Read “Planning the schecting at the Food Conference - part 1″ here.
Having laid all the burecratic ground work for the shechting, I now needed to actually get my hands on a goat! I didn’t know it, but Hazon was planning to use a goat belonging to ADVA Dairy, run by Aitan Mizrahi, who lives and works at Isabella with the Adamah program. I touched base with Aitan, who told me he has some goats that could be slaughtered, but he was planning on slaughtering them in October. He was fine waiting until December, as long as Hazon covered the extra food the critter would need for those 2 months. Seemed more than fair. We would need a few goats, partly to feed all the people at the Conference at least a taste of goat, but more importantly because there was no guarantee that every goat would be kosher.
Despite everything being done properly, after an animal is shechted, it’s lungs are inspected for sirchot, adhesions, which can render the animal unkosher. In order to try and ensure we’d have at least one usable animal, we arranged to shecht 3. Our friend at the OU told me we’d have an excellent chance of most if not all being kosher due to their young age. Apparently, animals over a year old are more likely to develop these lung blemishes and the younger they are, the less likely we’d find a disqualifying sircha. Since these goats will be all of 8 months old, much younger than the market usually deals with, we could be confident that we’d have meat to eat.
Animals, check.
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Melanie Dunea’s new book - My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals
- combines Americans’ ever-growing obsession with food and celebrity chefs, with our voyeuristic desire to glimpse into the lives of famous people.
The book features goregous, coffee table-quality portraits of renowned chefs, along with interviews and - of course - their own description of their ideal “last meal.” It is truly remarkable to notice the number of chefs who chose shellfish and pork products (particularly suckling pig) as their deathbed delicacy.
New York-based chef and organic foods enthusiast, Jonathan Waxman’s final meal comes slightly closer to The Jew & The Carrot’s style:
“a bountiful and varied selection: handmade tortilla chips with guacamole made from organic tree-ripened avocados, spit-roasted lamb from the Sonoma Valley, served with potatoes cooked in ashes, followed by ice cream sandwiches made from shortbread, served with wild strawberries.”
So nu, what would your (God, forbid!) last meal include?
Purchase My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals here
For all of the back and forth here about whether to shecht a goat at the upcoming Food Conference (which is certainly a noble and lively debate), very little space has been given to the what of shechting. Or the how, I suppose. While certainly secondary, the technical aspects of what goes/would go into slaughtering a goat at a Jewish retreat center in rural Connecticut with no facility set up for such a thing, and kosher are by no means simple. I was given the debatably enviable task (I loved it) of figuring out the answers to all the whats should we move ahead. Given that I’ve spent the better part of 18 months (2 years if you count my initial pangs of conscience) trying to get my ethical, kosher meat co-op off the ground, I figured I’d know all the pieces by heart and would just smooth them into place- heck, 1 little goat vs. dozens of cows? Piece of cake. Turns out that’s only half true.
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