Thanks to Danielle Selber for sharing her thoughts about her experiences volunteering with Birthright Israel NEXT’s Harvest to Harvest campaign!

I love to cook. If you’re looking for me, you can usually find me in the kitchen, stirring away at homemade tomato sauce or a big pot of soup, adding ingredients that don’t quite match just for the thrill of it. I often serve Shabbat dinner for twenty, and I really like chopping all those onions. I bake cookies for my Hebrew school students regularly (to the chagrin of their parents), and my boss has nicknamed me “Kugels Lebowski” for my uncanny ability to make a festive kugel for any random occasion. For my last birthday, I received six cookbooks.

Thanks to Rabbi Eliav Bock, Director of Ramah Outdoor Adventure (Ramah Outdoors) for sharing these thoughts related to Passover, his community in Colorado and the work of the Jewish Food Movement. Read on for his Ten Plagues Facing Our Modern Way of Eating and Relating to Food and the complimentary Dayenu that you can adapt for your own seders…

It is the month of Nissan and spring is in the air. If I was living on a farm here in Colorado, I would be plowing the fields, spreading manure, and getting ready to plant our first spring vegetables. Sadly I do not live in such close proximity with the land. Instead, I live in a house in Metro Denver and would not be able to fit a tractor through the door that leads to my back yard.

No, this time of year is a time when many of us living urban lives do not even stop and appreciate the effort that farmers throughout the country and throughout the northern hemisphere are making to ensure that we in America have delicious food to eat. (In a future post, I will write about the farmer with whom we are contracting to bring fresh local food to camp. She did spend last week preparing her fields. But more on that in a week or two. . . .)

Thanks to Bobbi Rubinstein for sharing this update about the garden at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA. Bobbi is a publicist, journalist and green activist. She’s chair of the Valley Beth Shalom Green Team and co-founder of Netiya: The Los Angeles Jewish Coalition on Food and Environmental Justice Issues.

I am excited to share some news with the Hazon kehillah. My shul, Valley Beth Shalom, has broken ground on an urban garden called the Gan Tzedek Initiative. We’re growing food to donate to local food pantries and creating educational opportunities around Torah and environmental study. And perhaps most importantly, we’re building community across all age levels since this is a team effort among all the schools, teachers, parents, administrative staff and clergy.

Huge mazal tov to Rabbi Eliav Bock, author of this guest post and Director of Ramah Outdoor Adventure, on the birth of his son last week!

Today is the first of periodic blog posts about food at Ramah Outdoor Adventure. Because the food we eat at camp will play such an integral part in supporting the overall mission of the camp, I thought it appropriate to focus some of the blog posts leading up to camp on the use of food.

For those who missed the announcement the other day, The First Lady, Michelle Obama, launched the “Let’s Move” campaign. She has correctly singled out childhood obesity as a major epidemic facing America. Her campaign aims to get kids off the couch, away from video games, and eating more wholesome food. For anyone who has been aware of the growing food movement in America these past few years, nothing that she said yesterday is too surprising. It is an indisputable fact that as a society, our children today are less healthy than they were a generation ago. Anywhere from 25%-30% of American children are overweight. As Mrs. Obama pointed out, today’s children are the first generation whose life expectancy is shorter than that of their parents.

Thanks so much to Rachel Kriger for this terrific meditation on the month of Adar.  Rachel was raised on organic food and in Jewish dayschool. After college, in the Adamah fellowship, she was able to merge her love of small scale farming and Judaism, and she became the farm manager for the following year.  The Calendar Garden at Kayam farm at Pearlstone, is a place to cultivate plants and their connection to seasons, Jewish wisdom and body awareness. Please feel free to join this Rosh Chodesh group in the garden each month.

Thanks so much to Emunah Hauser for this heads up.  Emunah is a host at Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, which has been organizing the Referendum on the Deli Menu, which will be held on Tuesday in Berkeley, CA.  Check out Saul’s blog Sustainability Adventures of a 100+ seat Diner.

Can the Jewish Deli be sustainable? Can a retro cuisine be part of the avant- garde?

Local, organic VS. the externalized costs of cheap, industrial food and . . . collective memory and food traditions?

Deli is at a crossroads. In New York, only a handful delis remain from hundreds. Across the country, beloved Delis continue to disappear. Popular expectations of “real” Deli conflict with today’s economic realities. And these expectations conflict with environmental sustainability.

Thanks so much to Aaron Lerman for this great guest post.  Aaron is the Vice-President of Bet My Life Charities, which seeks to educate and train athletes for races ranging from the casual 5k to Ironman Triathlon…and to raise money for some worthy causes. When he’s not working with the charity he can be found eating falafel, traveling the world, riding bikes or learning more about health. At home in Chicago, he designs and develops window treatments and other home products for retail stores…so if you’re in the market for some curtain rods, this is the guy to talk to! This next spring Aaron is looking to get down and dirty by creating his own backyard garden which has been a long awaited (and delayed) project.

Upon walking into the Birthright Israel NEXT salon at Hazon, I could feel the excitement and energy in the room. Dozens of people were talking, laughing, re-connecting and of course eating on this first night of the conference. This high-energy atmosphere permeated every event I attended during the conference… and did I mention there was lots of eating?

Now, looking back on my time at the Hazon Food Conference in Monterey, California, I wanted to share what the conference meant to me, and how the energy of the event has continued to stay with me.

Thanks so much to Sara Rice for this great guest post.  Sara recently attended the Hazon Food Conference and is the Noshin’ columnist at TCJewfolk.com

I didn’t go to Jewish camp. Or Jewish day school — or even regularly attend a shul growing up. As a somewhat-recent convert, I don’t have any of the memories involving particularly eventful Pesach seders or Purim carnivals that many of my Jewish friends do. But it makes me all the more appreciative of my time at Hazon Food Conference 2009. Where else can I sing birkat hamazon with 400 other Jews who I know get “eating and being satisfied” in the same way I do? Where else would I have the opportunity to make havdalah with such exuberance that the floor is visibly reverberating under my feet from the combined force of, at minimum, 200 others? These are now my memories, and these are my people — foodie Jews who care about taste, ethics, the environment, and even just the beauty of a bowl of dried fruit. But to say we were all the same would be absurd; I met people with all different careers — sex therapist, caterer, Jewish educator, math and philosophy student, farmer, botanist, historian, and author; people of all ages, from barely born to octogenarians; nationalities from the U.S. to the U.K., to Israel, and even Argentina.

Thanks so much to Lailah Robertson for this great guest post about her experience and the Hazon Food Conference. Lailah is a San Francisco freelance writer who writes the blog In My Box about her CSA box and all the delicious vegetarian, gluten-free things she makes with it. This post is NOT intended to endorse any particular diet or agenda, e.g. to say that being vegan (abstaining from all animal products) is the only way to live, or that vegetarians are hypocrites. It merely hopes to be an exploration of one of the least considered aspects of our food chain.

Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, asked us two questions during his keynote speech last night at the Hazon Food Conference. It felt like the beginning of one of those Jewish parables, the ones where the wise rabbi asks or tells us something that means more than it seems on the surface, where you ponder on the teaching and the world opens up in a new way.

“Stand up if you eat meat, but you wouldn’t if you had to kill it yourself,” Nigel called out. A number of people in the packed hall rose from their seats. I applauded them for their self-awareness and honesty, while of course maintaining a certain degree of vegetarian smugness.

Then he asked us another question. “Stand up if you are vegetarian, but would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” This time fewer people stood up, but it was still a significant number.

Then Nigel told us the story of the goat.

Thanks so much to Rita Esquenazi for her great thoughts on the Hazon Food Conference

630 people. Four days. One conference. I am here in the rugged beauty of Asilomar State Park, where the Pacific Ocean meets a rocky beach, to attend the fourth annual Hazon Food Conference. Among the many ideas and emotions running through me, more than anything I feel blessed to be here, being able to exchange knowledge with a wide variety of people from across the country and around the world, from as near as Salinas, CA to as far as South Africa. As a Goldman Young Adult Fellow I am deeply grateful for this opportunity that the Fellowship enabled. Almost 50 other Fellows are here and we are discussing our next steps and how to bring what we’ve learned back to our communities, how to create teachable moments, how to build more sustainable communities.

I am here because I am interested in the nexus of Judaism, eating healthily and sustainably and helping those in need. Many others are focused on environmental issues, bringing down “the Man” of giant agribusinesses, or simply because they enjoy food! But what is this Food Conference all about anyway? Hazon states that they exist to create a sustainable world for Jews and for all people. Clearly, with over 600 people here, that chord resonates.

Thanks to Debs Gardner for this great guest post.  Debs maintains the food blog, Seattle Local Food.

It was Friday morning at the Hazon conference, and we were already deep in weighty conversations about social justice and corporate food production. We’d watched The Garden, a documentary about Latin American immigrant farmers protesting destruction of a gorgeous 14-acre garden they’d built in industrial South Central Los Angeles. I’d participated in a media panel, discussing misleading marketing, the role of blogging in media, and the challenges writers face. Like needing a salad after too much kugel, it was time for something at least a little lighter. So, I went to hear one of my favorite experts on Jewish food tell stories and make nosh.

Joan Nathan was on stage, multitasking. Busily adjusting the top of a food processor, she was demonstrating how to prepare two different dishes, while overseeing an assistant chopping vegetables and simultaneously talking into a microphone, held by another assistant, about the history of Jewish foods in France.

Thanks so much to Aryeh Pelcovitz of Uri L’Tzedek for this great guest post.

In July of 2009, Uri L’Tzedek began a small project in New York to change the way the (Orthodox / Jewish) community approached its food. Modeled after Israel’s Tav Chevrati, the Tav Hayosher, ethical seal, would certify that a kosher eating establishment was meeting legal and ethical standards in the way it treats its employees. Uri L’Tzedek granted the Tav to kosher restaurants and supermarkets after confirming that their employees were paid at least minimum wage, overtime, were granted appropriate breaks,  and work in a healthy and safe environment.

Thanks so much to our friends at Jewcy for sharing this really funny holiday post they put together with Erik of Fancy Fast Food, a super fun new food blog that performs “extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants.”

Hey everybody, it’s Hanukkah! It’s Chanuka! No matter how you spell it, it’s time for the Jewish festival of lights — eight crazy nights of dreidels gone wild, a time when latkes are as abundant as old yentas around a mahjongg table. But you don’t need to be Jewish to partake in Hanukkah traditions, particularly the gastronomic treat of latkes (or lattkes). No matter how you spell it, “latkes” is Yiddish for fried pancakes, typically of the potato variety — making it oddly similar to McDonald’s hash browns. However, Bubbe Wendy has guilted us into using her Fancy Fast Food recipe (”If you just want to use McDonald’s hash browns, then I guess that’s fine by me…”), so here goes. Oy…

Thanks so much to Jay Weinstein, for his great guest post.  Jay is a chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America, is a New York based food writer, editor, culinary instructor, and cookbook author. His food articles and recipes have been featured in The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Newsday, Time Out New York, National Geographic Traveler, and numerous other publications. His latest book, The Ethical Gourmet, focuses on ecologically sustainable fine foods. He teaches culinary arts at The Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City.

Straight out of the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in 1988, I went to work for Jasper White, the Boston chef who would become my mentor. I still remember how he told me that Atlantic salmon were commercially extinct. We were beginning to use a new salmon raised in a Canadian aquaculture operation that was a cross-breed of farmed Norwegian salmon, and wild Atlantic salmon. “Better half wild than not wild at all,” he quipped.

Since that time, the New England rivers that provided genetic stock for that ‘80s hybrid have suffered the excesses of the salmon farming industry, and the American public has been exposed to the pollution, pesticides, artificial colorants, and epidemics that salmon aquaculture has brought to our shores. We’ve lamented the megaton hauls of wild “feeder” fish dumped into the insatiable maw of the big salmon business, which built salmon into the most consumed fish in America.

While most consumers seem content to keep on buying factory-farmed salmon because it’s cheap, reliably fresh, and inoffensively mild in taste, some eco-savvy Americans who are concerned about the decline of ocean fish, river biodiversity, and humane treatment of animals rail against fish farming as an environmental disaster. Mention farmed fish to them, and they’ll say that wild is the only choice for fish-eaters with a conscience. Fish farming, after all, has done such damage. But there’s a problem with their argument too.