This entry is cross-posted at marriedwithbackpacks.com

It’s now been seven weeks backpacking through this meat-lovers paradise, tough going for a pair of Jews spoiled by home cooking and New York’s great vegetarian restaurants. Vegetarian cuisine in Peru and Bolivia is, like their economies, ‘developing.’ We were pleasantly surprised at the number of vegetarian restaurants in Lima, Arequipa and Cusco. In many of them we had a set menu consisting of a soup, a main, tea and possibly desert for $1.50-$5. Now it could be that South American vegetarian cuisine is relatively immature, or did the Spaniards run off with all the Inca’s seasoning as well as their gold… because all most all of our Andean meals were quite bland. The vegetables or grain soups would have been enlivened by adding almost anything. The mains usually consisted of rice, eggs and glisteningly oily fried vegetables. Most of the vegetarian restaurants rely heavily on eggs and cheese, so if you are travelling vegan, it might end up being the rice and oily vegetables for meal after meal. If you risk eating at a non-vegetarian restaurant, the vegetarian menu usually consists of pizza and spaghetti. I should mention that it wasn’t all bad news, we did enjoy a veggie version of a traditional Arequipa dish (at a restaurant called Lakshmivan), a large pepper stuffed with vegetables, tofu and chillies, as well as scrumptious burritos at the Hearts Café in Ollantaytambo.

When it comes to snacks there is more to get excited about.

In this week’s parasha, Beha’alotcha, Bnei Yisrael continue their journey from Egypt to the promised land. They are provisioned during their desert wanderings by manna, a mysterious food which appears on the ground with the nightly dew, and, according to midrashim,[1] exhibited a variety of tastes. It is against this background that we read the Israelites’ astounding complaint:

�If only we had meat to eat. We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic.� [2]

The Israelites had only just been redeemed from tortuous oppression, so it is most perplexing that they would now long for the ‘free’ foods of slavery. Commentators have offered a number of explanations, claiming that perhaps the fish were so cheap or easy to catch such as to be considered free.[3] The Sifrei, however, provides a more profound interpretation.

If you are in New York next week please join us for Hazon’s New York Ride Launch Event followed by a presentation by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Wednesday, February 10th – 7 pm reception | 8 pm presentation
Bnai Jeshurun | 88th and West End

Learn about Hazon and the 10th Annual New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride at a wine and cheese reception featuring ADAMAH goat cheeseand local, kosher delicious treats.

Following the reception New York Times Bestselling Author, Jonathan Safran Foer will speak about  his latest book “Eating Animals,” sponsored by Bnai Jeshurun.

Andrew Udell is a 16 year old student at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York City. Andrew is a co-founder, together with his friends Lizzie Davis and Skyler Siegel, of Veguary. I asked him a few questions about his plan to help save the world one month at a time.

What is Veguary and how did it start?

One day at shul, my Rabbi posed a question to our smaller minyan about our effect on the world.  One thought led to the next, and I just started thinking about how eating meat affects the world.  I decided to do some more research about vegetarianism, and I came across some really daunting facts that were difficult to handle, yet important to know. I wanted to try out being a vegetarian for a little while. I started doing some more thinking, one thing led to the next, and with the help of a few friends, we founded Veguary and built the site in a few months. Veguary refers to the second month of the year, in which those enthusiastic about fighting global warming, improving their health, or making a positive difference in the world commit to reducing or eliminating their meat intake by pledging on our website at www.veguary.org.

Why February? Was it for the name?

This week White Castle treated us to yet another problematic fast food burger commercial.  The commercial features a person in a full body pig suit performing a highly sexualized dance on the stage of strip club. You can view the ad in all its BBQ-sauce money shot glory on whitecastle.com. You can channel your discomfort by reading this interesting article on the relationship between meat and gender issues, with some specific studies from, of all places, Israel.

Many of us are familiar with the ritual blessings surrounding the eating of fruit. We bless borei pri ha’etz, ‘creator of fruit of the tree,’ before biting an apple, borei pri ha’adamah, ‘creater of fruit of the earth,’ on a watermelon. There is, however, a lesser known blessing that we recite not on the fruit but on the trees themselves. Birkat Ha’ilanot, blessing of the trees, has its origins in the Talmud. The Babylonian tractate of Blessings (Brachot 33:B) quotes Rav Yehuda saying:

“A person who goes out during the days of [the month of] Nisan and sees the blossom of [fruit] trees recites [the following blessing]:

“Blessed are You Hashem, our God, King of the universe, who did not allow anything to lack in His world and [who] created within it good creatures and good trees to give pleasure to mankind through them.”

Check out the great new press in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on a new breed of Jewish farmers.  “Farming the land, Torah in Hand“  explains how our friends at Adamah, Jewish Farm School, Kayam and others are more than just farmers who happen to be Jewish, but are actually farming Jewishly. Click here to check it out.

One correction to the article: Kilayim is incorrectly translated as ‘holding back’ – a better translation would be ‘mixtures’ or ‘mixed species.’

It may have passed under the radar for those who missed the Hazon Food Conference, but Hekhsher Tzedek, the ethical certification seal for the kosher food industry, has now evolved into Magen Tzedek. The name change serves a number of purposes. Aside from easing arguments over spelling, dropping the term hekhsher would better enable the seal to be applied to products that aren’t food.  The main motivation behind the name change however, is to allow the seal to coexist with other rabbinic kosher seals. Orthodox supervision organizations such as the OU were none to happy at the thought of a rival Conservative hekhsher telling them that their meat was kosher. In the meantime, it seemed like the founder of Hekhsher Tzedek, Rabbi Morris Allen, was spending half of his time explaining that the new seal was not intended to be a rival kashrut certification but an ethical seal. Thankfully, after discussions with the OU the parties have agreed on a new name. You can read more about Magen Tzedek in the official press release, or in this article from the JTA.

Michael Ableman is a farmer, an author, a photographer, a recognized practitioner of sustainable agriculture, and a proponent of regional food systems. He has written several books, essays, and articles, and he lectures extensively on food, culture, and sustainability worldwide. Michael is currently farming at the Foxglove Farm on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia and developing The Center for Art, Ecology & Agriculture there.

Is it just me or is there something not quite right about Burger King’s “Whopper Virgins” campaign currently gracing our television screens? For the uninitiated (you “Whopper Virgins virgins” out there), the ad campaign features members of various isolated ethnic groups participating in a burger taste test. The marketing shtik is that since the Romanian villagers, Greenlandic Inuit and Thai Hilltribesmen that star in these commercials have never been exposed to ‘burger culture,’ they can be utilized as objective voices in the Whopper vs. Big Mac debate.

Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot may be the homes of the new Jewish food movement, but in a way the general food movement, even without the ‘Jewish’ modifier, is still very Jewish. I am not referring to the fact that, much like many progressive movements, a disproportionate number of the food movement’s major protagonists, like Michael Pollen, Peter Singer, or Mollie Katzen, are Jewish. Rather, that the questions and challenges posed by the food movement are the types of questions and challenges the Jewish tradition has been raising for millennia.

Remember… the first conflict we see in the Bible is over, of all things, forbidden fruit!