After hearing and reading all about locally grown organic food, I decided that I wanted to get my hands in the dirt. So this week, I helped out at the local CSA on a nearby farm. We transplanted onions, leeks and scallions. Two of us sat behind the tractor in little yellow plastic seats that are about a foot off the ground. Slanting down from the tractor is a metal sheet filled with trays of seedlings.

In-between and a little in front of the seats are three wheels with spikes on them. As the tractor moves forward, the wheels turn, digging small holes in the ground. The wheels are also filled with water, so as they dig, the holes are filled with water. As the tractor moved forward I had to pull out a seedling, from the tray, and shove it into the hole that was next to me. I then had to pinch the soil shut on top of the roots. This process had to be done in about 1 second in order to keep up with the tractor. Planting the three rows of seedlings took about an hour. The tractor had to stop a few times for me to catch up because it took me a while to get into a good rhythm. I believe we planted over five hundred onions.

Working at the CSA made me realize just how much work goes into making fresh, locally grown fruit. Everything there was grown by hand. I thought it was a great experience and I look forward to eating the onions.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, sets out to answer the seemingly simple question, “What should we have for dinner?” Pollan traces four meals to their origins: a meal from McDonalds, a meal cooked from ingredients bought at Whole Foods, a meal from a small local farm, and one that was made hunter-gatherer style. Pollan discusses the taste of the meal and the environmental impact of each meal. As you can imagine, the meal from McDonalds was the worst meal both environmentally and taste-wise. It is also the only meal that one can eat while driving on the highway. The meal from Whole Foods was good flavor-wise. The milk at Whole Foods is organic, meaning the corn the milk cows are fed is organic. It does not mean that they are treated humanely. The free-range chickens are not allowed outside until they are ready to be killed. The local meal was all grown on a small local farm, was completely free-range, and all grass fed. The fourth meal was all made with food either hunted, foraged, or grown by Pollan. He goes hunting for wild boar, tries to forage for abalone, forages for mushrooms, and grows lettuce from his garden in Northern California. This meal was the best of the four; he described it as “the perfect meal.”

As I thought about this book, I realized that a kosher omnivore living in New England would have a very hard time preparing a meal hunter-gatherer style.

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This past weekend, I hosted the first (and maybe the last) annual matzah tasting. We tasted six different types of matzah: egg, grape, whole wheat, thin tea (go figure) milk chocolate- covered egg, and dark chocolate-covered regular.

I invited my friends Leah and Ben to join me as judges. We scored the matzahs using a score sheet adapted from the pie-judging sheet from the American Pie Council’s pie competition. Each matzah could receive up to four points in the first six categories, and up to eight in the last one. These were the categories:

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After fruitlessly trying to find information about the tuna melt, I was getting frustrated with my project. I looked at the history of sandwiches, the history of tuna fishing, and the problems with tuna fishing. However, I was having trouble linking everything together. So I decided to switch my topic to the history of apple pie. I have managed to find several sources about apple pie, including really early cookbook references. I even found a website for the American Pie Council, which is “committed to preserving America’s pie heritage and promoting American’s love affair with pies.” http://www.piecouncil.org/about.htm. I am looking forward to my research.

I just got a notice in the mail about this upcoming conference that looks really interesting. It’s called “Women, Men, and Food: Putting Gender on the Table” (April 12-13, 2007, Cambridge MA). It’s free, but you have to register. You can read about it by clicking this link.

www.radcliffe.edu/events/conferences/2007_food.php

Every Purim, my family makes a lot of hamantashen. A few years ago, my mother started a homeschoolers’ baking group, and for the past couple of years, we have enlisted their help. We have two flavors that we make every year. One is poppyseed. The other is cherry. Each year, we also experiment with a variety of other fillings. For example, one year we did fig, another we did pumpkin. We’ve also done strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, apple, and blueberry. My personal favorites are the poppyseed and apple. We are trying to think of a new flavor for this year. Does anyone have any ideas?

I’m a homeschooling teenager in Boston. I’ve been using the freedom of homeschooling to explore a special social studies topic this year – the history of food. I’m reading a lot of books and articles and recently visited the Radcliffe Library, to see their cookbook collection. I’ve also been doing a lot of cooking and eating.
One of my current projects is studying the history of the tuna melt. I got the idea after reading an article in the newspaper where the journalist traced the history of tiramisu, which in the 1700s was called tipsy cake, and before that, rum bread. This article was trying to prove the point that not all “modern” foods, such as tiramisu, are so modern. I’m trying to do the something similar with the tuna melt.
I would like my posts on the Jew and the Carrot to chronicle my tuna melt project and my other food-related projects. I plan to post interesting facts and stories that I find while researching, and also sometimes post about my own experience researching this topic as a teenager. I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions as I go along.