Yoni Landau inspired by the Hazon Food Conference and as a result is putting together a training in Northern California for students to take their campus food movements to the next level and then implement a sustainable, student-run business model to act as a hub. The organization is called the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed). Thanks, Yoni, for sharing your work and your thoughts with the Hazon family!

Think of the last time you saw something that pissed you off enough to do something amazing about it. Maybe it was a long grocery line or a bumper sticker for the Tea Party, or maybe it takes a humanitarian crisis like Haiti to really get your adrenaline going.

For me, it was orange chicken.

Uri L’Tzedek is now accepting applications from college and graduate students for our 2nd annual Summer Fellowship Program! This 6-week program is an opportunity to work alongside Uri L’Tzedek’s staff and board, experiencing the many mechanisms that come together to create an effective non-profit organization, gaining exposure to communal Jewish life, effecting change, and learning Torah, social justice philosophy, and community organizing models.

Fellows will be based in New York City and will dedicate their time to some of the following innovative projects: Tav HaYosher (the ethical seal for kosher restaurants), organizational development, communications, education, service, community outreach, website development, multi-media, and technology.

Thanks to Karen Radkowsky for this guest post.  Karen is the President of Limmud, NY.

When Alan Glustoff founded 5 Spoke Creamery in 2005, he put his years as a dairy technologist to work. Glustoff set out to make artisanal kosher cheeses that rivaled their non-kosher counterparts, and his success speaks for itself.  Today, 5 Spoke Creamery’s Kof-K certified cheeses are served in the finest non-kosher restaurants (including Per Se), sold in leading specialty food stores (like Zabar’s and Murray’s), and touted in major food publications (from Bon Appétit to Epicurious).

What makes Five Spoke Creamery’s cheeses different is that they are handmade from the raw milk of grass-fed Holstein cows that are free of pesticides and hormones. Because grass-fed cows get to roam, picking and choosing from a variety of grasses, herbs, flowers and weeds, raw milk from a grass-fed cow has a depth of flavor that cannot be duplicated.

In case you are wondering, raw milk cheeses are perfectly safe. They are made from unpastuerized milk and follow state laws requiring a minimum of 60 days for aging which eliminates pathogenic bacteria. In fact, the safety record for raw milk cheeses span many centuries, and over 70% of European cheeses are made from raw milk.

Thanks so much to Sal Cardoni for his great cross-post.  Sal is a writer living in Los Angeles by way of Wilkes-Barre, PA, covering Environment Issues for TakePart.com

Photo courtesy of Kirk Anderson

It’s a resplendent Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, that rare smog-free day. You decide to charbroil some burgers for lunch. You creek open the lid of your backyard grill and…bzzZZZzzzz!  A bee-hive! In ten seconds flat, you’ve hightailed it back into the house, slammed the door, and Googled “exterminator.”

Best to kill those sons-a-beeswax before they swarm, right? Wrong!

Thanks so much for this great guest post from Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal.  Rabbi Rosenthal is the Director of Education at Congregation B’nai Zion in El Paso, TX.  Before moving to El Paso, she worked as Shabbat and Holidays Coordinator at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.

Passover is a perfect time to learn about Jewish communities from around the world, since there are so many different customs that surround the seder and Passover observance in general.  Whether it is the Afgan and Iranian custom of smacking your tablemates with scallions during Dayenu or the Hungarian custom of decorating the seder table with jewels to commemorate the gold, silver and precious stones that the Israelites took with them from Egypt, Passover can really give us a glimpse into the practices of Jewish communities other than our own.  Haroset is one of the ways that people can learn about other communities and their seder customs, since it seems that every Jewish community (and perhaps every Jewish family) has their own way of creating this seder plate staple.

After thousands of community screenings and grassroots word-of-mouth, you can finally watch FRESH at the theater. We’re opening at the Quad Cinema Friday April 9th. In the spirit of our grassroots model, we’ve organized a long list of how-to workshops, farm to table dinners, lectures and tastings just for you – including two lectures this Sunday by Joel Salatin (details below)

So pick up your fork, get your hands in some dirt and discover new ways to support real food in the city! Almost all FRESH Week event tickets include a redeemable voucher for a FRESH movie ticket at the Quad, so what are you waiting for? GET FRESH NYC!

Below is just a sampling of the events we have planned.

Zachary Agopian is a chef in Portland, OR and an intern working with an exciting project called Food-Hub: food-hub.org/. This project promotes the use of local foods by directly connecting local farmers and ranchers with local buyers. Thanks, Zachary, for sharing this project with us!

If you’re like me you’re always on the prowl for the freshest ingredients to nourish your body. Now, this may involve an assortment of ridiculous activities; from a full inspection of your milk aisle for the freshest carton, or the heated family “discussion” over your highly guarded mushroom foraging stash. My personal favorite, over-dosing on peaches until you can’t stand the sight of one until next summer, as to not give-in to the temptation, in the long winter months, of a well traveled piece of fruit.

Thanks so much to Justin Goldstein for sharing with us his post from Jewschool. Justin is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University and a regular contributor at Jewschool.com.  He lives with his wife in Los Angeles and is active and interested in issues of food and economic justice, is an at-home amateur organic vegetarian chef, a farmer’s market enthusiast and a vocal advocate and all-around cheerleader for the work which Hazon does in the world.

For many American Jews, the Passover seder is an intimate and annual Jewish experience that is possibly the only time of year they will have such an experience. Not just Jews, but even many non-Jews in America enjoy participating in a Passover seder. There is something unique about the Passover seder which forces us to contemplate our role and status in society, our historical memory and our diet. Whether one observes the laws of dietary restrictions for the full 7 or 8 days of the festival, or if one simply partakes in the unique cuisine, one cannot help but reflect on our typical diets in the face of the temporary changes.

In our contemporary society we have the freedom to visit supermarkets and specialized stores and purchase food from around the world irrelevant of the season or distance. And yet, at the Passover seder, we are forced to recall what it means to hastily prepare simple loaves transported on back. We recognize, in a certain regard, between the stark difference of experiencing food in servitude and experiencing food in freedom. And while we have the freedom to buy and eat what we want, for a series of reasons we in the 21st century have less freedom and awareness in choosing or understanding how our food is produced and what type of story our food has from farm to table.

Bobbi Rubinstein 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

Tonight at 7pm Pacific Time, Angelenos will ask a fifth question:  Why on this night are millions of people going hungry?

With 1 in every 8 Angelenos experiencing food insecurity and 1 in 10 Angelenos using a food bank in 2009, Los Angeles is now known as the “hunger capital” of the United States.

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.