“You can trace the recent history of Tu B’shevat seders like branches on a tree.”  - Nigel Savage, Jerusalem Post, 2004

The Jew & The Carrot Presents: Healthy, Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources

Click here to peruse The Jew & The Carrot’s Tu B’shevat Resource List, for helpful tips and ideas to create your own Tu B’shevat seder, or celebrate the holiday of the trees in sustainable style.  If you have any ideas or tips you’ve picked up from a Tu B’shevat past, please share them below.

(x-posted at Pickled) 

Bonnie over at Ethicurean created a fascinating infographic for Wired that overlays the price per calorie of various foods with their energy payoff and sugar content.  It depicts what Adam Drewnowski researched and Michael Pollan wrote about for the New York Times: 1. The cheapest available food is often the most fattening.  2. The most calorie-dense foods (usually processed and frozen convenience items) tend to be concentrated in the center shelves of supermarkets.   

This supermarket setup seems pretty pervasive - it even holds true at my idealistic, non-profit Food Coop where I spent my monthly shift last night ringing up fancy cheese and (expensive) mixed-drink ephemera like limes and mint for people’s New Year’s celebrations.  Check out Bonnie’s graphic above and, when shopping in the “middle aisles” of your grocery store, don’t forget Rambam’s “middle way” - moderation.

I’m always surprised when the fall chaggim (holidays) come around. Rosh Hashana, the start of the new year, five thousand years and counting from the beginning of time — on a Thursday? In the middle of the week? But I have things to do! I have to make resolutions? Reflect on my life? Today?

I never feel ready. The lead up is confusing, the rhythm is out. Sure, on a yearly scale, the cycle of holidays is beautiful and profound — matching what we notice in the environment with how we remember and celebrate our history as Jews, the great spiral of the Jewish year. But all of a sudden, a big important day, in the middle of the week – it throws me off.

Because there is another holy day that is very much in synch with the rest of the week – that is, Shabbat. The rhythm of Shabbat is so constant and reliable, it shapes the very profile of my week. I look forward to it, I work hard right up to it, I rest, and then start over. The fact that it comes so often, so predictably, is what makes it so special.

But the fact that Shabbat is so constant means it’s not going to shake you out of your routine — it IS the routine. And so the chaggim – whether they are the Jewish holidays or the secular ones that are based on a number on a calendar have nothing to do with the day of the week, actually serve their function best when they come at an inconvenient time.

In fact, festivals function much like inclement weather and parades. Read more »

In honor of New Year’s, The Jew & The Carrot proudly presents The Year in Carrots: Best of 2007.  We’ve rounded up the posts that most inspired, outraged and tickled us (and you!) over the past year - not to mention the tastiest, most sustainable recipes from 2007.  Whether you’re new to The Jew & The Carrot or a long-time reader, we hope you find something delicious in the list below.

So, sit back (with a glass of champagne if you’d like) and dig in!

Happy New Year! Chag Sameach!

Our Top 10 Favorite Posts
1. The View from Your Fork: An Interview with Michael Pollan
2. They’re Kashering My Kitchen
3. Thoughts on Becomming a Shochet
4. Why I’m Not a Foodie
5. In Praise of Dinner Parties
6. I Just Couldn’t Do It
7. Growing Food?
8. A Blessing of Rain
9. Is it a Bris Without Bagels? 
10. Eating and Reading

Your Top Five Favorite Posts (Most Comments)
1. Schecting a Goat at The Hazon Food Conference
2. Thou Shall Snack - An Interview
3. Hazon Food Conference: The Goat
4. If Your Great Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize It
5. Will They Wipe Your Chin Too?

Favorite Holiday Posts
1. Seder Con Salsa
2. The Great Matzah Tasting
3. Dip The Apple In The Maple Syrup
4. How Juice Saved My Yom Kippur
5. Canola and Grapeseed and Olive, Oh My! How To Fry This Hanukkah

Tastiest Recipes
1. Bone Warming Winter’s Meal - Peter Berley’s Recipes
2. Heeeeeeeeres Herman!
3. Latke Time
4. Happy Birthday to Us - Chocolate Cake
5. Move Over Rachel Ray
6. In Search of the Perfect Pomegranate Chicken (and Seitan!)
 

Join Hazon for our 6th annual Tu B’shvat seder at the JCC in Manhattan.  Learn, be inspired, eat a delicious dinner and a seder of organic fruits and nuts, and drink four cups of wine as we celebrate the holiday of the trees.  Examine how food connects us to Jewish tradition, to the Earth, to other people, and to ourselves.

Tuesday January, 22
7:00pm
$30 (includes dinner and wine)
The JCC in Manhattan 334 Amsterdam Avenue @ 76th Street
Register here or call 646-505-5708

Planning your own Tu B’shevat seder?  Check out The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy and Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources.

I grew up in a non-kosher home. My Bronx-born father was strongly Jewish, but an atheist, and my mom was raised Catholic from ages 2 to 6; her life was saved by her gentile nanny in Poland during the Holocaust, who raised her as her own daughter. Her favorite food during that period: bacon. And even when she reverted back to Judaism, she never lost her love of all things pork.

My grandparents on both sides didn’t keep kosher either. Nor did any of the Jewish families we knew, except maybe one or two. I grew up eating ham and cheese sandwiches, and thinking nothing of it. Except for one great aunt in New York who kept a strictly kosher home, but ate pork and shrimp every time we went out to dinner with her, I had very little exposure to it.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change that. I was one of two Jews in my high school, always feeling very much “the other.” If I would have had to decline eating at a friend’s house because of kashrut, I don’t know how I would have managed. It just would have been another reminder that I am more “other” than I like to think.

But despite the fact that kashrut is pretty much still a non-issue for me, the fact that I care so much about where my food comes from is making me feel more and more kosher all the time.

Read more »

(x-posted from Lilith)

We’ve made it to the final stretch of the “holiday season” (read: the inclusive euphemism for Christmas and New Year’s Eve). Despite Nigel’s insistence that, “no one says Merry Christmas in America” (he’s from England where supposedly everyone says Merry Christmas as if they have a tic), the holidays – and particularly Christmas – can literally be felt, regardless of one’s religious beliefs.

This phenomenon holds particularly true with food. No matter that Chanukah celebrations peaked half a month ago - holiday food is ubiquitous. From late November through New Year’s Eve, red-and-green wrapped chocolates seem to pop up out of nowhere. Alcohol, cookies, pie, and heavily salted snacks also take on “how-did-that-get-into-my-hand?” properties. And whether you spent Christmas dinner with friends or celebrated the “Jewish way” with Chinese food and a movie, holiday foods have a tendency to find their way, often in excess, into our mouths.

Read more »

*Thanks to Michael Croland of Heeb N’ Vegan for this guest post.

In 2007, we witnessed the very beginnings of a revolution in the way farmed animals are treated. Thanks to a series of major announcements this year, the cruel confinement typical of factory-farming is, in several cases, on its way out.

In January, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pig-meat producer, announced that it is phasing out gestation crates—which prevent pregnant sows from turning around—within 10 years. The announcement has already had a ripple effect in the pork industry, as Maple Leaf Foods (Canada’s leading pork producer) announced shortly afterward that it would phase out gestation crates and Cargill Foods said that it has stopped using gestation crates in half of its pig factory farms.

Read more »

Thanks to the mysterious random number generator, The Jew & The Carrot reader, Larry Lenhoff is the winner of The Jew & The Carrot’s birthday raffle:  He will be sent a copy of Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables.   Congratulations Larry!

Want to purchase a copy of Farmer John’s Cookbook? click here. 

Read other entries from the birthday raffle, here.

Another Chance To Win!

Win a print of the stunning photo above, taken by Karl Schatz.  Simply purchase a $5 raffle ticket (or two, or seven!) to be entered in the raffle. All proceeds go to Hazon, and the winner will be announced on January 8th, 2007 at Hazon’s New York Ride Launch Party.

Buy your ticket here.

Book Review: Wild Fermentation
(Sandor Elix Katz | Chelsea Green Publishing) 

*Stay tuned to the Jew & The Carrot in the next few days for an interview with Sandor Elix Katz and a chance to win a copy of Wild Fermentation!

When I describe my hobby of “recreational fermentation” in my urban life, I often get some funny looks.  When this happens, I frequently find myself wishing that more of my friends had read Sandor Elix Katz’s pickling classic, ” Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods” - a book that brings down the ancient wisdom and practices of fermentation in simple, easy to understand language.

What is fermentation?  For Sandor, also known as Sandorkraut, “fermentation is a health regimen, a gourmet art, a multicultural adventure, a form of activism, and a spiritual path, all rolled into one.” On a practical level, fermentation is the process of preserving foods while making them more digestible and nutritious through the action of beneficial micro-organisms, or “cultures.” These are the same cultures that are in your yogurt, and as Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions writes in the forward, “The science and the art of fermentation is, in fact, the basis of human culture: without culturing, there is no culture.”

So what does fermentation have to do with us today, in an age of pasteurization, preservation, and refrigeration?

Read more »

No, it’s not a joke:

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe.

Does this give anyone else the sense of peace and hope for the world that it gave me?

Thanks to The Jew & The Carrot contributor, Jeffrey Yoskowitz, for his great article “Thinking Outside the Bun,” in The New Jersey Jewish News.  Read the article here and see the full text below.

Also - check out The Jew & The Carrot’s new “Jcarrot in the News” page.

Thinking Outside the Bun
By: Jeffrey Yoskowitz
New Jersey Jewish Week
12.20.07

I just ate a kosher Whopper from Burger King in Tel Aviv on a soggy, white sesame seed bun that oozed with mayonnaise, tasteless pickles, subpar mustard, and wilted lettuce. I made sure to add an extra packet of ketchup to enhance the flavors of the meat patty.

Israel was ahead in terms of kosher fast food, but the United States is catching up. A kosher Subway has opened in Livingston, one of 15 kosher Subways expected to open this year throughout the United States.

When large corporations take an interest in kosher food, the Jewish community responds with jubilation, a sense of triumph, and an opening of their wallets. More exciting than the typical Jewish products (read: anything made by Manischewitz or Streits) are American products that go kosher.

Read more »

In Va-Yechi, our creation story culminates with Jacob on his deathbed blessing his sons. (Gen. 49.) He highlights characteristics that are unique to each of his twelve sons, the fathers of our twelve tribes. According to Rashi, five of these blessings focus on the agricultural specificity of each tribe’s territory in the Land of Israel.

For Zevulun, Jacob promises that he “shall dwell at the edge of the sea. His will be a shore for ships…” (Gen. 49:13.) The Talmud Megillah tells how the beaches of Zevulun were home to the molluscs from which techelet dye (for the blue tallis thread) could be extracted. (Talmud Bavli Megillah 6b.) His territory was agriculturally poor but a lucrative resource for snail-farming.

Jacob’s blessing of Judah describes a land of vines and garments dyed with wines. (Gen. 49: 11.) For Issachar, “He saw a resting place, that it was good, and the land that it was pleasant,” (Gen. 49:15.) Rashi writes, “He saw that his part of the land was blessed and would produce good fruit.” (Rashi, Gen. 49:15, s.v. vayar minucha ki tov) Issachar, whose tribe’s destiny was immersion in Torah learning, was bestowed a place where fruits grew in abundance, making the food life easy and devotion to study practical.

Read more »

Following the lead of such projects as Yale Sustainable Food Project and inspired in no small measure by the popularity of such books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sustainable food has become an increasingly hot topic at college campuses around the country. Over this past summer and semester I have been involved in a collaborative project with two biology professors, Betsey Dyer and Deborah Cato, and over 30 First Year Seminar students to educate ourselves and the broader Wheaton College community about food and sustainability.

We concluded our semester earlier this month with a sustainable banquet using food which we ourselves harvested, got from local farmers’ markets, supplemented with Wise kosher organic chickens, and cooked - inspired by the “perfect meal” at the end of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was the required summer reading for all first year Wheaton students. The students from my seminar, “The Rituals of Dinner,” having studied dinner rituals ranging from Plato’s Symposium to the Passover Seder, the meals in Genesis, Leviticus, and the Gospel of Luke to Babette’s Feast and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, designed the ceremony for our sustainable harvest banquet. For me personally, it was a way in which my Jewish foodie and environmentalist commitments moved me into increasingly broader circles of connection with other people and with nature. The whole project was an intensely Jewish experience for me, even though I was doing it primarily in a non-Jewish context. The project itself was featured in the Winter 2008 edition of our alumnae/i magazine, the Wheaton Quarterly and you can read the full text of the article after the jump here: Read more »