go on to the world championship in Australia. The car itself, dubbed the ‘Sol Machine’, is actually made of Kevlar, a welded titanium frame and solar panels that charge the battery. It can go up to 50 mph. The car’s parts total more than $50,000.

In my next post, I’ll be talking with Seth about his culinary experience on the trip.

“What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?”  That was the question posed by the folks at Blog Action Day. 

The idea is simple and profound: one topic, thousand of different voices across the blogosphere.  Well, the day is here and the topic is the environment.  Considering The Jew & The Carrot is about food, Jewish life, and sustainability, that shouldn’t be too difficult to handle.  Then again, food lies at the core of many aspects of life, so if next year’s topic is business (or family, books, politics, vacations…) we’ll be ready.

To get things started: check out the fascinating op-ed in The New York Times today, where the former president of the American Farm Bureau, Dean Kleckner blasts the US’s continued addiction farm subsidies.  Kleckner writes:

“By promising to cover losses [through subsidies], the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.” 

With the Senate’s Farm Bill vote looming, it was heartening to see support for a smarter Farm Bill coming not just from well-meaning activists, but from the farmers themselves.

It always happens every time I perform a demo. I am rolling along with whatever the menu du jour is and I am all excited and enthusiastic about the food and ingredients (I can be quite dramatic at a demo). Then I get to dessert and it all goes south on me. Invariably someone asks me about pareve desserts.

I cannot stand fake food. I never use margarine and non-dairy creamer in place of butter and cream. I just don’t trade lipid for lipid and white liquid for white liquid. I end up in heated battles at these demos with home cooks telling me how great their margarine cakes are and how dare I suggest otherwise?! Read more »

On UJC’s podcasts web page, Nigel moderates a panel discussion about the new jewish food movement featuring Simon Feil, Leah Koenig, Linda Lantos, and Lisa Kleinman. Download it here!

Michael Pollan is at it again, and that’s a good thing. 

After a brief hiatus following his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan is nearly ready to release his next work titled, 
In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating.

Pollan says that the work grew out of questions he received about The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  In a recent interview with Grist’s Tom Philpott, he said: once I’ve ”looked into the heart of the food system and been into the belly of the beast” what should I eat, and what should I buy, and if I’m concerned about health, what should I be eating?  The short answer?  “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  To get the more nuanced response, you’ll have to pick up the book which will be out in January, 2008.

We know what’s up on Pollan’s plate - what’s next for you?
- Preorder your copy of In Defense of Food here. 
- Read Philpott’s full interview (highly recommended) here.
- Read The Jew & The Carrot’s interview with Pollan here.

My kitchen is overflowing with apples.  Yesterday, a bag full of sweet, crisp, big-as-my-head globes came home with my roommate from our CSA.  They were promptly piled into a wicker basket on our kitchen table…atop the remaining apples from last week’s CSA. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love apples - there’s nothing better than a Honey Crisp, Winesap, or Ginger Gold  slathered with peanut butter or Nutella, baked into cobblers and glistening tarts, or raw when I’m running out the door.  They’re simultaneously iconic (think Adam and Eve, keeping the doctor away, your elementary school teacher’s desk…) and humble-like weather-worn barns dotting the New England countryside. 

But after the apple & honey (or maple syrup) overload of Rosh Hashanah, I’m ready to take a break - at least until it’s time to make apple sauce for latkes.  Harvest season has other plans, however - post-Rosh Hashanah is exactly when things start to heat up in the New England apple world.  So, instead of giving up on pile of apples that will continue to grow on my kitchen table for the next month, and find I decided to take my familiar apples into less familiar territory with a recipe for apple salsa.  If you have other “unfamiliar” apple recipes, I’d love to hear them.

RECIPE BELOW THE JUMP

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