Wow,
The conference was something incredible. I feel so blessed to be a part of this growing community and movement, and I thank those of you who joined us at Asilomar and contributed in a myriad ways to the 3rd annual Food conference. I truly look forward to witness how we all take the next steps forward, through personal choices, communal activity, public policy outreach, the development of new educational opportunities, and ….

At the conference, I was given the honor of sharing my vision for the New Jewish Food Movement, and I thought I would also share it here. So, I have shared those words below. I hope you might get some inspiration from my vision, but more importantly, I hope you will be inspired to think of how your vision fits into Hazon’s work, and even share your vision here on JCarrot.

Happy New Year
zelig

——– (more below the jump) ——–

Ever wondered what could be more local than locally grown?  Blogger, writer for The Forward and The Jew & The Carrot guest contributor, Aaron Kagan, set out to find out – and came up with two Jewish urban foragers who scout out wild edibles.  Read the article (originally published in The Forward) below, and find a great related recipe over at their site.

For folks who do not get The Jewish Week in New York, I wanted to share this cute article that was written about me and Hazon.  It also gives a bit of insight into the ever-emerging new Jewish food movement.  I’m a bit afraid/embarrassed that my obsession over not serving strawberries at my November wedding might seem weird to some people – but I know readers of this blog will understand!

She is What She Eats
By: Randi Sherman
12/17/08

At Leah Koenig’s wedding last month, the details had to be just right. The groom, musician Yoshie Fruchter, understandably insisted the music be good, easy enough. And Koenig wanted the menu to be good, a more difficult task considering her strict stipulations.

“I couldn’t find a caterer who could make food kosher enough for me, my husband and our guests, and who cared about the food being organic and seasonal,” said Koenig. One caterer who fit the criteria couldn’t handle the size of the party. The caterer for the JCC in Manhattan, who Koenig was excited to work with, suggested strawberry shortcake, but the berries were out of season and wouldn’t be locally grown.

To get the caterers to work with her, Koenig suggested apple crisp with vanilla ice cream instead. Anna Stevenson, a friend and former colleague, provided butternut squash, beets and potatoes for the meal from the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut. Guests, some dressed as carrots and peas to honor Koenig’s tradition of sometimes dressing up in carrot costume for coworkers’ weddings, praised the food served at the meal. Koenig calls it her “crowning glory.”

While a fruit’s seasonality might not be a factor for most brides, to 26-year-old Koenig, serving strawberries in mid-to-late fall is nearly sacrilege.

The Hazon Food Conference ended yesterday. I did not cover any sessions for the blog, since I was too busy with my duties as a member of the executive committee, but the fact that the turkey schechting made front page news locally was a pretty big deal. Said article was even above the fold. While my good friend Roger Studley deserves full credit for making this happen, the fact that the schechting took place because of the conference was hardly mentioned. It would have been nice if a bit more about the conference would have made it into the article, but still — it’s interesting that this was deemed front-page worthy, without a photo, even. As the volunteer member of the executive committee who planned the food for the conference, I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say in the coming days, but today I took a much-needed day of R&R. I will say though that it was an incredible four days. I’m both exhilirated and exhausted.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting full video of some of the key note addresses and panels at the Hazon Food Conference. Until then, enjoy another demonstration from raw foodist Alexander Sharone. Below, he demonstrates making nut milk from brazil nuts, but this recipe will work with any nut. Be sure to soak the nut over-night (4-6 hours for cashews) in order to start the sprouting process. This begins digesting proteins in the nut, breaking them down to their amino acid components and making those amino acids more available to your stomach. After you’ve soaked the nuts, rinse them and keep them in a jar in the fridge to slow the sprouting. Alex blends his with a three-horse power blender, which is powerful enough to grind the soluble fiber right out of an avocado pit, but you can make nut milk with a regular blender. Here’s Alex grinding up and “milking” those Brazil nuts:

Open up your kitchen cupboard, grab a handful of common herbs, fruits and vegetables and voila, your own unregulated pharmacy. On Friday, Tamar Lieb shared her knowledge of the medicinal uses of common plants in the workshop “Kitchen Wisdom for Common Ailments.” To use herbs as medicine, you can do everything from eating them to dissolving them in water, honey, sugar, or oil to extract beneficial properties from fresh and raw plants. I’ve included her long list of beneficial herbs and their properties here (it’s even alphabetized!)

To use waters for your herbal preparation, you can make an infusion (pouring boiling water over delicate things like flowers or leaves) a decoction (boiling harder things like bark or certain dried roots), or use steam. The smell of a plant is its volatile oils escaping, so when you’re making tea, Lieb suggested, keep it covered while it steeps. In a steam bath, made by pouring boiling water over your more delicate herbs (think the pizza spices – oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme – for a cold) and then placing your face, under a towel and over the bowl while you breath in the oily, aromatic steam.

Late on Shabbat afternoon, a few entrepreneurial conference participants listened to some words of wisdom from Noah Alper who, until he sold his kosher bagel shops in 1996, had been the largest kosher retailer in the United States.  Beginning in the late 1980’s, Noah’s Bagels had helped take what had once been an ethnic specialty – bagels – and make them the normative cuisine in areas of the country that had rarely seen any Jews.

But even from the start of his career, Noah was used to blazing trails.  He shared a story of when he was one of six entrepreneurs waiting early one cold January morning at the Logan airport cargo pick-up.  Those entrepreneurs had pooled their resources to have fresh organic vegetables shipped in from California.  Although today organic produce is widely available, in 1973, when he co-founded the natural foods grocery store Bread and Circus, there were only a handful of stores in the Boston area that sold organic and fresh.

After entering the relaxing and invigorating space that is Asilomar yesterday afternoon, I attended my very first workshop at my very first Hazon Food Conference, a fabulous new documentary about the current state of organic agriculture in Israel and its history, presented by Isaac Hametz and Sasha Perry, who created the film.

This fantastic film began with the “father” of organics in Israel, Mario Levy, and his concerns about the health effects of DDT-like chemicals on communities living near farms in the north of Israel. Levy went on to found the Israel Bio-organic Agriculture Association, which now has 400 members. Although the organic movement in Israel is still fledgling, with fewer than 10 CSAs, it is growing in popularity and in July, Israel past its first organic law.

Several years ago, Rabbi Deborah Prinz and her husband Rabbi Mark Hurvitz were traveling in Bayonne, France.  While glancing at a placard in one of the museums they were visiting, Rabbi Prinz was shocked to read that Jews had brought the fabrication of chocolate to France in the 17th century.  As she would come to realize, Jews played a vital role in of early production and distribution of chocolate in Europe.  Even as far back as Christopher Columbus whom some have speculated might have been Jewish and some of his crew may have been converso. If true, then it would have been Jews who brought cacao to Europe.

In other news, outside of the beauty of Asilomar, a committee of the UN General Assembly approved a declaration on the right to food earlier this week, considering it “‘intolerable’ that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population.” If adopted by the General Assembly, the resolution would “express concern that, in many countries, girls were twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and childhood diseases and that twice as many women as men were estimated to suffer from malnutrition” and encouraged all member states to take action to deal with these forms of gender inequality and discrimination and protect the rights of indigenous people, who have additional obstacles to the right to food.

Here we are at day 2 of the Hazon Food Conference, and already there have been so many amazing moments of connection – between old friends reuniting here in California, between new friends who are excited to partner with each other on new food-related projects, and moments of personal “ah-ha” connections as exciting new ideas are shared during the sessions and at meals.

Below, are a series of images that help capture some of those connections.  Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words.  This weekend, they’re worth a thousand tastes.  Btai Avon!

In two months, eight hermaphroditic redworms will reproduce to a community of 1500 and will be well on their way to transforming your coffee grounds, egg shells and vegetable scraps into nitrogen rich compost, all without stinking up your kitchen.

Master composter Adam Edell showed participants how to make worm bins for their home composting use, using red worms, a kind of worm that lives in the litter above the dirt, as opposed to the deeper layers of soil. Their shallow lifestyle makes redworms perfect for breaking up kitchen scraps in dark, aerated plastic bins, but to get going in their new habitat they need a three inch bedding of shredded newspaper. Adam suggests papers like the Times, that use soy-based ink instead of chemical, and that you avoid glossy pages and rich, dark inks all together. Check out the video below for his rip, fluff, dip, squeeze, fluff, toss method of preparation in the video below.

Sarah Newman is a locavore and vegeterian. She works as a researcher and blogger at Participant Media, which is releasing the documentary and companion book Food, Inc. in Spring 2009. She’s also a panelist at Hazon’s Food Conference this year, taking part in “Will Blog for Food” on Sunday. She’ll be blogging from the conference all weekend at Takepart.com, and we’ll be cross-posting her articles here on The Jew & The Carrot.

I just saw the short film Food Stamped, by Shira and Yuval Potash. This middle class Berkeley, CA couple chose to live off of food stamps for one week. After stealing lots of free samples, skipping and skimping on usual items such as coffee, carrots and cheese and thoroughly planning each meal, the couple successfully pulled off a week’s worth of meals on $50.

Sarah Newman is a locavore and vegeterian. She works as a researcher and blogger at Participant Media, which is releasing the documentary and companion book Food, Inc. in Spring 2009. She’s also a panelist at Hazon’s Food Conference this year, taking part in “Will Blog for Food” on Sunday. She’ll be blogging from the conference all weekend at Takepart.com, and we’ll be cross-posting her articles here on JCarrot.

I’m completely immersed in the food world now and I’ve only been at the Hazon conference for four fantastic hours. As I mentioned in a previous post, Hazon (aka vision in Hebrew) is leading efforts in the Jewish community to develop sustainable food systems. The contrast between my drive here through the non-union unsustainable industrial farms and CAFOs of California’s Central Valley and being at Hazon where every attempt is made to be organic and sustainable is striking.

However, if you’re reading this blog, you might ask, what can I do in my life? Are these just a bunch of elitist hippie Jews who have the privilege of spending a vacation immersed in a beautiful setting while eating locally grown foods and discussing how to eat and live as sustainably as possible? Well, I am actually sitting by a fire in a comfy chair wearing my clogs, wrapped in my Nepalese scarf and with my Marmot rain jacket draped over my shoulders.