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 »
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.
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
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.
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!)
(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,
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
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.
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.
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.
- Price of a Farm Aid Ticket: $52 (+ ticketmaster fees)
- Price of Fung Wah bus from Boston: $15
Standing among a crowd of New Yorkers, surrounded by equal parts marijuana haze, “Stop Factory Farms” t-shirts and average New Yorkers here to see Dave, Neil & the Allman brothers, listening to a Hasidic reggae artist talking about the taste of an unbelievable tomato and getting one’s hands back into the dirt to refresh the connection between humans and the earth: PRICELESS
Leadership of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) will be participating in the now-famous Food Stamp Challenge during the Days of Awe period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Sept. 14th-21st).
Executive Director Rabbi Steve Gutow and JCPA Chair Lois Frank will stick to the $1 per meal or $21/week budget of an average food stamp recipient, as part of the organization’s new Anti-Poverty Campaign, to highlight the connections between Jewish teachings surrounding poverty and the current Food Stamp reauthorization component of the Farm Bill.
Get out your sustainable, local, affordable healthy food calendars, folks….
Because Farm Aid has released its lineup of HOMEGROWN Happenings surrounding Sun Sept 9th’s Farm Aid Concert on Randall’s Island in NY. The events, in partnership with many other local food and agriculture organizations, include a festival at Union Square from 10-4 on Sept 8th, and a week of farmfresh menu options at several NYC restaurants.
Hasidic reggae master Matisyahu will be among the excellent line-up at the upcoming Farm Aid 2007 concert and festival at Icahn Stadium on Randall’s Island on Sunday Sept. 9th… and they say Jews don’t farm…
In addition to music, the actual Farm Aid festival will include fresh examples of New York’s sustainable & organic bounty, which will be collected on a caravan around the state leading up to the concert, as well as opportunities for education and action to improve our food system.
