Yesterday, Hazon organized a conference call with Rabbi Morris Allen for our staff, board, and volunteer leaders of our food programs. Rabbi Allen is the founder of Hekhsher Tzedek, and and just came back from visiting Postville, Iowa along with his daughter, fellow Rabbi, Harold Kravitz, and his daughter, and the chair of Allen’s synagogue’s social justice committee.

We asked him to brief us on the current situation with Agriprocessors, the mood in Postville, and the Jewish response – from an on-the-ground perspective.

This is what he saw and reported:

Yesterday I popped into one of those new organic bodegas that seem to be sprouting up around my Brooklyn neighborhood. My goal was simple: buy organic butter for a cake. But when I got to the dairy case and picked up the squat foil-wrapped package, I literally gasped out loud at the $7.65 price tag. Seven dollars. and fifty six cents!!

Now, I am all about paying a little more for organic/local food, and I did receive the memo about food prices going up, but I had not yet come face to face with the brutal reality of taking out a loan to go grocery shopping. Granted, I normally shop at the member-run Park Slope Food Coop, where my monthly labor ensures me a little financial cushion from the rough world out there.

When I got home, however, I found out that as bad as that moment in the store was for me – the organic dairy farmers have it significantly worse.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty neutral when it comes to the Rachael Ray divide. I’ve seen her show, sure, and have been annoyed by her “Yum-O!” as much as everyone else, but when you don’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen, I can think of a lot worse things than using pre-made ravioli in a recipe.

Thanks to Devadeva Mirel for this guest post recounting her two and a half weeks surviving the mean girls and the dining hall food as a Jewish camper. Check out her blog and jam company Sabjimata Jam here.

My first time away from home (and in a setting without wall to wall carpet, mind you) was not one full of fond memories. It was the summer between fifth grade and puberty. My parents drove me into “The City” where I, along with the other suburban campers, rode the train from Grand Central Station to Albany. We then all climbed into a camp van which drove us even further away from home, to Young Judea’s “Tranquility Camp.”

My memories of camp are the stuff of ‘tween dramas: bodily insecurity, cruel cliques, and undergrad counselors with bandeaux tops, visible tan lines and a surprising disinterest in anything having to do with canoes or lanyards. For those two and a half weeks of my life, I felt the dull isolation of being disconnected from my friends, family and the soft cotton blankets at home.

Meal times were another source of displeasure. Comfort food for me had always meant onion bagels and Lay’s potato chips. Now comfort food basically meant anything that wasn’t beets from the dining hall. My camp had a policy where campers had to at least taste everything – a scary prospect for me. “Try it, you’ll like it” never sounded more cruel.

Here’s a roundup of the latest from the Agriprocessors scandal:

Take a hike, son. Amidst the recent flurry of calls from Jewish communal leaders to boycott Agriprocessors’ products (including the Uri L’tzedek boycott, which Hazon is supporting), the company’s founder Aaron Rubashkin started looking for a new CEO to replace his son, Sholom. Read the full story at The JTA here.

Dancing with Sholom. One of the most interesting articles I’ve read since the raid is writer Ben Harris’ account of his personal interactions with Sholom Rabushkin, as noted on The JTA’s blog, The Telegraph.

Uri L’tzedek. Read the full text of Uri L’tzedek’s call for boycott below the jump. It’s pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

Shavuot is one of my favorite culinary holidays. It’s one of the few holidays where dairy dishes do not get pushed aside by meat (though I certainly have nothing against meat!) and get to be the star of the show. It’s also the celebration of Bikkurim (first fruits), which commemorates the bringing of the Seven Species of Israel (barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates) to the Temple in Jerusalem.

Strawberries are not technically one of the seven species, but they are definitely among the “first fruits” of the spring season here in America. In the recipe below, I’ve paired sweet roasted strawberries with medallions of fried goat cheese and a honey lavender vinaigrette. What could taste more like springtime than that?

Recipe below the jump.

When was the last time you ate a banana? This morning, sliced on your cereal? As a quick snack on the way to shul to tide you over until kiddush? According to an article in Plenty Magazine, finding a banana to eat might soon become a lot more difficult:

“Back in 2003, the magazine New Scientist ran a cover story declaring that the banana was on the brink of extinction. The problem, the article explained, was that commercial bananas were genetically bankrupt: sterile, seedless clones with no genetic diversity and no resistance to a new wave of virulent fungal diseases…Scientists say, the outlook is still pretty bleak for the banana. Commercial growers remain wedded to a single variety known as the Cavendish, the bright yellow fruit found on US supermarket shelves; meanwhile, a lethal and fungicide-resistant infection called Panama Disease has decimated plantations across Southeast Asia and is widely expected to spread into plantations in Latin America and Africa.”

The Jew & The Carrot “old-timers” might remember a post from this time last year about a blintz making party I went to for Shavuot at my friend Avi’s apartment. Well, Avi is at it again, though instead of making blintzes at his house, he’s putting together an all night blintz and music extravaganza on June 10 in NYC…

BLINTZKRIEG: Music & Blintzes

Find out all the info below the jump. And if you know of (or are planning) any other fun, foodie Shavuot activities, please share!

While visiting my sister in Virginia this past weekend, I had the chance to sample some fair food at her local Memorial Day festival. Keeping in mind that the motto of fairs seems to be a perverse Pollan paraphrase (Eat “Food.” Way too Much. Mostly Fried.) I feel lucky that my latest passion that I stumbled upon is something relatively (at least compared to fried oreos and coke) healthy: The Giant Turkey Leg. Vegetarian Spoiler Alert: I’m about to spend the next 350 words waxing rhapsodic about a big hunk of meat.

Before I relate how this deliriously-delicious drumstick brought a family and neighborhood closer together this Memorial Day weekend, let me first echo that sentiments of blogger Bobby McMahon: “One bite, and I knew that I had made a grand, delicious decision.” Tender, smoky, juicy, meaty. And that was just the first bite. If a pastrami sandwich from Katz’s Deli led a good and decent life, it would come back to Earth reincarnated as a State Fair turkey leg. It was that good.

But this turkey leg’s mere deliciousness is not why am I bothering my fellow Jewfoos (Jewish foodies) with this poultry panegyric. Let me tell you the rest of the story:

Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. Over the summer, she will spearhead The Jew & The Carrot’s “Unboxed” segment – periodic posts that aim to demystify summer’s most seasonal produce.

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my cousin who lives year-round in a largely rural, but fast-developing part of Bucks County in southeastern Pennsylvania. Beth is a great cook and friendly with several local farmers. We stopped by Jim and Kathy Lyons’ Blue Moon Acres for organic micro-greens and spent a morning in the lavender fields at Carousel Farm with another organic grower, Niko Christou. At None Such Farm Market, which sells produce grown across the road and on other nearby farms, we acquired asparagus and rhubarb, the true harbingers of harvests-to-come in the Northeast.

In response to a previous post, which asked how readers are personally responding to the Agriprocessors balagan, one reader commented:

“My extended family as well as many members of our synagogue community will not boycott Agriprocessors unless the Rabbinic Assembly(RA),the USCJ, and/or their rabbi say so… Without strong and active leadership from the RA and the USCJ, passive communities like mine will continue to allow the worker-abuse and animal-abuse horrors of Agriporcessors to continue.”

It seems that several Jewish organizations and individuals are starting to provide that much-needed leadership, calling for boycotts on Agriprocessors’ products that go beyond the Conservative Movement’s wishy-washy advisory.  They include:

The Conservative Movement, which has publicly announced its support of Rabbi Morris Allen’s Hekshsher Tzedek initiative, seems hesitant to call for a full boycott on Agriprocessors after last week’s raid.

The JTA reported on Wednesday that: Calls this week by activist rabbis for a limited boycott have been muted out of concern that a boycott could be actionable and might discourage Jews from keeping kosher because kosher meat would be harder to access. Like KRG on Jewschool, I personally find that stance to be pathetic and frustrating. What sort of mixed up priorities must we have to turn an embarrassed eye from a very real and very serious affront on human rights because it might lead to someone to eat non-kosher meat. Ach…

But then yesterday, The Conservative Movement came out with a different statement that, while shrouded in somewhat vague language, seems to be calling for something like a boycott:

I can’t think of a better indication that spring has arrived than the fresh rhubarb ginger crisp currently sitting on my window sill (okay – it’s actually on top of my microwave, but go with me.) The inspiration to make this crisp for Shabbat dinner tonight came to me as I was hurrying through the Union Square farmers’ market towards the subway. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of absurdly neon pink that nearly caused me whiplash as I turned to get a better look. Rhubarb had arrived!

The second inspiration was the copy of Peter Berley’s cookbook Fresh Food Fast, which a co-worker gave me as an engagement present. Flipping through the book, which is divided into winter, spring, summer, and fall recipes, I found a recipe for a rhubarb crisp. It almost seemed a crime not to make it.

More and a recipe for ginger rhubarb crisp below the jump…

Thanks to Rabbi Mordechai Rackover for this guest post.  Rabbi Rackover is Assistant Rabbi and Director of Education at Beth Sholom Congregation and Talmud Torah in Potomac, Maryland.

I live in kosher culinary limbo – a purgatory filled with memories of what once was, shattered by the brutal realities of my current state.

Having grown up without observing any Jewish dietary laws I have tasted “the other side.”  Occasionally I find myself overwhelmed by memories of Italian sausage, shellfish, oyster sauce and exceptional all-you-can eat buffets where chicken and macaroni and cheese rub elbows and the shrimp scampi stretches as far as the eye can see.  There are wistful moments when I recall the charcuteries, greasy spoons and hidden lunch counters in my hometown of Montreal, Quebec.

Aaah…the Greek food. The barbecue. The unrivaled smoked meat…I swoon.

Flash forward to today.  Without regret, I am a Rabbi, a foodie and a father who is trying to introduce the best possible food practices into my family’s life and kitchen.  Unfortunately, the neighborhood my family inhabits can not support our taste for delicious, healthy kosher food.