Rabbi Gordon Tucker is the Senior Rabbi at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. He served as the Dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTA) from 1984 until 1992, and on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly from 1982 to 2007. His most recent published work, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations is a translation with commentary of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s three volume work in Hebrew.

Right before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to speak with Rabbi Tucker about his thoughts on Hekhsher Tzedek, how food and social justice connect, and where change comes from in Conservative Judaism (hint, read the title of this post)

Read all about it below the jump (plus - a special, candid photo of Rabbi Tucker on Hazon’s New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride!)…

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Mark Bittman’s Saturday Article in the New York Times exposed fish farms as rife with unbalanced feed to food ratios, environmentally degrading practices and negative effects on biodiversity (not to mention palate diversity). He also says that farmed fish tastes bad. I guess it turns out that CAFOs and Fish Farms have more in common than a penchant for scandalous kashrut practices.

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If Anna Lappe (of the Small Planet Institute) had one minute in an elevator with Barack Obama she’d ask him to start a Food Corps, modeled after the Peace Corps to “support a generation of young people to dedicate a year or two of their lives to engage with ending needless hunger in a country of plenty and the squandering of fossil fuels, water, soil and other precious resources through chemical agriculture.”

The idea is apparently compelling to a lot of food movement luminaries. In Grist’s article, Read more »

You can only eat fried green tomatoes so many times before that best of unripened delicacies starts to wear on the nerves and the stomach lining. Here, courtesy of urban gardener and farmer’s market maven Zoe Plaugher, is a sticky, brown, vinegary, sweet, spicy and tart chutney that will put those last premature tomatoes to excellent use. The result is reminiscent of a more complex tamarind chutney and it goes great with latkes, roast meats or couscous.
Green Tomato Chutney

Approx 3lbs of green tomatoes ~ 5-6 cups, cored and chopped
2/3 c water
2 c sliced shallots
½ c minced ginger
1 c dried cherries (tart or extra tart are best, but use sweet if that’s what you have)
2 c cider vinegar (more if needed)
1 c honey (may be adjusted depending on sweetness of cherries)
1-2 jalepenos, cherry bombs or any other medium-hot pepper.  Adjust up or down to your liking.

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Sweet potatoes could be the mascot of the sustainable foods movement.  Packed with nutrition, including more than twice the daily suggested serving of vitamin A, antioxidants, protein, iron, potassium and other hard to get minerals, sweet potatoes provide a huge benefit to calorie ratio. They taste wonderful, they’re even anti-inflammatory, which can help mitigate inflammation-related diseases like asthma, arthritis, and heart disease. Because they’re root vegetables, they absorb everything (including pesticides and chemical fertilizers) that’s in the soil around them, so it’s important to get organic sweet potatoes so you can eat the nutrient-rich skin.  Finally, sweet potatoes come into season right now, in November and December, just when straight-off-the-farm bounty starts to wane. At your farmer’s market, you should be able to find just-dug sweet potatoes. Prepare them by poking a few holes and baking them in the oven or by boiling them, then use the starchy, nutrient-rich water in soup or other recipes. Straight up is the best way to enjoy these excellent roots, since they taste great with nothing at all added, but they drop jaws and fill bellies in this sweet and savory pancake recipe.

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The joy of Diaspora is the variety of experience it brings into our tradition. Almost any kind of food has analogues in every tributary of Jewish heritage and candy is no exception. We’ve sifted through the internet and our cookbook collections to bring you Jewish candy recipes from Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Mediterranean, including, of course, the sticky and celebrated halvah, in its classic sesame rendition and with a serendipitous autumnal twist.

Raw Halvah
(From Arrowhead Mills)

1/2 cup Sesame Seeds (ground)
2 tablespoons Sesame Seeds (whole)
3 tablespoons Raw honey
1/4 cup Sesame Tahini (use the driest part of the jar)
1/8 teaspoon Almond extract

Grind 1/2 cup seeds in a blender. Mix ground seeds, whole seeds, tahini, honey and extract in a bowl all together until thoroughly blended. Roll into small balls or into a long roll and refrigerate.

More after the jump…

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This year of the food crisis, we’ve heard a lot about world hunger in the newspaper and the blogosphere. As countries and as individuals with generally more and better access to more and better food, most of us probably feel imperative to help spread the wealth. The U.S.A., where I come from, is the largest food donor in the world, but this year, on World Food Day at the United Nations, the U.S.A. issued the world’s biggest mea culpa to the international community.

Former-President Clinton did the talking, telling the UN that he “blew it” on food. Not only did he blow it, the IMF blew it, the World Bank blew it, and the UN blew it. In the end though, that’s a lot of air, and not a lot of policy.

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There’s no food without water, and some people love to talk about how the destruction of our watersheds will lead us all to perdition before our teeth even fall out. It’s the kind of doom-saying that makes a lot of folks want to crawl under a rock instead of thinking about change.  But saving enormous amounts of water is actually pretty easy and, to a large degree, can be accomplished with a time investment instead of a monetary one. In the spirit of the new year, here are some tips and resources on how to change your kitchen for the better (world-wise and wallet-wise).

Start with your Sink.

To repair the world, you can start by repairing your sink.  Fixing leaking faucets can save 20 gallons of water a day. Just spend a couple of bucks and a few minutes screwing on an aerator and watch your water bill go down. If you need one, you can also get a water filtration system for your tap instead of drinking bottled water, which uses lots of water in production and pollutes the world with plastic. Finally, unlike quails and manna, water still falls from the sky - so you can harvest rainwater for your garden using a rain barrel. The Florida Extension teaches you how to build one here.

Or, you could get fancy.

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Rabbi Julian Sinclair is an author, educator, and economist. He is also the co-founder and Director of Education for Jewish Climate Initiative, a Jerusalem based NGO that is articulating and mobilizing a Jewish response to climate change.  Before starting JCI, Julian worked as an economist advising the UK Government and for a British political think tank.  Meanwhile, he authored the book Lets Schmooze: Jewish Words Today and is working on completing a Phd in the mystical thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.  Phew!

Sinclair lives in Jerusalem and has been featured on NPR and interviewed for the New York Times by our own Leah Koenig.  Hazon is delighted to invite Rabbi Sinclair as a presenter at this year’s Hazon Food Conference, December 25-28, 2008.

Get a sneak peek at what Julian has to say below the jump.  And find out more/ register for Hazon’s Food Conference, here!

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As a kid, anything edible held my attention. Sukkahs, charged with dappled light and dedicated to the harvest, seemed to combine all of my interests into one sacred space. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt, standing alone in the autumn-smelling sukkah, under a ceiling hung with fresh, growing foods; and I’ll never forget my disappointment, year after year, at the sight of apples, squash and blue corn wizening and rotting on their strings.

Now that I’m a full grown canner, it occurs to me that the sukkah, with it’s commandments for good air circulation, more shade than light, and it’s tradition of hanging edibles, is a perfect place to preserve for the cold months. After all, turning sukkot decorations into food is already a tradition—Etrogs make it into wine or brandy after the celebration’s over.

Below, you can find some tips and recipes for celebrating God’s gift of food and shelter through the year.

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Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory - it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.

The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)

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A farmer, an educator and an activist, Michael Ableman is also a photographer and a writer. His three books include his latest, Fields of Plenty: A farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it, for which Ableman traveled North America chronicling the passion and prowess of the new generation of American farmers. He currently farms in British Columbia with his wife and two sons, and will be joining us as a presenter at the Hazon Food Conference in December, 2008. (Click here to find out more and register for Hazon’s Food Conference.)

I talked to Ableman about his hopes for the sustainable agriculture movement, his many hats, and Judaism’s connection to the cycle of the seasons.

Find the full interview below the jump. Read more »

Headache, fatigue and a metaphysical hunger for chocolate: the sure signs of sugar withdrawal, and during Pesach 2002, in post-industrial Wisconsin, I had to settle for potato chips and jelly.

Potato chips and jelly. Yep, you heard me. Picture an 18 year old New York-Jewish co-ed with a history of cookie eating and a mom who’s not so good at the whole care package thing. Now combine that with a supermarket kosher section that could fit 80,000 times in the space of this period. I needed something, man, and the matzoh I’d horded from the Madison supermarket one hour’s drive away just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

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You won’t notice it on the supermarket shelves or the tables of Jewish America this autumn, but both apples and honey are embattled, and by the same mysterious foe. I’m talking Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), and if you think that name sounds like it’s describing a symptom more than a disease, you’re right. CCD, like the similarly vague Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Restless Leg Syndrome in humans, are all named for their symptoms because we don’t know their cause. All we know is that bees are disappearing, abandoning their hives and scattering to the winds, not making honey, not pollinating the flowers and trees, and those minute defectors could cost us far out of proportion with their size.

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