Much is new over at KOL Foods, the country’s largest provider of kosher, sustainably raised meat. Founder Devora Kimmelman-Block has started a blog, which covers both news from the company and issues in sustainable meat production, written with a Jewish twist. KOL Foods has also started online ordering, to allow people from a wider range of locations to order ethical kosher meat. While there has been some criticism of this move, on the argument that this undermines KOL’s commitment to local meat, a counter-argument is that there are some areas of the country where local, ethical kosher meat simply isn’t possible: for example, Florida may have many Jews calling it home but no kosher slaughterhouse. KOL has also expanded its offering to include pastured poultry, the first time this has been available on a wide level (there have been smaller efforts in New York, Boston, and Ohio). From now until November 3rd, you can order a pastured turkey for Thanksgiving. All orders will be entered in a raffle to win a free turkey.You can read all about the turkey farmer and his birds on the KOL Foods website.

I got an intriguing email from another member of my synagogue this week. He knew I had organized bringing a sustainable meat co-op to the shul, but was wondering what I knew about bulk dry goods in our area. Married to a vegetarian, he cooked a lot of legumes and grains, but found it hard to find them in larger packages (more than say 1-2 pounds for legumes or 10 pounds for grains). Also, prices for these staples have been rising. He floated the idea that there might be interest in the synagogue in buying these items in large quantities (say, 100 pounds at a time) from a bulk supplier, both to bring down cost and to reduce packaging. It also might provide all of us with more variety, since the risk of trying a new product would be spread among the group, and encourage us all to eat more sustainably by reducing our meat and dairy consumption.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a member of the Tuv Ha’aretz at the JCC on the Palisades in beautiful Tenafly, New Jersey. Our farm has been hit by the weather pretty hard this year: from the tomato blight to the torrential spring/early summer rains to the above tornado, not much has been growing. What we have gotten is amazing: local, tasty organic produce.  It’s a tension: we all want to support local farmers and preserve agricultural land in this corner of New Jersey. But we haven’t been getting as much as we expected and we’ve been getting a lot of summer squash.

Yesterday, we received a letter from our CSA coordinators that explained what had happened this summer and sharing the comments of many of our members. I am proud at how many people feel a stake in our farm and the fate of our farmers. Through weekly updates from Ted and Annemarie Stephens, and trips to visit the farm, we’ve built a connection to the people growing our food. We may be disappointed, but this summer has been financially devastating to the Stephens. Our CSA shares make a real difference. I also give our coordinators a lot of of credit both for being honest with us about how this summer has not always met up with our expectations and for reiterating their commitment to keeping this CSA going next year. I know I will be signing up again, and I hope many others do as well.

Read on after the jump for the letter!

This has been the summer of the zucchini. With my Tuv Ha’aretz CSA deeply affected both by the Northeast tomato blight and the heavy early season rains, most of what we have gotten this summer has been some form of zucchini or summer squash. It’s light and delicious, but it has been hard to come up with new and exciting ways to cook it. I’ve made several batches of chocolate chip zucchini bread. I cooked up an enormous batch of Tamar Fox’s delicious ratatouille and used it as a very filling pasta sauce. We’ve had zucchini kugel and squash soup and squash salad (including a less than successful Israeli squash salad with olives), and a very yummy Tuscan squash torte from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. An experiment with summer squash latkes taught me the important lesson that for everything but zucchini bread, salting the vegetable and draining the water off will create a much better and crisper result (a lesson I learned too late to save my soggy latkes).

Yesterday was the first day (finally!) of my local farmers’ market here in NJ, and I’ll admit I went a bit fruit happy, coming home loaded with local blueberries, strawberries, and cherries. It took some detective work to figure out what things were not local–the farmer may be Pennsylvania Dutch but those sure aren’t local peaches, not yet. I’m much stricter about eating fruit locally and seasonally than I am vegetables. I can go months without fresh berries or stone fruit, hoping that it counts towards my balanced diet if I eat many servings of fruit in the summer and far fewer in the winter. Sure, there are days towards late February when I am sick of citrus fruit, grapes, and bananas, and look longingly towards the plums flown in from California. But in my heart, I know they will disappoint me.

10 shares are still available at the Tuv Ha’aretz in Tenafly, NJ. Deliveries are expected to start July 1, and will be coming from Stephens Farm, an organic farm in Sussex County. A full share will cost $540, with deliveries expected to continue until mid-late fall.

For some reason, I get stopped all the time in the produce section at Whole Foods. I don’t know what it is about me that suggests why I would be able to explain the difference between lacinato and regular kale, or whether golden beets are as sweet as red ones (especially since neither of these vegetables were part of my diet as recently as a year ago), but there must be something.

However, I’ve had an encounter that I can’t shake. I was standing by the grape tomatoes, trying to decide between the organic ones from Florida (but were they the product of slave labor?) and the local greenhouse tomatoes from Connecticut (fewer food miles, but what about pesticides?), when a woman about my grandmother’s age began talking to me out of the blue. You could tell she was in a bit of sticker shock at the Whole Paycheck prices, and she said to me, “You know how much these are at Shoprite? 99 cents.”

Americans waste more than more than 100 billion pounds of food every year, at every stage of production from field to store to plate. That number doesn’t include the produce thrown out or left to rot by the millions of home or community gardeners. Wouldn’t it be great if all those leftover tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard could be linked with local food pantries and shelters?

Gary Oppenheimer had just that inspiration. He’s the founder of Ample Harvest, a project aiming to help home gardeners donate their unwanted produce to food pantries. Gary is a master gardener and the head of the West Milford Community Garden. I spoke with him about Ample Harvest and how home gardeners can make a difference.

Reverend Robert Jackson is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, an innovative food program based in Bed-Stuy that combines a food pantry, an urban farm, and a farmer’s market to create a healthy, sustainable food system for people in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Urban farming becomes the starting point for empowerment and self-reliance, giving people in the neighborhood the chance to become physically and spiritually healthier.

Rev. Jackson sees three parts to the mission of BRM: creating fresh food, establishing the distribution of fresh food, and helping those who are impoverished by supplying them with emergency food. BRM was a major partner of the Brooklyn Food Conference.

I spoke with Rev. Jackson about his drive to bring fresh food to his community.

There has been a lot of press recently about HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, which is being touted as the response to recent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses and the general amount of contamination and crud that is entering our food supply via industrialized farming.  (You can read the complete text of the bill, and track its progress through Congress, here)

There are rumors flying that the bill will outlaw organic farming, which is not true, but there is a real concern that the provisions in the bill will make it even harder for small producers to comply with food safety regulations (and it is already getting difficult–just ask Joel Salatin).

I baked bread for the first time a few weeks ago, and it was a life-changing moment. Not just because it was some of the best bread I had ever tasted, but because it also made me think seriously about what bread means. In an age when we have all kinds of grain products at our disposal (rice, noodles, couscous), many a meal can pass without bread. And yet bread is one of the most basic foods.

In Judaism, a meal is often defined as one in which you eat bread. There are many brachot (blessings), each one for specific food, but if you recite the motzi, the blessing for bread, it covers the entire meal. This brings up some interesting questions, such as whether pizza counts as bread (thus requiring motzi and birkat mazon, the Grace After Meals.) Bread is life-sustaining, and deeply embedded in our culture. It links us to our times of celebration. On Passover, it is through bread–matzah, the bread of affliction–that we invite the poor to partake of our freedom. On Shabbat, bread is a reminder of God’s gift of manna, which fed the Jewish people in the dessert, and on Rosh Hashanah, we eat round, sweet bread. Challah itself solves an interesting Jewish dilemma: it is an enriched bread, meant to be celebratory, and most enriched breads (like brioche) are made with milk. Since Shabbat meals often include meat, Jews needed to create a parve loaf.

The United Nations Environment Programme released a major report this week on the impact of the recent surge in food prices, a rapidly growing population, and declining agricultural yields due to environmental degradation. It is very clear that the solution to 21st century food problems is not to simply rely on technology and increased use of pesticides, fertilizers, and chemicals. Included among the findings of the report is the fact that agricultural yields through organic farming methods are higher than through industrial farming. It criticizes the use of cereal and grain as animal feed, connecting that in part to rising food costs. And importantly, it points out that climate change is a key factor in 21st century food security, as water scarcities, invasive pests and weeds entering new ecosystems, and increased drought put additional pressure on the already-stressed world food system.

Jewish Food Movement?

Over the past few years, a growing number of Jewish foodies, farmers, rabbis, chefs, teachers, students, families and many others have brought meaning to those words, asking why and how one can eat in a way that is both deeply Jewish and deeply sustainable.

It is time to ask a new question: where will this movement be in 7 years? Last Rosh Hashanah ended the last shmita (sabbatical year) cycle, and we’ve begun the countdown to the end of the next shmita cycle in September 2015.  Using the shmita cycle, with its wisdom about our relationship to the land as a guide, what should be the goals of the Jewish food movement? How do you envision that the Jewish community (in the United States, Israel, the entire world) will look and act differently in its relationship to food by September, 2015?

This week’s parsha is B’shalach, which tells the climatic final chapter of the Exodus: the Israelites’ nighttime crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh and his chariots. The Italian Jews have a special recipe they make this Shabbat called Pharaoh’s Wheel, a pasta baked into a round pan and filled with nuts, raisins, and meat. Unlike the flat, plain matzah of Passover, the lekhem oni of slaves, Pharaoh’s Wheel is a dish to be tasted in freedom.

I remember to make Pharaoh’s Wheel every few years, and it is always greeted with celebration, along with the realization that I still don’t own a round oven-proof dish (Pharaoh’s Brick, anyone?). This year, I was proud to be able to make it with grass-fed, ethically slaughtered kosher meat.