Aliza Wasserman is in graduate school studying food policy and public health on the East coast. While an undergraduate at Cornell University, she somehow managed to avoid the uber-presence of agriculture and nutrition until she graduated in 2005 and realized that's exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She would love to become a better, more seasonal and precise cook, and one day hopes to know a thing or two about gardening. For now, her role in agriculture is resigned to the Ivory Tower. In addition to the Jew and the Carrot, she currently blogs at Jewschool and US Food Policy and has written for New Voices, Tufts Nutrition Magazine, the Boston Jewish Advocate and the Cornell Daily Sun.
Aliza Wasserman's Website »
As I sit and listen to Edgardo Reyes of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers speak of the struggles of farm workers in Florida and across the country, at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Des Moines, the trial of Sholom Rubashkin is beginning today in Sioux Falls, SD.
The Des Moines Register, headquarters located a few blocks away, has reported that despite Mr. Rubashkin’s 163 charges and maximum life sentence, his son Getzel has said that [Rubashkin] has prepared for trial “intensely, but also with the peace of mind of a man who knows he will be, G-d willing, fully exonerated…He has been the source of strength and encouragement for those around him, instead of the other way around.” Mr. Rubashkin maintains that he is innocent of the 91 fraud-related charges for his first trial, which begins in Sioux Falls, SD, moved from Cedar Rapids, IA to account for any media to which potential jurors would have been exposed, according to the NY Times.
While most of us in the Northeast who are plugged in to local agriculture are reveling in our early CSA bounty, many of the producers of this bounty are worrying about the future of this year’s crop.
Laura, a friend in Cambridge, MA, who is a participant in this summer’s Adamah Fellowship in Falls Village, CT, writes on her blog that the Adamah CSA, which delivered its first share this week, is in danger of losing its crop due to the high volume of rain received by the Northeast US in the past few weeks. This amount of rain, combined with the fact that the rain is predicted to continue for several more days at least, and the fact that the farm is located next to a river, mean that it could cost them the viability of many crops, especially so early in the season.
Coming back from a bit of a blogging hiatus, I have recently discovered what seems like an explosion in a new type of foodie event:
The cooking/eating competition for a particular food item. Case in point:
For all the pomp about the circumstances of cuts to spending in the Senate’s version of the stimulus bill, the Senate has actually included some better child nutrition provisions than the House.
Either way, there are significant differences in the child nutrition (and other nutrition-related) provisions in the House and Senate bills. FRAC has an overview of the differences between the two versions. As details are being ironed out as we read, call your Representative and Senators and let them know that these are both important safety net for the growing number of unemployed Americans, as well as some of most far-reaching ways that taxpayer dollars can be use- SNAP (formerly food stamps) generates $1.80 for every dollar spent.
Some key differences:
- School Food Service: Senate has $100 million for
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.
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.
Coming up on November 19th is The Politics of Food: A Conference on New York’s Next Policy Challenge organized by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer at Columbia’s Lerner Hall. On the agenda are Mayor Bloomberg, Stringer, the President of the UN General Assembly and several others.
The long list of partners for the conference include UJA Federation of NY and the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. The conference is free but registration is required.
Back in May, with Agriprocessors in the middle of its downward spiral (how far down it goes, nobody knows…), it seemed like there were people in Postville who still had some respect and appreciation for the jobs brought by the slaughterhouse, and felt their town was being unfairly picked on. On their blog Postville Voices, they wrote “We’ve had enough of every organization with an agenda cynically misrepresenting our town and workplace to further their own ends,” and added that, “There is one thing we do know — the people that run Agriprocessors are good, decent, honest people and we trust that they have acceptable answers.”
As the price of food continues to increase, the value (in real dollars) of food stamps is decreasing– Democrats in Congress are working to pass additional increases to the minimum food stamp benefit in the next few months. But how are these benefits calculated?
Originally, they were based on what is known as the Thrifty Food Plan, what is considered the minimum cost of a reasonably healthy diet. But the food stamp benefit is not recalculated each year. Rather, it is updated based on inflation, and the Thrifty Food Plan is then periodically updated so that it fits the current (maximum) food stamp benefit and resembles the current food preferences of Americans as closely as possible. How do they do this, one might ask?
Well, my advisor and primary author of the US Food Policy blog, Parke Wilde, and two awesome student colleagues at Tufts have put together a Thrifty Food Plan Calculator so anyone can figure out how much a healthy meal costs in their own way– to figure out the ideal mix of foods for health and taste given a food stamp budget. The actual Thrifty Food Plan was last updated in 2006 and the calculator uses the same information economists and nutritionists at USDA had to create the 2006 TFP. You can see if you would have chosen the same combination of foods as they did.
At 7 PM tonight I picked up the very first bunch of veggie-goodies from my very first CSA share- with Heaven’s Harvest farm in New Braintree, MA. As we don’t have a Tuv Ha’aretz CSA in the Boston area, we have launched a campaign to ensure members of the Jewish community, beginning with those involved with the Moishe House Boston: Kavod Jewish Social Justice House, to join one of the many already existing CSAs in the area.
I had been anticipating it all week, wondering what freshly harvested items would be provided for me, a roommate and a nearby friend, who are all going in on the CSA share together.
Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about a lecture she went to with a representative of a major beef company, in which she tried to challenge his assumption that the solution to improving the fatty-acid profile of beef is to genetically modify the cattle (as opposed to just feeding them more grass instead of grain, which is how it was done…forever).
During our conversation, we shared the impression that the beef industry is much less concentrated and integrated than the poultry and hog industries. Well, apparently we were wrong:
Agriprocessors – the controversial kosher meat company – has recently been hit with a barrage of fines, citations, accusations and legal troubles, coming from all fronts including all three branches of the US government, as well as civil society.
Here’s a rundown of the latest:
Violations of Workers’ Rights. On March 20, the Iowa Division of Labor Services issued a $182,000 fine for 39 citations to the Postville, IA plant of Agriprocessors, the world’s largest kosher meat processor, for violations of worker health and safety regulations including labeling of hazardous chemicals, emergency response issues and programs for respirator use and blood borne pathogen issues. The company has 15 days to respond to the citations and fines. Although counsel for Agriprocessors said “any valid concerns raised by the Division of Labor Services have been immediately addressed,” the citations resulted from two inspections, one as recent as Feb 11, 2008.
