Ever since the right to privacy went down on sheepskin, there’s been a cornucopia of confusion about whether or not American law should regulate personal choices, and what those “personal choices” are. As law makers get more and more worked up over “the epidemic of obesity”, and their constituents’ new interest in food, they look to legislate people’s eating habits from both the consumer (taxes on soft drinks, calorie counts in fast food) and the producer ends. As I listen to pizza makers bemoan the loss of transfats, community activists struggle to increase access to fruits and vegetables in poor neighborhoods, and local curb-sitters mark the price of a smoke in NYC, I get to wondering where all of this interest in our personal  habits comes from, and whether the government really has the right to legislate it in the first place.

I asked my brother, the recent law school grad (though not yet lawyer) to dispel some of the mists of obscurity surrounding civil rights in general. What follows is a highly simplified version of his explanation, as filtered through my not-too-legal mind.

There is a cheesecake sitting in my (boyfriend’s) refrigerator right now. At some point late last week I got it in my head that with Shavuot just around the corner I should make a cheesecake. Since I’m doing a time-share with my boyfriend’s kitchen, permission had to be granted by the relevant roommates, which was how I found myself late last night remembering how much I disliked baking.

But I’m terribly sentimental about food and of course my cheesecake comes with a story…

“Rabbi Shimon taught: ‘…Three who dine at a table and exchange words of Torah are considered as having eaten at God’s table…’”  (Pirke Avot 3:4)  I suppose a discussion of religion is considered verboten almost everywhere by certain people, but not in Jewish culture.  Then again, we like to talk politics in public, too!  But in the days of the Mishna, of course the conversation was only with the other people at the table.  After all, there was no e-mail, no phones…  and no text messages!  I remember, when cell phones were first becoming popular, my friend railing against people who would answer calls during dinner.  I agreed with her, but felt there should be some wiggle-room:  what if your friend is calling to say she’ll be late?  What if he needs directions to the restaurant?  Also, why should it bother me at the next table?  I understand if it is the person you’re dining with, but the “noise” argument makes no sense, since you wouldn’t be bothered by the people at the next table having a normal conversation.  Nowadays, we’re all used to this and most of us are pretty polite about it (music on the subway is a different story entirely, but I’ll restrain myself for now.)  Text messages, though around for years, have recently become more of a problem according to the NYT Dining section.

This optimistic article points to an issue felt acutely in “inner cities” around the country: a lack of fresh produce being sold at market.  This problem was controversially or famously addressed in my city by the New York City Green Cart initiative but this certainly hasn’t solved it and plenty of other cities have the same issues (NYC isn’t even mentioned in the article, though LA, Newark and Detroit are, and the article is mainly about Chicago.)  Could it be that looking to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s as examples, however, are more detrimental than good?  As big a supporter of organics as I am, I think encouraging people to eat “conventional” produce would be a big boon over Mickey-D’s and would be a lot cheaper and easier than the “greenest” route.  Even frozen produce makes a nice, healthy, easy and inexpensive meal most of the time.

On Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah, we also celebrate the offering of the first fruits in the Temple, the bikurim.

The offering was a supremely humble gesture: the fruits which form first on a tree are often smaller, less perfect, only hinting at the abundance to follow. In ancient Israel, these offerings were gussied up, surrounded by the more beautiful fruit which grew later, brought sometimes in gold baskets, accompanied by flutes, processions. All the trappings of art and wealth were used to beautify the offering. Yet without the small, perhaps wrinkled fruit of the bikurim, there could be no offering.

It was at this moment of offering that the Torah teaches us to recite the story of redemption, the same one we now read in our Passover haggadah. The story was also a garland, as it were, for the bikurim offering, connecting our history to the very physical redemption of another spring and another growing season.

I promise I will post more recipes soon but before I do that I want to share with you an experience I had last weekend.  Now that my boyfriend and I have made the switch to local, organic, pasture-raised milk, eggs and meat (milk and eggs in my case and all three in his) we felt it important to go visit some of the places where these things come from.  My boyfriend found a way to get on a tour of Marin Sun Farms – which is one of a few farms where we get meat and eggs.

I really had no idea what to expect when we rented a Zipcar and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Highway 1 to Pt. Reyes.  We’ve come to love the town of Pt Reyes Station so we built in some extra time to grab breakfast at Bovine Bakery and coffee at Toby’s.  After filling up on some great local food we headed out to H Ranch in Inverness (about 10 miles from Pt Reyes Station) where Marin Sun Farms is located.  I won’t give you a play by play of the farm tour but I will say this: it was incredible!

For some reason, I get stopped all the time in the produce section at Whole Foods. I don’t know what it is about me that suggests why I would be able to explain the difference between lacinato and regular kale, or whether golden beets are as sweet as red ones (especially since neither of these vegetables were part of my diet as recently as a year ago), but there must be something.

However, I’ve had an encounter that I can’t shake. I was standing by the grape tomatoes, trying to decide between the organic ones from Florida (but were they the product of slave labor?) and the local greenhouse tomatoes from Connecticut (fewer food miles, but what about pesticides?), when a woman about my grandmother’s age began talking to me out of the blue. You could tell she was in a bit of sticker shock at the Whole Paycheck prices, and she said to me, “You know how much these are at Shoprite? 99 cents.”

Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal was ordained this May at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. For the past three years she has worked as an educator at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. She will be moving to El Paso, Texas this June with her husband Adam and her son Simon.

In my family, holiday food traditions are never about what you might think of as traditional holiday food.  Yes, we have matzah on Passover and apples and honey or Rosh Hashanah, but the traditions go deeper than that.  At our Passover seder, we must have potato kuglets, made each year by different members of the family.  No matter what else on the menu changes, the kuglets are how we know it is Passover, and not another festive meal.  Before the fast of Yom Kippur, our traditional family food is honey chicken and noodles.  Nothing else will get us through the fast, and no one thinks to suggest anything else. And then there is the Ten Commandments Cake on Shavuot.

This week I went to pick up our Tuv Ha’aretz CSA box from the Tikvat Israel synagogue for the first time. The above picture is of my mother eagerly placing each food item into a recyclable bag.

A New York Times article from Saturday highlights some college students and graduates who have gone from academics to organics and agriculture. While the article brings up a good point - that American youth want to find a way to do their part, to contribute to society in a way that they find valued and sustainable – this trend is not a new one. Idealism and wanting social change have been a part of college student and twenty-somethings’ culture for generations.

I’d like to take us back to May 2000…

It’s just about that time of year again: the cream cheese is starting to thaw, the cheesecake recipes are dusted off, and the dairy, it is a’flowin. Welcome to Shavuout preparation!

Shavuot is technically the end of the counting of the Omer, and is the traditional high holiday which celebrates G-d’s gift of the Ten Commandments. Shavuot is derived from the word for week and has a number of other intrinsic meanings as well. It is a very happy and joyous celebration, as it marks the most sacred gift to the Jewish people, that which continues to affect the daily lives of so many, that which is the basis of basically all Western civilization codes of morality. As we are educated by the Torah, so we educate ourselves for Shavuot. One tradition is to stay up all night long and learn the night of Shavuot… some mark the break of daylight by reading the 10 Commandments and then running into the ocean for an early morning dip for fun (well, at least in beautiful Santa Barbara!).

Americans waste more than more than 100 billion pounds of food every year, at every stage of production from field to store to plate. That number doesn’t include the produce thrown out or left to rot by the millions of home or community gardeners. Wouldn’t it be great if all those leftover tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard could be linked with local food pantries and shelters?

Gary Oppenheimer had just that inspiration. He’s the founder of Ample Harvest, a project aiming to help home gardeners donate their unwanted produce to food pantries. Gary is a master gardener and the head of the West Milford Community Garden. I spoke with him about Ample Harvest and how home gardeners can make a difference.

Originally published on My Jewish Learning

Blintzes are most often described in relation to other foods. They are “like pancakes” but thinner, “like Russian blini” except without the yeast, or “like crepes,” just folded a little differently. Still, blintzes are a delicacy all their own. Originally from the Ukraine, fillings like cheese, potato, and kasha were folded inside the blintz wrappers (or bletlach, “leaves” in Yiddish) and fried until golden brown. In The World of Jewish Cooking, Rabbi Gil Marks writes that, “As with other filled foods, blintzes provided a great way of transforming leftovers into a special dish or stretching scarce resources.”