I’ve already posted once today, so sorry for double-dipping, but this is worth posting ASAP:

From the JTS press release:

Dr. David Kraemer, the author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages [and 2006 Hazon Food Conference Keynote Speaker], will discuss “Jewish Eating and Jewish Identity” at The Jewish Theological Seminary’s Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 4, 2008. The event will take place at JTS, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.

(Thanks to Jewlicious and  for the hat tip)

Last November, The Jew & The Carrot blogger Jeff reported on the newest treif sensation: Ham-flavored soda from the Jones Soda Co.  (It was part of the company’s Christmas soda line.)

Well, it seems the pork-infused drink thing is catching on.  Several different food bloggers out there have started making their own bacon vodkas – the most beautiful of which is featured at the Brownie Points blog .  For the record, the scariest looking bacon vodka I found is over at Si Blog.  Eegaads!  It looks like a science project gone terribly awry.

That’s right, your long wait for cheeseburgers in a can is now over. They’re even more convenient than these (but don’t forget, February 12th is International Pancake Day! Although you’ll have to wait a week to celebrate at IHOP).

I think if “Sarah” had eaten this cheeseburger, she might have become Ba’al Teshuva instead of secular. Of course, if you want the ultimate in non-kosher (both eco and traditional) eating, you could cook your cheeseburger on one of these while driving on shabbos:

This week, the Winnipeg Free Press reported yet another scandal in the kosher food industry – this time focusing on the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp.  According to the article, the company sold kosher-certified fish products that had sloppy-at-best supervision throughout the 1990s:

“The FFMC is the largest North American supplier of fish minced to produce kosher fish called “gefilte fish…”  To be OU certified, the FFMC employed a rabbi to supervise the processing and cleaning required for the kosher certification…But according to information obtained from employees at FFMC, the rabbi was often derelict in his duties and management knew it.While he was required to observe the production line at all times, he spent a great deal of time in an office on a computer, or was simply absent….He was obliged to make sure that only fish with fins and scales were being processed, that species like burbot and catfish were not in the mix. Allowing a catfish into the mix would be as offensive to Jews as dropping pork into ground beef would be to Muslims.

Honestly, as I read about this latest transgression – I felt anything but shocked.

Hey friends,

Back again with my lawyer hat on – watching Monsanto in its state by state quest to prevent consumers from knowing what is really in our milk. We beat this back at the Federal FDA, we beat them back at the Federal Trade Commission, we beat them back in Pennsylvania…

Now they are going for Indiana.

A bill introduced in the Indiana House of Representatives by Bill Friend, a rep from the tiny town of Macy, Indiana, would make his state the first to prevent consumers from knowing how their milk was produced.
HB. 1300, which could be voted on any day, is couched as legislation to protect consumers from mislabeling. But it would prevent dairy labels that contain a “compositional or production-related claim that is supported solely by sworn statements, affidavits, or testimonials.” In other words, anything related to the moral or ethical dimensions of the product would be off-limits.

Last night, some friends and I met for our somewhat bi-weekly, whenever-we-can-get-a-critical-mass-of-people-together wine club.

We gathered at a friend’s apartment to try out a variety of wines (each club member brings a bottle to share). The evening included a lot of sniffing deeply into wine glasses and swirling the juice of fermented grapes on our tongues to pick out the hidden flavors – a little raspberry or plum here, the scent of hot chocolate and smoke there. Along the way we nibbled on exotic snacks – spanish marcona almonds, a vegetable terrine, and baked camembert cheese with a balsamic reduction – and enjoyed feeling terribly sophisticated on otherwise ordinary Monday night.

The whole thing actually felt like a good Passover seder – it was relaxed and participatory, with people calling out interesting tidbits they found in the various “haggadot” we had available (Windows on the World Complete Wine Course and The Oxford Companion to Wine. And, of course, there were four – or maybe a few more – glasses of wine.

A few of the folks in our midst have some wine knowledge – I once worked on an organic vineyard, another couple has traveled in Europe’s wine regions, and a third – our resident expert – works as a sommelier at a kosher restaurant in Brooklyn. But as the hour turned late and the the last drops of deep red liquid pooled in the bottom of our glasses, I realized that it didn’t really matter. We were there to taste wine, sure – but really the whole “wine club” thing is just another excuse to get together and hang out. And I’ll happily raise a glass to that.

Start your Own Wine Night (below the jump)

Last week, an alliance of consumer groups and environmental organizations in the UK called on Heinz to drop its bogus million-dollar advertising campaign that its soups contain: “ingredients that you would find at a Farmers’ Market.”  It reminded me of a similar commercial I recently saw that advertised Campbell’s soup as made from “farm-grown” vegetables – something that sounded so delicious and wholesome that even my finely-tuned (read: cynical) advertising ear almost missed the deceit. 

When it comes to attracting customers, some food companies will bend over backwards to connect their products to the current zeitgeist, even if the link is tenuous at best. Sustainweb reported:

An article in the San Francisco magazine this month discusses “eco-worriers” – people who can hardly make it through the day because the polar bears are drowning. In fact, there are now eco-therapists who specialize in dealing with people who feel guilty and anxious—simply for doing things they have to do to live in a city, like turn on lights. For some, it’s just never enough. One woman, who walks to work and buys local produce,

“still gets plenty of ribbing when someone learns that she eats meat (once a month) or drives a car (a Toyota that gets 37 miles per gallon). “People get really pissed off and tell me I’m not going far enough. I want to say, ‘What do you mean, far enough? Do you want me to kill myself so I don’t produce any greenhouse gas, except for the methane I produce when I decompose?’”

The article suggests that in San Francisco, where people are so ecologically minded (ie — check out this article about supermarkets in today’s Chronicle), it’s almost a question of theological faith: when you worship the earth, and draw strength and meaning from your relationship to it, what do you do when your god, your earth mother, is sick – under siege – dying?

Perhaps the deepest reason for our distress is that we don’t just love Mother Nature—we worship her. In places like the Bible Belt, where the End of Days is not necessarily viewed as a bad thing, some might see the coming apocalypse—if they even believe it’s coming—as God’s will, and they take comfort in that. To them, our existential panic about snowless winters and 120-degree summers must seem almost meaningless. Yet in the Bay Area, where environmentalism is practically its own religion, global warming isn’t just killing the world, it’s also killing the thing we look to for inspiration and solace—in effect, our God. What are we supposed to do with that? What is the outlet for all our fury and sadness and fear?

Thanks to Rhea Kennedy of the You are Delicious blog, for this guest post.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me weird food for lunch and packed it in weird ways. God bless them, they sent me off into the world with chunks of tempeh, entire raw portabellas, dark whole-grain bread with thick pieces of cheese inside. These treats were invariably wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother had deemed better for you than plastic baggies or packaging from a factory. As soon as I was old enough to notice this was different from the other kids’ cold cut sandwiches in neat Ziploc bags and individually-wrapped string cheeses, I became mortified.

Around the same time, I started attending Hebrew school in the evenings – something I approached mostly with dedication, although I occasionally dragged my feet about going. After all, it wasn’t the Christian kids’ religion class (which we all just referred to as Religion) that got them out of school early once a week. To me, those who went to Religion sat in the soft cloak of normalcy—and I didn’t.

Fast forward a few years.  I now follow Jewish tradition with pleasure and am a zealous whole foods foodie. Although eating and religious study practices may be hard to take for an image-conscious little kid, I now understand eating whole foods, keeping kosher, saying brachot and other thoughtful ways of approaching food are central to my life.  Indeed, I’d argue that observing these traditions – in combination – is rather revolutionary.

Hazon’s Tu Bishvat seder was lots of fun – we sang, we kibbutzed, ate an amazing meal, and listened to some inspiring words by Dr. Eilon Schwartz of the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Israel. *Note our take on sustainable centerpieces – fresh herbs in glass jars surrounded by pecans. It’s low-key, lovely and edible (after the seder you can make parsley pesto and pecan pie!). Who says you need cut flowers?

(x-posted at Lilith)

I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. In comparison to the stereotypical “I use my oven as an extra shoe closet” New Yorker, I’ve always cooked a lot for this city. But since I started freelance writing two days a week last summer, and especially since the New Year when I renewed my commitment to preparing my own meals, I’ve found myself spending much more time in the kitchen.

I’ve also discovered that there’s lots of time to think when one cooks – even if NPR is playing in the background. As I’ve tinkered with various types of cookies and tried out new recipes from my favorite Chanukah present, Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (thanks Mom!), I’ve started to wonder, “what makes food feel Jewish?”

Yes, there are the old standbys – Chicken soup with matzah balls, fresh challah, pastrami on rye. And then there are the mysterious, and often severely unappetizing foods that you find in the “kosher food” section at the supermarket – gefilte fish, pickles, Manischewitz, and Tam Tam crackers. Honestly, I can only imagine what folks who aren’t familiar with Jewish eating must think when they see a supermarket shelf of glass jars filled with gelatinous objects suspended in a bunch of different colored murky liquids.

The Potrero Hill Community Center in San Francisco is still ringing with the laughter, song, and meditative silence of 160 young adults who came together from across the Bay Area last night in an unprecedented Tu B’shvat gathering. It was really a blast!

We packed into the Community beyond its capacity (the event beyond sold-out), we drank wine from the four worlds (local, organic, kosher wine from Santa Cruz, CA) and we ate a bounty of fruits from the four directions (literally from all around the world). Even in this room packed wall to wall with tables and chairs, Josh Miller who co-lead the Seder, got everyone on their feet dancing to Tzadik Katimar.

I am not a professionally trained chef, but I love food. I love reading about it, cooking it, feeding myself, feeding others, talking about it, buying it, and growing it (presuming it’s not 6 degrees below zero in Chicago). 

One of my favorite cookbooks is Mark Bittman’s amazingly practical: How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, which features straightforward techniques and an encyclopedic listing of all different types of food.  I’ve found that Bittman’s philosophy holds true to the way I like to cook; quick and satisfying - like his Noodles with Peanut Sauce.

This recipe works as well for a quick meal as it does for entertaining large groups.  I’ve found that the vegetarians at my Shabbat lunch table appreciate a hearty pile of saucy noodles just for them, especially when I add spicy baked tofu for an extra boost of protein.  And as long as I have all of the ingredients at home (most of which I like keeping around in my kitchen anyway), it takes only a few minutes to whip up.  The best part is, many of the items can be substituted or modified. Don’t have tofu? What about seitan or tempeh? Or chicken? Don’t have noodles? Try rice?  Served hot or cold, this dish is virtually impossible to mess up – even for novice cooks.  B’tai Avon!

There was a disturbing story in the Times today about the alarmingly high level of mercury in both store-bought and restaurant-served sushi-grade tuna. How is it possible that no government agency tests for mercury in our country’s seafood, when even the FDA and EPA have issued warning advisories about the consumption of certain fish that are known to contain unsafe levels of this industrial pollutant?

While it might be fun for my three-year-old son to color in this page from his “Jewish Activity Book (!):

…maybe I should just substitute a page with Joe Camel smoking a cigarette, which would be no more toxic?