Reports released this week disclosed that many foods made with high fructose corn syrup are contaminated with mercury, and that the FDA has known about this since 2005. Testing on supermarket foods with HFCS found detectable levels of mercury in nearly a third of products with HFCS.

Meanwhile, the Corn Refiners Association stands by its assertion that corn syrup is safe. And yes, the FDA did recently give the corn industry permission to refer to corn syrup as a “natural ingredient.”

In Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, one of her characters is sitting in a diner with visitors from another planet. One of the aliens picks up a container of non-dairy creamer and says “Trudy, this is what we’re made of.”

In homage, for years, in my family, whenever we ate something that was super-processed, we referred to it as “alien food.” As in, “What is this soup made of?” “Aliens.” There is even a cake that my mother makes from a mix that we just refer to as “aliens cake.” This Kahn-Troster-ism can be very confusing if you join our clan at a later date, as my husband discovered when he innocently asked what was for dessert, and got the answer “aliens.” Alien food was not something we were defensive about, but the fact that it had its own term signified how small a part of our diet highly-processed food was. And any time I indulge in something with a long list of unpronounceable, unrecognizable ingredients, or with no real nutritional value, I think “This is what we’re made of.”

The more I get involvement in the food movement, though, the more I realize that we’re made of aliens, too.

I’m still fired up from the Food Conference, with a million thoughts about the steps we should be taking as individuals, as a Jewish community, and as a nation to bring about a more sustainable food system and environmental renewal. The Shmita Project sessions at Asilomar were the first steps in a 7 year plan to change the Jewish communal discussion about food, farming, and a Jewishly-informed Farm Bill, and we’ll be reporting on them soon. Thank you to everyone who attended.

In today’s fast-paced world, with the emphasis on immediate, tangible results, even a 7 year plan can seem like a long time. As we’ve written about before, the shmita ideally meant that you had to relinquish your focus on the immediate to keep an eye on the long-term concerns of every member of your society, especially the less fortunate. In addition to the Shmita, the Torah has laws for the Yovel, the 50-year Jubilee cycle, which also worked to prevent entrenched poverty (the modern Jubilee Movement has focused on debt relief to developing countries). Can we as a Jewish community think 50 years ahead on issues of food sustainability and environmentalism? What would that project look like?

“Six years you shall sow your land, and you shall gather in its produce.  And the seventh year you shall release it from work and abandon it, and the poor among your people will eat.” (Exodus 23:10-11)

What would you do if you had seven years to prepare for a major event? Would you plan out each year carefully, with set goals for each step along the way leading up to the big day? Would you ignore the future despite your impending sense of doom, and hope for the best? Can you even think that far ahead? Seven years are the blink of an eye and an eternity, depending on your perspective.

This year, we began another cycle of the Shmita, a biblical agricultural cycle that mandate that the land lie fallow every seven years. No crops could be planted, and that which did grow was open to everyone. One had to plan for the Shmita for years in advance, so that you didn’t starve. The Shmita today is an odd commandment: since it only applies to Israel, it has a very significant impact on the lives of everyone who lives there. Every seven years, it creates agricultural chaos. But those of us in the Diaspora are free to ignore it. Why should we plan for the next seven years?

Mark Bittman’s recent call to eat more sustainable fish included the instruction to eat more herring, a fish that is near and dear to Ashkenazic cuisine. What would kiddush in synagogue be without plates of this tasty, flavorful fish? Well, maybe herring is a little too flavorful–while I love herring, I find that many younger Jews find it too strong or fishy tasting. For those whose taste buds were raised on bland farmer salmon or other milder fish, herring seems to only be on the menu if you eat it at a trendy Scandanavian restaurant.

But there is hope for the herring-skeptic. I first had this delicious herring salad in London, at the Shabbat table of a cousin from South Africa. In my family, while we eat it all year, it has become an important part of our Yom Kippur break-fast. The sweetness of the pineapple and the acid in the mayonnaise are a wonderful balance to the full-flavored herring. The matjes herring is wonderfully delicate, and is a good introduction to herring for those who are used to tart, briny fish pieces from a jar.

Check out the recipe after the jump!

I was sorting through the mail this morning and an unusually thick envelope caught my eye. As a doctor’s family, we receive all kinds of mail from drug companies and hospitals, but this one was from the Corn Refiners Association. You may recall Leah’s rant in September about the corn syrup marketing campaign. Well, the corn syrup manufacturers have gotten together and sent every single member of the American Academy of Pediatrics a slick guide to high fructose goodness called “Changing the Conversation about High Fructose Corn Syrup.” It includes “The Top Published Myths,” an FAQ, and cute ads, with quotes about the safety of HFCS from medical journals, all sent straight to your kids’ doctor.

After the Flood, as he begins the process of replanting the earth, the Torah tells us that Noah is a farmer. In Bereishit (Genesis) 9:20, he is called ish ha’adamah, a tiller of the soil or literally a man of the earth. In the rebirth of the world after the Flood, a farmer is certainly a useful person to have around, but how does this connect with what we already know about Noah?

In the Midrash, the rabbis consider Noah to be the inventor of the plow – a farm tool which made it easier and faster to plant more and feed more people – and the initiator of effective agriculture. Considering the etymology of the name Noah is connected by the Torah to the meaning “rest” and also to the meaning “relief,” Noah brought people “relief” and “rest” by allowing them to move beyond subsistence living. Upon naming him, Noah’s father Lamech even says (5:29): “This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.”

As a teacher of Judaism, I am often at a loss to explain one of the most beautiful and yet most pagan Jewish rituals: the celebration of Sukkot with the four species (arba minim) of the lulav and etrog.

Sukkot is both a harvest festival and a creation festival, and these two aspects come together in the moment of the procession around the synagogue with the bounty of the earth. It’s a joyous moment befitting of Sukkot’s title of z’man simchateinu, the time of our happiness.

We read in Vayrika (Leviticus) 23:40: “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day [of Sukkot], the fruit of the beautiful tree, tightly bound branches of date palms, the branch of the braided tree, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” This has come to be understood as the four species used in the lulav: the fruit of the beautiful tree is a citron or etrog (a type of citrus fruit), together with palm leaves, three myrtle springs (the braided tree or hadass), and two willow branches (arvei nachal). During both the hallel service and the hoshanot processions, we wave the arba minim in celebration of God’s goodness.

But it does look a little strange. Growing up in a suburb with very few Jews, I always wondered what the neighbours thought we were doing schlepping tree branches and citrus fruit across town.

Tips to reuse your lulav and etrog below…

Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.

In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted.

I like Diet Coke. Okay, let’s be fair – I really like Diet Coke.

As my main source of caffeine, it was as much a part of my image in rabbinical school as the midrash books I schlepped around. When I got pregnant, the first question some of my friends asked was, “How are you going to go without Diet Coke for 9 months?” (Answer: I found an OB who let me drink it.) I can drink a 2 litre bottle at one sitting and I can tell the difference between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi blind. It’s well…I wouldn’t quite call it an addiction, but I’m definitely hooked.

However, when my brain is not addled with the need for a rush of Aspartame, I know that drinking Diet Coke—especially in such quantities—is a problem on all kinds of levels. In a way, Diet Coke is the ultimate symbol of our food system in crisis: water dyed with color, saturated with caffeine and an artificial sweetener, poured into plastic, and trucked thousands of miles to your home.

It’s only sustainable if what you are trying to sustain is corporate profits. And then there is the carbon footprint. As Grist wrote in response to the pleas of another environmentally tormented diet pop addict (apparently I am not alone), drinking several cans of soda a day for a year is equivalent to flying round-trip from New York to Cleveland. This summer, knowing that drinking Diet Coke does not fit in well with the rest of my sustainable, environmentally friendly food values, I tried to do teshuva (repentance); I tried to give up Diet Coke.