“Setting out from Elim, the whole Israelite community came to the wilderness of Sin…the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron… “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out in to this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death.” (Exodus 16:1-3)
Andrew Udell is a 16 year old student at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York City. Andrew is a co-founder, together with his friends Lizzie Davis and Skyler Siegel, of Veguary. I asked him a few questions about his plan to help save the world one month at a time.
What is Veguary and how did it start?
One day at shul, my Rabbi posed a question to our smaller minyan about our effect on the world. One thought led to the next, and I just started thinking about how eating meat affects the world. I decided to do some more research about vegetarianism, and I came across some really daunting facts that were difficult to handle, yet important to know. I wanted to try out being a vegetarian for a little while. I started doing some more thinking, one thing led to the next, and with the help of a few friends, we founded Veguary and built the site in a few months. Veguary refers to the second month of the year, in which those enthusiastic about fighting global warming, improving their health, or making a positive difference in the world commit to reducing or eliminating their meat intake by pledging on our website at www.veguary.org.
Why February? Was it for the name?
Hey everyone!
Well the podcast is now officially under way and kicking off its debut season. As of now there are several options to access the podcast and subscribe to it so that it will play and download straight into your iTunes!
The first step to do is visit this site:
This will take you to a page where you have a couple options, depending on what you want.
I would suggest scrolling down a bit and clicking on “Subscribe with iTunes.” This will allow you to listen in your iTunes and then will download subsequent new episodes.
My boyfriend is Brazilian. To look at him you’d probably think he was Middle Eastern, with his dark complexion. He speaks with an American accent that is very South Florida, but none-the-less he was born in Brazil.
Last week for no particular reason I wanted to surprise him with a Brazilian inspired meal. However, most Brazilian cuisine involves meat or fish – two things my boyfriend is loath to eat. (We do occasionally eat humanly raised grass-fed local sustainable meat, but he finds seafood appalling.) Feijoada, considered the national dish of Brazil consists of black beans slow cooked with various parts of the pig. Since my boyfriend loves meatless rice and beans, so I decided to get creative.
On the Internet I researched various feijoada recipes, which mostly relied on lots of salt and pork and very little other flavoring unless you count the beef bits. But how could I keep things kosher and compete with recipes that look like a butcher shop in a pot? There were a lot of vegetarian black bean recipes online, but this needed to be more than just rice and beans, I needed to make this complex and interesting to call it feijoada. So I explored the Internet for some more tastes of Brazil.
Cross-posted on From the Ground—the blog of American Jewish World Service (AJWS)
Imagine being chronically hungry, and then, after finally receiving a long-awaited plate of food, eating just one bean. According to The New York Times, this is precisely what happened to Maxi Extralien, a starving Haitian boy who received food from a Haitian civic group in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. In the face of extreme food insecurity, thousands of other children like Maxi face the same dire situation: rationing one bean at a time to make food last as long as it possibly can.
Thanks so much to Aaron Lerman for this great guest post. Aaron is the Vice-President of Bet My Life Charities, which seeks to educate and train athletes for races ranging from the casual 5k to Ironman Triathlon…and to raise money for some worthy causes. When he’s not working with the charity he can be found eating falafel, traveling the world, riding bikes or learning more about health. At home in Chicago, he designs and develops window treatments and other home products for retail stores…so if you’re in the market for some curtain rods, this is the guy to talk to! This next spring Aaron is looking to get down and dirty by creating his own backyard garden which has been a long awaited (and delayed) project.
Upon walking into the Birthright Israel NEXT salon at Hazon, I could feel the excitement and energy in the room. Dozens of people were talking, laughing, re-connecting and of course eating on this first night of the conference. This high-energy atmosphere permeated every event I attended during the conference… and did I mention there was lots of eating?
Now, looking back on my time at the Hazon Food Conference in Monterey, California, I wanted to share what the conference meant to me, and how the energy of the event has continued to stay with me.
I’m fascinated when tradition gets tested by modern science and comes out standing. I’d cheered when acupuncture was shown to be effective for chronic pain. Now, I’ve learned that America’s Test Kitchen, which publishes Cook’s Illustrated, has subjected challah to its test kitchen experimentation. The results: pretty much what you’d learned from your mother and grandmother (or would, if you had one).
The best tasting challah is not too sweet, not too dense, not too fluffy and not from the commercial bakeries. Their results, from the Holiday Baking 2009 issue, included:
The Green Zionist Alliance (GZA) is seeking volunteers to help write a food-justice resolution for the World Zionist Congress, scheduled to be held this coming June in Jerusalem. The Congress has jurisdiction over the spending and policies of the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (KKL-JNF). If you’d like to participate this year in writing a food-justice resolution, please contact David Krantz – chairperson [at] greenzionism [dot] org.
For information on the GZA’s work in Israel through the World Zionist Congress, click here.
For information on the resolutions that the GZA successfully passed at the last Congress, click here.
This year my New Year’s resolution was to waste less food, and I guess I was on the same page as, um, God, because the newest video from MyJewishLearning.com is all about Bal Tashhit, the commandment from the Torah that prohibits wasteful destruction. In the past God has appeared to Todd as an orange, a female house DJ, and Flava Flav’s long lost twin borther. But this episode, God upped the ante–he appears as Al Gore.
Image courtesy of vitasamb2001
As I have watched the horrors of Haiti unfold from my safe and comfortable living room, I am continually saddened by a sense of ineffectiveness, of wanting to do more than write another check or say another prayer. I wish I could have an impact, do something to directly improve their lot, participate in a more meaningful way. I started to do some research to see if I could purchase goods from Haiti, and subsequently and came across information that was as familiar as it is disturbing. Despite adequate natural resources, Haiti cannot feed itself, much less produce many exports to support their own trade.
People love to cook for intimate gatherings, but they also have a fascination with mass-producing food. I, for one, am guilty of an obsession with the Food Network show Unwrapped and immediately join the line for any tour of a cheese-, chocolate-, or bourbon-making operation. I’ll also tune into any show that gives chefs a ridiculously short amount of time to cook for an outrageous number of people—preferably with some kind of added challenge, like making dinner for a cruise ship filled half with gluten-sensitive diners and half with people who subsist entirely on whole wheat bread… while the boat heads directly for a storm on the high seas.
Originally published at My Jewish Learning.
Over the last decade, seders for Tu Bishvat have spiked in popularity. This growth is largely due to the contemporary Jewish community’s interest in “greening” ritual and holidays. Every year, the number of organizations turning to Tu Bishvat to inject some sustainability-awareness into their annual programming grows, as does the collection of environmentally-inspired haggadot for Tu Bishvat available online. (Like this one from My Jewish Learning, this one from Hillel, and this one from Hazon.)
The downside is that some people shy away from celebrating the holiday precisely because it feels too “hippie” or eco-spiritual. But while the Tu Bishvat seder, which was originally developed as a mystical celebration by kabbalists in 16th century Safed, provides a helpful structure for celebrating Tu Bishvat, there are no official rules for the holiday. The lack of halakhic requirements means that seders can be tailored to meet their hosts’ personalities–even if they happen to prefer fine china over bicompostable dishware.
From our friends at the Jewish Farm School, an environmental education organization whose mission is to practice and promote sustainable agriculture and to support food systems rooted in justice and Jewish traditions.
Eden Village Camp (EVC) and the Jewish Farm School (JFS) are thrilled to announce the creation of the Eden Village Farm, a 2-acre educational farm that will be a central component of Eden Village Camp. EVC is a new Jewish summer camp with a focus on environmentalism, social justice and spirituality. The farm will be a laboratory for creative and meaningful educational experiences, connecting Jewish agricultural laws to contemporary environmental and food justice issues. The farm will also host programs and volunteer events in the spring and fall.
Last week, The Washington Post’s On Faith blog published a piece of mine inspired by the Hazon Food Conference. Specifically, I was inspired by the session “What Would Moses Drive?”
Entitled “Can Judaism save the planet?”, this piece presents one perspective that answers the question with a resounding “Yes!” We at least have the tools to do it. Judging from the number of people at the conference, and their passion and dynamic visions, we have the resources as well.
