I really love the design and message created by the Jew and the Carrot’s own Anna Stevenson, which adorn the totes (and other awesome stuff) in our Cafe Press store - it’s far superior for lugging your groceries home than the ubiquitous, ugly Whole Foods bags. But I have to admit-when I read my friend Faye’s recent blog post, I was really feeling the urge to appropriate her lovely Judaized-Michael Pollan slogan:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (All the rest is commentary.)”

I think the combined ideas of our two wise sages, Pollan and Rabbi Hillel, really sum up the new sustainable food movement, sweeping the Jewish community, not to mention the rest of the U.S.

Although I can’t claim to follow all of the tenant’s of Faye’s professed “Pollangelism,” I am definitely a true-believer in the fundamental pillars. Still, having recently completed a course on defining what a Sustainable Food System is, I’ve become too wonkified in some of the nuances of policy for which the religion ceases to hold up to scrutiny. And I think that in addition to voting with our forks, as Pollan suggests, it’s crucial that we also vote with our votes and letters, voices and community organizations. But hey, no religion has all the answers, especially when held up against the scientific evidence, so why should we subject the Pollangelicals to a double standard?

In this era of sound bites and tag lines, we’d love to hear your suggestions for other names for the new Jewish food revolution!

Update:  If you can top Faye’s brilliance, your winning slogan will be the next one on the Jew and the Carrot’s moichandise! 

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:

Read more »

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.

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Thanks to Linda for Sunday’s post on the recent NYTimes article about the global context of rising food prices. While raising a number of important issues often overlooked in the domestic “locavore etc.” movement, the article begins to explain the effect of biofuels on global food prices. In December, Grassroots International, Community Food Security Coalition, World Hunger Year and several other groups released the report “Fueling Disaster: A Community Food Security Perspective on Agrofuels,” which deals with the effects of proliferating reliance on biofuels on food sovereignty.

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While planning tonight’s Tu Bishvat Seder at the Moishe House Boston: Kavod Jewish Social Justice House,  I’ve been scouring Jewish environmental resources and looking around for the most sustainable way to purchase fruits and nuts which are most certainly not locally grown in New England. A friend also planning the Seder has been looking around for seeds for the traditional American Tu Bishvat parsley planting. While I was certainly aware of the current Shmitta year in Israel, it has only recently come to our attention that this could create a potential question around whether or not to plant parsley at our Seder.

In lieu of the traditional tree-planting, the JNF has opted for other ways to celebrate the holiday in Israel, from a festival to hiking and bird-watching tours. In response to a question written in to the Jerusalem Post’s Ask the Rabbi column about whether a youth group could plant trees on the holiday, the answer was no. If the holiday traditionally marked the paying of taxes on fruit trees, how is the holiday different this year, since fruit trees are perennials and produce fruit without annual planting?

Clearly we are not in Israel, and thus unlikely bound by any restriction on planting. Yet, what does this mean for the way this holiday should be celebrated? And more indirectly, how does giving the land a rest relate to those of us who are not directly involved in agriculture in our daily lives? Should we change what we are eating on the holiday? On other days? How might we interpret this restriction more symbolically?

Both amendments– Lugar-Lautenberg’s “Fresh Act” and Dorgan-Grassley’s payment limits– that would have included meaningful farm subsidy reform in the 2007 farm bill failed in the past two days, the latter falling only 4 votes short of the 60 it needed to be adopted.

The Environmental Working Group and the Center for Rural Affairs blogs have some interesting analysis of how the Democrats sabotaged reform by playing politics with the vote’s parliamentary procedure, in order to prevent Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) from embarrassing her own party. They place blame for the failure of Dorgan-Grassley squarely on the Democratic leadership and those reform-touting Senators who voted against the amendment.

A number of other amendments to reform agriculture policy remain to be voted on, including Sen. Tester’s (D-MT) attempt to “beef up” the new Livestock Title by adding a “packer ban” to check the power of industrial meatpackers and processors by reinforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act’s rules against market manipulation. Apparently, the meat industry has been hard at work preventing this amendment from passing.

You can watch here.

(cross posted on the US Food Policy blog)

Eric Schlosser’s Nov 30 editorial targeted Goldman Sachs, one of three private equity firms controlling most of Burger King’s stock. The fast food monarch, in turn, is reponsible for turning the tide back on the one-cent per bucket increase in wages for thousands of Florida tomato pickers.

It would cost Burger King just $250,000 a year to increase the pickers’ wages by this amount, to solidify similar deals struck with Taco Bell and McDonalds by the AMAZING Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Although many readers of this blog may not frequent Burger King, many others do.

Regardless of the location, when we shell out $6.50 (or $36.50) for a meal, do we have any idea how much of our dollar is going to the person serving us?
to the person making the food?
to the person harvesting the food?
to the person driving our ingredients across the country?

An alternative model is practiced by Just Coffee, a Madison, WI-based co-operative business which sources, roasts, and sells coffee held to the most fair and ethical standards “using the language and mechanics of market economics to turn the market on its ear.”

A number of food industry firms have introduced voluntary nutrition labeling Read more »

Today JTA reported on the upcoming biennial meeting in Orlando, in which the Conservative movement is expected to pass a resolution on the new Hechsher Tzedek, ethical kashrut labeling program.

The article also interviewed other religious and lay sources on the merits of the Hechsher Tzeek program. Rabbi Menachem Genack, head of the Orthodox Union’s kashrut division raises an interesting question, mentioning that ensuring social justice in our food system is the responsibility of the government, not religious bodies.

I actually agree with Rabbi Genack– the government has a greater responsibility to do so, and a greater potential to create appropriate regulations….theoretically.

However, for a variety of reasons, the federal and state governmental bodies that would have a role in regulating, legislating, litigating and enforcing laws that ensure the safety and health of workers in the food industry, and ensure a safe and healthy food supply–including OSHA, the USDA, the WTO, those enforcing federal anti-trust laws– have been asleep at the wheel. In the absence of a more sustainable, ethical food system in which these externalities are appropriately regulated, civil society, including religious institutions have an obligation to work towards such a system, starting with the Jewish community’s Hechsher Tzedek.

YehuditBrachah reports on Jewschool about a new Nathan Cummings Foundation grant for Hechsher Tzedek. The budding Conservative movement initiative started by Rabbi Morris Allen. According to Allen’s blog, a group of Rabbis and lay leaders who have been working on the project will be presenting at the upcoming Conservative movement biennial convention in Orlando. Both the grant and the increasing momentum within the Conservative movement around the important issue of food justice in Kashrut should be exciting for both observers of kashrut and those concerned about food justice alike! (even better for those of us who fall into both categories!)

The beginnings of the Hechsher Tzedek originated with Allen’s first trip to the Agriprocessors’ kosher meat plant in Postville, IA–which produces meat under the label Rubashkin’s. Now a variety of potential ethical issues around the Agriprocessors’ plant have been coming to light– including the newest, which is a potential violation of precautions to prevent the spread of BSE, or Mad Cow Disease.

The Daily Forward continues its coverage of the UFCW campaign to bring Agriprocessors’ violations into the public eye. In conjunction with the Jewish Labor Committee, UFCW orchestrated a leafletting action outside Trader Joe’s that source Agriprocessors’ kosher meat last Wednesday. The UFCW leaflet included claims about violations of mad cow safety rules, a claim that was subsequently disputed by Sholom Rubashkin on the Agriprocessors’ website and in Yeshiva World News.

Also from Yeshiva World News: Osem has reportedly “recalled tens of thousands of bags of Bamba, Bissli, and Dubonim snacks” because of a small toy prize inside the package with 3.5 times the allowable level of lead. Maybe babies shouldn’t be fed Bamba anymore…

Stay tuned for updates on the UFCW campaign.

11.26.07 Update: The Jewish Advocate reports on last week’s leafletting action outside Trader Joe’s in Brookline, MA, organized by the Jewish Labor Committee.

(cross-posted on US Food Policy blog)

Yesterday, the NYTimes reported on the difficult and rewarding nature of trying to get local foods into schools, by overcoming tangible barriers and bureaucratic obstacles in Local Carrots with a Side of Red Tape.

The article illustrates the large example of the NYC School System which has tried to use its tremendous purchasing power to help many of the struggling fruit and vegetable farmers of New York state. This video features a smaller scale example in MA.

The article makes brief mention of the policies which currently make it difficult for the 10,874 [and counting] schools across the country that are part of the Farm to School movement to source school food locally, which brings us back to…drumroll, please: THE FARM BILL.

In case readers of this blog don’t have enough other reasons to care about the Farm Bill–which is scheduled to be debated by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee next Tuesday, October 23–with farm and conservation payments, organic research, food stamps and the myriad other items up for negotiation, the ability for schools to request local foods for school meals is a small item of great import to be included in the draft of the Farm Bill due out any day now.

Specifically, all schools that receive federal dollars for school meal (lunch, breakfast, after-school, summer, etc.) purchases must follow a federal bidding process, also called procurement, Read more »

No, this isn’t a photo of the living quarters of undocumented Latin@ workers crammed into the basement of a Postville meat processing plant — but the temporary residence of “over 100 Bochurim [Rabbi Moshe Rubaskin has been hosting] in his home for the month of Tishrai.”

The plant, of course, is referring to the Rubashkins’ Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and packaging plant, the largest kosher beef producer in the U.S., which received 250 noncompliance citations for food safety from the USDA in 2006, the source of two Class I recalls in the past 9 months, as compared to 34 recalls in all of 2006 for the entire beef, poultry and egg industry.

And the man: Rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, convicted criminal and probable felon, who spent the Chagim celebrating with hundreds of community members and politicians, despite a recent indictment by a federal grand jury for toxic waste dumping at the site of his former Montex textile plant in Allentown, PA.

A local paper, the Morning Call, has more on the nature of the crime(s) of Rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, who is the brother of Agriprocessors’ president Sholom Rubaskin, and Moshe’s son Sholom Rubaskin– illegally storing hazardous waste on the site of their former textile plant, lying about it, followed by several fires (of unknown but suspicious origin) started at the plant, and over $400,000 in unpaid taxes. The city of Allentown is now left with the pleasant task of making redevelopment decisions for this 5 acre property contaminated by toxic waste dumping and burning, located next to Good Sheperd Rehabilitation hospital and residential areas. 

By Sept 17th, the father-son duo were free Read more »

In an update to the previous post about the JCPA’s Food Stamp Challenge this past week, the New York Jewish Week reports that, in search of cheap food while participating in the $21/week Food Stamp Challenge,

“McDonald�s Dollar Menu fit the bill for Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.”

Closer to the action, the Washington Jewish Week reported that Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), in fact, did not take the Challenge in the end, but hopes to participate with the Washington JCRC later this fall.

JCPA Director Steve Gutow also referred to some of the problems underlying food injustices in that article, and the need for Jews to be more involved in addressing them:

“We are no longer connected to the communities from which the poor usually come,” Gutow said. “We’re not as close to the Hispanic community or the African American community, and we need to regalvanize that. Part of our strength as American Jews is that we have always been able to connect with different groups, and we need to get back to that.”

The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has posted several compelling narratives of Jewish leaders, including JCPA and JCRC leaders, Rabbi David Saperstein of the RAC, and Congressmen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who’ve been participating in its Food Stamp Challenge on its new blog.

In the latest post, JCPA Director Steve Gutow says “To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity” of his experience spending only $21/day or $1/meal on food this week, to replicate the real lives of many food stamp recipients around the country.

“Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.”

An earlier post by a participant in CA alludes to one of the reasons why the obesity epidemic has taken root so strongly among low-income households: “I found calories to be affordable. I did not find the wide array of food that I had expected to find when I prepared my shopping list.”

Gutow has also posted a copy of the transcript from the press conference JCPA held in Washington yesterday.

Wednesday’s Washington Times included an op-ed blasting the Food Stamp Challenge as a useless publicity ploy–a gross overgeneralization that does highlight a genuine problem with the Challenge. Read more »

Despite the exciting abundance available at farmers’ markets all summer, it’s not until the concord grapes arrive in early fall that the true celebration of the New England harvest begins.  Tonight, as I enjoyed my first bunch of the season’s juicy, purple slip-skin bounty, I began to investigate their unique place in my local and cultural foodshed. Love them or hate them, concord grapes are a symbol of New England history and harvest, having been developed in Concord, MA in 1849.

In 1853, the grapes won first place in the Boston Horticultural Society Exhibition, and according to The Forward, that history is tied up with the history of their founder, Ephraim Wales Bull, a nativist and potential anti-semite. Before their use in Kosher wine was adopted by New York’s Sam Schapiro, explains the article, the grapes were championed by Bull as being native-American and superior to their “too tender Syrian brothers,” a potential reference to the Semitic immigrants Bull would have resented as a Nativist. Although we may never know the intention of Bull’s comments, we can savor the fruits of his labor, via wine or straight from the vine.