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 »
NYPost reports on a dispute over the authenticity of the new Bowery Whole Foods’ Guss’ Pickles supplier:
July 5, 2007 — It’s a case of the big pickle versus the little gherkin. A pickle peddler says she’s soured on trendy Whole Foods, claiming the chain of
supermarkets has been buying legendary Guss’ Pickles from a Bronx rival she accuses of ripping off the famous name. “Whole Foods is selling the pickles [as if ] they are coming from the Lower East Side’s Guss’ Pickles,” said owner Patricia Fairhurst. “They never came from me. I am Guss’ Pickles.”
The briny brouhaha stems from a legal battle between Fairhurst’s 85-year-old store on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side and another business, United Pickle in The Bronx. Fairhurst insists that United Pickle stop using the Guss’ name synonymous with sours and dills. Both sides are due in Manhattan federal court July 16 to fight over the name - but Fairhurst accuses Whole Foods in the meantime of using the Guss’ Pickles brand to sell a rival’s inferior product in a new Bowery store.
A Whole Foods Market spokesman, however, insisted that United Pickle - run by the Leibowitz family - is the true purveyor of the pickle name.
I guess we’ll see on July 16th who the “real” Guss is…Wikipedia and NYTimes Select have the full scoop:
In 2006, Tim [Baker, former owner of Guss, several owners after Isidor Guss] sold his ownership of Guss’ Pickles and left a legal mess in its wake. A buyer in Woodmere, NY claims to have bought the name Guss’ Pickles from Tim, while the actual store, which moved from its historic location on Essex Street to a storefront within the Lower East Side Tenement Museum was sold to someone else. The two parties are now battling in court for the rights to the name Guss’ Pickles.
As the mark-up of the 2007 Farm Bill begins–the first two of six House sub-committees completed their mark-up of the Bill last week– I will be posting a series of updates about the Farm Bill, as I spend the summer in the thick of things interning for a national coalition working to create a Farm Bill that promotes healthy and local foods.
But first, a shameless plug: as part of the Community Food Security Coalition’s work, I am helping to organize a sign-on letter in support of these Healthy Priorities, which will be submitted to the leadership of the Senate Agriculture Committee this week as part of a Dear Colleague letter from Senators Feingold and Brown.
If you are involved with an organization that is related to food, agriculture, youth, communities, farms, public health, or really any area that understands the importance of what we put into our bodies and how our tax money is used, please support of the inclusion of initiatives to ensure access to fresh, healthy and local foods for all communities in the 2007 Farm Bill by signing your organization on to the letter to the leadership of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
PLEASE email me to sign on to the letter. For more information about the issues and efforts, visit CFSC’s Farm Bill policy page. Read more »
There are only a few days remaining to vote in the JFSJ poll to shape the upcoming Domestic Jewish Agenda. I’m very excited about this campaign for which Hazon, Isabella Freedman Retreat Center, Jdub Records, Jewcy.com, Jewish Student Press Service, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, Jews United for Justice, Jewschool.com, Moishe/Kavod House Boston, Progressive Jewish Alliance, The Shalom Center, The Tribe, VelveteenRabbi.com , and Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring are sponsors.
I’m only dissapointed that reforming our food system did not make it to the 10 issues that voters can choose from to help shape the new domestic social agenda for Jews/Jewish organizations. Does this mean that food systems will not be included in the agenda? Some might argue that food is encompassed by the “Environment” choice, but there is much that needs reform in our food system beyond its environmental implications. Perhaps someone from Hazon can clue me in to whether this was discused and why it was left out.
(cross-posted on Jewschool)
This isn’t exactly a brand-new concept, but the NYTIMES 05.25.07 feature on “Veggie Mobiles” traveling through food deserts seems like an exciting, albeit temporary and non-systemic, solution.
I’ve recently had a number of conversations about the role of the ice cream man in childhood. Despite the fact that I was privileged to grow up on a street that the ice cream truck did frequent daily, my “health nut” mother relegated actual purchases from the truck to highly rare novelties. Therefore, while I know that the concept of a vehicle driving around neighborhoods selling food isn’t exactly a comprehensive or sustainable solution to anything, I definitely see potential for “veggie mobiles” around the country, in lieu of Mr. Softee’s monopoly.
Perhaps this hasn’t been tried before, because of the common misconception that kids only like unhealthy foods, which was shattered by David Kamp’s article in Wednesday’s NYTimes Dining Section about the horrors of traditional children’s menus and a new movement towards serving children real food instead of the dreaded “fingers.” Like Kamp, I was usually given smaller portions of what everyone else was eating, and didn’t have a problem with this. In fact, with regard to exciting grown-up restaurant foods, I was always told that “my eyes were bigger than my stomach.” In addition to the more innovative children’s menus, hopefully more restaurants will follow the trend of offering half portions of regular menu items, an option I have always appreciated.
In a recent article in the UK’s Jewish Chronicle, Michael Green of our ally across the pond, Swords and Ploughshares, writes about the questionable kashrut status of genetically modified foods:
A long tradition of Jewish thinkers has emphasised the importance of protecting the natural environment, but Jewish voices have failed to reach a consensus since GM food hit the shops in 1996. . .
As Jonathan Sacks puts it, God and man are “partners in the work of creation”. The ancient covenant is mirrored in the modern concept of sustainability which seeks to “meet the needs of the present [generation] without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Or, in biblical terms, the environment must be preserved l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.
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There are many food-related things one can count while counting the omer– food miles, money spent on food each day/week….what else can folks think of?
Next week, Eat Local Challenge and the Locavores are sponsoring a Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, from April 23 to 29. Many people are under the impression that eating local (like organic), requires a large food budget. The point of the Penny-Wise challenge is to eat local, as defined by a 100-mile radius, on what some consider a small budget.
The Penny-Wise challenge uses numbers from the Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditures, which allots $68/week for a one-person household or $144/week for a household of 2+ with 2 wage earners.
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If you haven’t found a screening of King Corn, another amazing recent film, Black Gold, about the efforts of Tadesse Meskela and Ethiopian coffee farmers to increase the market for Fair Trade Ethiopian coffee varieties, will be airing on PBS Wednesday evening (times vary by station). If you want to continue remembering and learning about struggles for freedom after Passover ends– there are a number of actions we can take as consumers and responsible citizens with info atBlack Gold and Oxfam’s websites.
The goal of these films should not be to stress you out further about which products to consume….or should it?
This evening, as my roommates and I were finishing up an exhausting round of stripping the dirt and chametz from our kitchen, I found it unfortunate that I had to throw several jars of salsa and tupperware of chiles down the garbage disposal. I wondered if the disposal could handle this amount of “hotness,” as an American garbage disposal would presumably not be accustomed to such intensity. On Passover, probably spurred on by the choice of packaged foods available and promoted by the local supermarket’s “Passover Aisle,” American Ashkenazi Jews traditionally retreat into the deepest recesses of Jewish culinary tradition; to me, it seems completely unnecessary to eat cold fish jelly or kishke for 8 days straight.
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So the NYC Food Policy “Czar,” Benjamin Thomases, has no background in food policy. Well, if he did, maybe his learning curve wouldn’t be so “steep,” as he confided to the NY Sun– he wouldn’t be so surprised at how hard it is to explain to people that his job has little to do with trans-fats and would understand better how interdisciplinary food policy must be. Kudos to him for trying to unite the departments and agencies that deal with food in the city; the same issues are present at every level of food policy- federally, much of the disconnect between nutrition science and agricultural subsidies seems to result from the disjointed Senate Committee and Federal agency structure.
To add to Ben’s great post on the evils of corn, last week researchers at the University of Barcelona, led by Dr. Juan Carlos Laguna, reported results of a mechanism linking HCFS (high fructose corn syrup) to obesity. HCFS has been accused of playing a significant role in the obesity epidemic, but there are a variety of theories as to why. The research in rats showed that:
Liquid fructose changes the metabolism of fat in the liver by impacting a specific nuclear receptor called PPAR-alpha, leading to a reduction in the liver’s ability to degrade the sweetener.
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So I’ve been very much appreciating the beginning ideas about the role of Pesach as prompting a sort of psychological and spiritual spring cleaning, especially coming from the indulgence of Purim. I have really been feeling that sort of inertia towards springtime and freedom in almost every aspect of my life in the past few weeks, and it’s reassuring to read that others feel the same way, and that there may be explanations for it.
But sometimes I need to take a break from my day-job studying the portance and significance of food/nutrition, debating local and organic, examining food consumption trends, sustainable solutions to malnutrition, Farm Bill politics and the implications of the obesity epidemic, and explore a creative, childish side. Which is what I did tonight when my biweekly box from Boston Organics arrived and my roommate and I had a conversation about the hair-like characteristics of carrot tops. I present to you: Mr. Purple Carrot-top?
This is the problem with government regulation:
“This artificial trans fat is the kind that New York City health officials decided to ban from restaurants, citing health studies that show that even a couple of grams of it a day can significantly increase the chance of a heart attack. Whether natural trans fats have the same health effect is still being explored by scientists, and some researchers believe the natural ones may actually be beneficial.But to the Food and Drug Administration, which is in charge of most packaged food labeling, there is no difference between the trans fat that occurs in cows and other ruminant animals and the kind that is artificially created and favored in large-scale food manufacturing.”
It perverts science and creates irrelevant law while missing half the problem.
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