Umami is so hot right now. Barbara Kingsolver talked about it in her food movement tome “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, NPR covered it, it’s been scientifically proven, and now it’s basis of a new Kikkoman advertising campaign, one that tells folks they can add umami to any dish to make it dazzling.

So what is umami? It’s glutamate, a non-essential amino acid that breaks down proteins in food. It also has the effect of exciting the neurotransmitters in human brains. When it’s bound to other amino acids, as in whole foods like tomatoes, asparagus, cheeses and meats, it has no adverse effects and makes life better from the tongue on down. When it’s free-floating though, as it is when used as an additive in the form of Monosodium glutamate and it’s many incarnations, in any savory processed food, and, unfortunately, in some delicious by-products like brewer’s yeast, that old neurotransmitter stimulation gets out of control. In up to 25 percent of the population (depending on your source, of course), MSG can cause side effects from over-stimulation of neurotransmitters. The side effects include a range of neurological and cardiac responses from the mild and incident-specific to the life-inhibiting and permanent, depending on the person doing the eating and the amount that they consume. (This article has a list, though I can’t vouch for or against their sources)

Rabbi Julian Sinclair didn’t lose a minute at the Hazon Food Conference in December. Not only did he speak on Rav Kook’s vision of kashrut and vegetarianism, mediate the latke hammentashen debate and lead a Food for Thought discussion group on bensching after meals, he also participated in the turkey schechting on the day before the conference began, where 18 turkeys were slaughtered for Friday night dinner.

The Hazon food conference was my first trip out to California, and boy did I fall in love. After a few days hiking in Big Sur, where sheer cliffs dropped down hundreds of feet to the blue ocean, foam rising rhythmically around small mountains of eroded rock, stretching as far as we could see, I drove North to San Francisco to visit friends. These particular friends had made the move from New York a year before, and they accepted me and my travel buddy on their futon with only a few days notice. At the very least, I owed them breakfast, and in honor of my new surroundings, I tried a new dish.

Our baked eggs that day were made from what was available at the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Baked eggs make a very easy, and pretty impressive main course for brunch. They’re versatile as far as seasonality, since eggs, cheese and cream are year-round commodities, and the casserole on the bottom of the dish can change depending on the veggies currently in season. In December in San Francisco, our eggs included mustard greens, spring onions, shitake mushrooms and canned tomatoes preserved with garlic and a few leaves of basil. When I returned to New York in early January, I made my next batch with potatoes sauteed with garlic, onions, lots of ginger, kale, more preserved tomatoes and a few flax seeds sprinkled in for good measure.

Good news folks! At least somebody is making money in this dismal bear-eat-bear economy, and guess what, it’s an agricultural company! Well…sort of.

I’m going to have to apologize for my inappropriate levity come Yom Kippur, but Monsanto “The Man” Company doubled their net income on seeds this last quarter. It hurts, I know, but it hurts us less than in hurts the soil in Argentina.

Analysts credit the rise in profits to an increase in corn production in South America. According to the article linked above, for every million new acres of corn (converted from soy production), Monsanto’s share goes up one dollar. According to some clever commentators on The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, we ought to build an equation that estimates how many farmers Monsanto needs to sue at 50K per patented grain of pollen for the same increase.

Blogger Jonathan Bloom of wastedfood.com spoke on NPR on Yesterday. He talked about the amount of food American families waste every week, the lack of research in this area, and how to cut down on waste. You can listen to the segment, which aired on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show, below.

In Gaza right now, food aid, water, and medical supplies are the responsibility of international aid organizations under the direction of the UN and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the United Nations suspended food aide deliveries to Gaza today when a driver, Bassem Quta, 32, was killed during an Israeli attack. Earlier this week, two delivery truck drivers were killed by missiles fired from a helicopter. Andrew Whitley, director of the United Nations relief agency office in New York, said that food deliveries would be suspended “until Israel could guarantee the safety of [U.N.] convoys.”

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting full video of some of the key note addresses and panels at the Hazon Food Conference. Until then, enjoy another demonstration from raw foodist Alexander Sharone. Below, he demonstrates making nut milk from brazil nuts, but this recipe will work with any nut. Be sure to soak the nut over-night (4-6 hours for cashews) in order to start the sprouting process. This begins digesting proteins in the nut, breaking them down to their amino acid components and making those amino acids more available to your stomach. After you’ve soaked the nuts, rinse them and keep them in a jar in the fridge to slow the sprouting. Alex blends his with a three-horse power blender, which is powerful enough to grind the soluble fiber right out of an avocado pit, but you can make nut milk with a regular blender. Here’s Alex grinding up and “milking” those Brazil nuts:

Open up your kitchen cupboard, grab a handful of common herbs, fruits and vegetables and voila, your own unregulated pharmacy. On Friday, Tamar Lieb shared her knowledge of the medicinal uses of common plants in the workshop “Kitchen Wisdom for Common Ailments.” To use herbs as medicine, you can do everything from eating them to dissolving them in water, honey, sugar, or oil to extract beneficial properties from fresh and raw plants. I’ve included her long list of beneficial herbs and their properties here (it’s even alphabetized!)

To use waters for your herbal preparation, you can make an infusion (pouring boiling water over delicate things like flowers or leaves) a decoction (boiling harder things like bark or certain dried roots), or use steam. The smell of a plant is its volatile oils escaping, so when you’re making tea, Lieb suggested, keep it covered while it steeps. In a steam bath, made by pouring boiling water over your more delicate herbs (think the pizza spices – oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme – for a cold) and then placing your face, under a towel and over the bowl while you breath in the oily, aromatic steam.

In two months, eight hermaphroditic redworms will reproduce to a community of 1500 and will be well on their way to transforming your coffee grounds, egg shells and vegetable scraps into nitrogen rich compost, all without stinking up your kitchen.

Master composter Adam Edell showed participants how to make worm bins for their home composting use, using red worms, a kind of worm that lives in the litter above the dirt, as opposed to the deeper layers of soil. Their shallow lifestyle makes redworms perfect for breaking up kitchen scraps in dark, aerated plastic bins, but to get going in their new habitat they need a three inch bedding of shredded newspaper. Adam suggests papers like the Times, that use soy-based ink instead of chemical, and that you avoid glossy pages and rich, dark inks all together. Check out the video below for his rip, fluff, dip, squeeze, fluff, toss method of preparation in the video below.

As you might have read below, our first official dinner at the Hazon Food Conference of 08 was full of conversation starters, though we hardly needed them. The room was roaring with voices, and a few of them were mulling over some discussion questions provided by The Jew and The Carrot.  Like this guy below, pontificating on the symbolism of tangerines:

Find all the questions and another video below.  Diners only seemed to get to number one on our list – the first of which explains why I ate two jelly doughnuts tonight after dessert.  (I’m always looking for reasons to eat jelly doughnuts.)  Join the conversation, and let us know what you’ve got to say on these topics too.

The night before the conference, and all through Asilomar, beleaguered travelers and hardworking Hazon-niks headed droopily towards bed. It had been a long day, with turkey shechting for some, T’uv Ha’Aretz teaching sessions for others, and long flights and car rides for everyone.

After a couple of rousing rounds of Ma’Otzur and Mi Yimaleil around the Channukah candles, and dinner in the now cavernous, soon to be bustling dining room, a couple dozen folks sat down with Rabbi Steve Greenberg to discuss transparency and our right to know in Jewish law and the law of the land.

According to halakha, Both buyer and seller have a moral imperative to be honest regarding the worth of products. Jewish law doesn’t recognize the concept of “let the  buyer beware.” But it’s not just about the market “price.” As Americans understand from our current mortgage debacle, you can’t know the actual worth of a product unless you know how it was made, what its by-products are and how it connects to the rest of the economy and ecosystem. The seller has a moral obligation to provide full information on his product, and the buyer has the right (though, notably, not an obligation) to full transparency.

My mom’s been cleaning out her house in the Bronx, where I and a prodigious collection of cooking and gardening books were both raised, each growing ever bigger, each likely to get spattered with sticky substances during cooking experiments, each dog-eared and brittle-paged…alright, I suppose I have over-reached my analogy. Anyhow, my mom and I have discovered a highly compatible interest not only in both cooking and growing (though she prefers flowers while I don’t grow what I can’t eat) but also in collecting enormous piles of books. Fittingly, I have become the repository of old books on gardening, disturbingly dated books on ethnic cuisine (one “African” cookbook actually contains a picture of the white, British author in a pith helmet) and other entertaining relics.

One acid-stained but otherwise unruffled paperback that came into my hands a few weeks ago seemed too hilarious a premise to pass up. The After-Dinner Gardening Book is a 1970s how-to guide for growing tropical plants from the pits and seeds of imported fruits. It seemed to me, little locavore whose gall rises on the Metro North in Jersey whenever the endless fields of invasive phragmites stretch along the railroad tracks, like an appalling idea. Grow papayas in my apartment? Why, when I can instead watch my scraggly sage plants get eaten up by tiny gray things that appear to live on the evolutionary edge between worm and mold? Why mess around with sprouting lychee nuts, when I can escort a baby walnut tree from my friend’s farm in Wisconsin, get patted down and have all my bags unpacked accordingly (walnut tree = terrorist) and my hair gel taken away from me, only to watch the poor thing languish in the greasy Brooklyn air? Apparently, burger king fumes do not a walnut tree inspire.

Today Obama announced Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, as his pick for secretary of agriculture (yep, that’s really him up there. Republican’s aren’t the only ones who know how to field dress large mammals).

Mr. Vilsack has been described as everything from middle-of-the road to evangelical biotechnology-lover. In November, he described himself as out of the running, saying that the Obama administration hadn’t contacted him about the job. Today at a press conference, President-Elect Obama said he didn’t know where Vilsack got the idea that he wasn’t being considered. Regardless of where he got it, the announcement took the spotlight off of Mr. Vilsack and quieted the then-clamorous opposition to his nomination.

Read below the jump for more on Vilsack’s positions.

There comes a time in every food-conscious person’s life when he/she/ze realizes that there’s a little bit of stomach lining in every block of cheese. Who’s stomach lining, you might ask? Well, calf, kid or lamb, with the species of the stomach generally corresponding to the species of the milk.

Why stomach lining is perhaps your next question? In order to make cheese, you need to coagulate or “set” it, that is, separate the curds (solid proteins and fats) from the whey (liquid). Soft cheese is often acid-set with lemon juice or vinegar, which produces a loose, brittle curd, but hard cheeses need something a little more complex.

Enter rennet – every mammal has rennet in its stomach lining to help digest its mother’s milk. The rennet from a young, milk-fed animal’s stomach contains an enzyme called chymosin, which breaks down proteins in milk at a single point in their structure, and makes the resulting particles extremely attractive to one another– the result is the uniform texture of a hard or semi-hard cheese like cheddar or gouda or brie.

Rennet isn’t the only animal product in cheese either. Lipase, an enzyme that hastens the breakdown of fats and enhances flavor, is extracted from animal tongues. Seem kind of like a fundamental violation of that whole don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk injunction? Interestingly, it’s not.