I just came home for Rosh Hashanah to be with my family at my parents’ home for the first time since I started Adamah last May. I expected to miss baskets filled with seasonal, local produce; I anticipated longing for the cultural values of so many people at Adamah. Usually my family does pretty well on the organic front, but hardly any of the produce in the house at any given time is local or fresh. It’s usually organic from California or Central America (the avocados). I was pleasantly surprised.
There is squash and zucchini aplenty on my mother’s kitchen counter. In fact, there is a small garden outside my house that supplies peppers and tomatoes, and all the other produce in the house is from a Morristown, New Jersey farmers market. Somehow, my experience with Hazon and Adamah had an impressive influence on my parents. From visiting the field at Isabella Freedman, talking to me over the course of a few months, sponsoring me in the New York ride and attending the New York ride celebration at the JCC, my mother and father literally took many of the messages home with them along with their delicious lacto-fermented Adamah pickles. Read more »
Bonjour from Paris!! I have spent the last three days biking in France — the first of a seven-week vagabonderie in Europe. (The transition from Adamah to traveling was very quick: a week ago I was eating just-picked cucumbers and harvesting round 57 of our beloved & prolific green beans. I expect that this trip will give me space to think about everything that happened this summer, & fully intend one or two posts on the subject. But for now, though I’m still in my Carharts, I’m in Paris on a rented bicycle and it’s a few hours before Rosh Hashanah.)
One thing I will say about the summer, as it relates to me now in France, is that I’ve never FELT more Jewish my entire life than I did at Adamah. I’ve always been more or less connected and involved with Jewish people and events, but this summer for the first time I developped a Jewish practice that I really connected to, involving food brachot, morning prayer & Shabbat. It was easy this summer, living as I was with all Jews (& all Jews who mostly wanted to practice as I did). But now I’m here, & the holiday is starting soon, & I’m trying to decide how I can still “feel Jewish” while travelling with my non-Jewish friends & staying at a hostel in Pigalle!
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As Hazon’s New York Ride approaches, everyone here at Adamah is excited. For one, we’ve been training for the Ride and it so happens that our program culminates with the awesome shabbaton followed by the Ride itself. That means Anna’s in the kitchen baking bread to help us load up on carbs this week and we’re all making pancakes with goat’s milk every morning. We’re also doing last minute maintenance and repairs on our bikes and scrounging around for extra bike shorts. In two days we look forward to welcoming hundreds of riders to our community and showing off our three months of work. Can’t wait for you all to get here.
Isabella Freedman is also gearing up for the 400+ people who will help make the New York ride the largest retreat to be held at the center. We’ve stocked up on new items, such as silverware, plates, wine glasses, as well as new pots and pans. In order for these items to be used in our kosher kitchen, we need to do a whole lot of toiveling. Toiveling is the practice of dipping kitchen accessories in a mikveh (ritual bath) to purify them and make them kosher before permanent cooking use. Read more »
How local is your Shabbat? Many people set themselves the challenge to “eat local” for a meal, to focus on what’s available in a given place and season. My experience of eating local this summer so far transcends the cliche that I have to pause to remember how unusual this experience is, how much I have learned from it.
I’ve been growing food on 5 acres of land with a dozen or so other young Jews this summer at Adamah. Tonight is our last Shabbat together as a community, and we’re in the process of cooking a feast. The food is abundant, fresh, & for the most part, grown right here. The question is not, “What shall we make for dinner” but, “What shall we do with the tomatoes?”. It’s a relationship with the earth and the weather, and we’re learning that all things are possible — but not all the time. And noticing the results of a particular blend of sunny and rainy days, or the earth tilting away from the sun, or the summer winding down into fall, reinforces our awareness of the awesome diversity of edible plants.
Finally, if it’s true that “you are what you eat,” this meal is made with the sweat of some of the most talented, beautiful, caring, inspiring people I have ever met. The conversations while weeding, the grunting from behind the tiller, and everytime two people share the load of a heavy harvest bin full of zucchini — these are all in the food we eat. I don’t have to tell you it tastes damn good! Don’t let the concept of “eating local” get you too caught up in the number of miles or the gallons of gasoline. Eating local means eating the world you want to live in, the world you do live in. It means your food is a reflection of your experience of time passing, and a way to celebrate it. It means that instead of being nourished by proteins and vitamins, you’re being nourished by the people and the energy and the world around you.
So here’s what’s on the menu for tonight — shabbat shalom!
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Most people who know me here at Adamah know that I do not eat dairy. I haven’t eaten it for over four years. Soon after deciding to abstain from milk products I found myself to be somewhat of an anti-dairy activist, always questioning friends’ dietary decisions and scoffing at cheese lovers.
I stopped eating dairy initially because I believed that it was unhealthy and bizarre to eat, and because I had trouble digesting it. I subsequently chose to cut the food group from my diet and have taken it to the extreme. I don’t eat baked goods made with dairy, I don’t eat pizza, and I don’t eat cheesecake. I further vilified the food group and its producers in conversations with friends and family to legitimate and validate my decision.
Here’s the problem. I’ve been eating plenty of non-healthy foodstuffs that are non-dairy. I found that I have mainly replaced dairy with processed soy products which I believe are far less healthy than dairy and worse for the environment (soy is produced as a monoculture in this country and is water and land intensive).
Here at Adamah I’ve begun to question my anti-dairy decision. Read more »
Last year, American Jewish Life Magazine identified Hazon as one of the “Hottest” Jewish organizations out there (natch).
This month, our food work is all over their new Green Issue!
- Learn AJL’s take on kosher, organic meat (and check out that green cow) here.
- Read about Tuv Ha’Aretz, Hazon’s Community Supported Agriculture Program here.
- Find out how sexy Jewish farmers are (note The Jew and the Carrot shoutout!) here.
Even without the copious Hazon coverage, AJL’s smart, witty writing makes it a new favorite. Check them out at http://www.ajlmagazine.com/
This is by Adamahnick Jackie Topol, x-posted from Heeb’N'Vegan.
Before I began my fellowship here at Adamah, I was beginning to make the transition to veganism. I have been a vegetarian for almost 7 years and decided that if I truly was against animal cruelty then I needed to not consume dairy and eggs anymore. When I was awarded the fellowship at Adamah, I knew that animal husbandry would be a part of the program but I didn’t really know what that meant until I came here. Moreover, I did not expect it to have such an impact on my final decision to go vegan.
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My brother Matthew, age 6, with giant zucchini
We try to keep up. Lazily spread out from a gnarly stock, the zucchinis live a life of luxury, in sundappled shade, air moistened by the damp shelter of their leaves, beautifully dark green and speckled, and GROWING. We’re out there every two days, harvest bins and totes, carrying armloads of 7” or 8” long zucchinis up to our fridge.
But sometimes, we slip up. A zucchini goes unnoticed. Maybe it should have been harvested on Tuesday, but we missed it, and again on Thursday it got overlooked… by Sunday when we peer through the leaves we’ll find a sea-creature! A leviathan! Bigger than my forearm, bigger than a rolling pin or a jumbo bottle of wine, these turbo-zukes aren’t exactly sellable, but they do make good props for caveman re-enactments.
And, thank God, they’re good for zucchini bread – which is easy to make parve, and therefore a completely versatile and awesome snack to have around, frequently, this time of year.
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And how! The rows of zucchini, with their bright orange star flowers poking out here and there are one of the most beautiful sights in our field. Zucchini plants reproduce sexually – that is, they have both male and female flowers on the same plant. Sperm from the male flower is carried to the female flower by honey bees; the female flower is actually the ovary of the plant, and once the pollen is spread, the magic begins! The fruit actually grows in the place between the female flower and the stem – so you can see baby zucchinis that still have a wilting flower at one end as flower makes way for fruit.
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On this day, we ask a lot of questions. Not like Passover, when we sit and eat, laugh and make jokes, and drink our wine. On Tisha B’av we mourn our loss, as Jews, and Humans, and as Pieces of an Ecosystem. This Holiday is not meant to prod us to ask questions, but yet, when we mourn we can do almost nothing but ask, “why?” I won’t try to answer any”why?” questions, but the next question that I heard today moved me. We were discussing what it means to be mourning for the human loss, and not just the loss, and asking what we can do. What can we do, to give our lamentation meaning that lasts beyond the day of official, enforced mourning.
To the question of “what can we do?”, the only answer that I can think of is to empower ourselves, and to empower those around us. Every day, we make choices in our live that impact our world, both close to home and far away. The things we do as we attempt to feed and clothes those dear to us have ramifications that go beyond the spiritual work of mourning and have the power to uplift lives everywhere. In our workplace, we can recognize the links that we play in a global or local chain of goods and services and seek to purchase true “economic goods.” I’m not talking about a washing machine that lasts for ten years, I’m talking about a washing machine that is good for me because it uses less water to wash my clothes, it’s good for the manufacturer because she uses recycled parts, it’s good for my brother in Bangladesh because it uses a fraction of the electricity that most machines use and doesn’t raise the sea level outside his field.
On a day when I choose not to eat (freeing up about 3 hours), I have time to reflect on the deep impact of my food choices on the world around me. Buy the tomato that’s really “good”. Food doesn’t have to be a commodity. Buy a tomato from a farmer who cares; it’s not just better for you, it really makes a difference.
This is from Jeff Yoskowitz, one of the Adamah Fellows (see previous Adamah posts). We are blessed to live in a community that includes Jews, vegetables and animals — and we are learning that the cycles of life and death are sometimes surprising, always awe-inspiring.PLEASE NOTE: This post contains graphic description and images of animal slaughter.
Today one of Aitan’s goats died (Aitan is a part-staff member of Adamah who also has a pasture down the road). The kid was a female named D’vash, which means honey in Hebrew. Apparently she was eating out of the grain feeder and somehow had her head get caught on fencing and her neck snapped. Aitan and I suspect that one of the other kids playfully pushed her as happens a lot, and her poor positioning trapped her neck and led to her death.
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It’s that time of year – the zucchini time of year. Recall Forest Gump: Zucchini pancakes, zucchini tarts, fried zucchini, sautéed zucchini, baked zucchini, zucchini frittatas….
Thing is, after so much zucchini, it still sometimes seems that there aren’t enough things to do with it. I crave it all winter long, and then wham! four weeks of zucchini madness. I have a few zucchini posts coming up in the next few days, with some of my favorite zucchini recipes, and I’d love it if you’d share yours too! To start things off, though, a few thoughts about harvesting, and the exodus from Egypt.
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Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag used to say of the Torah: “Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it. Pore over it, and wax gray and old over it. Stir not from it for you can have no better rule than it” - Pirke Avot 14:25, Sayings of Our Fathers.
Whether we stir or not, though it definitely helps to stir, compost happens. We are all witness to the irrefutable process of decay in varying degrees of time, as benign as the gradual whither of a solitary banana left in the fruit bowl too long (alright already you know who you are: you cannot continue to ignore that mealy brown banana in your kitchen any longer…it’s bordering on neglect now…time to make a decision…turn brown ‘nanas into ‘nanabread!), or perhaps more tragically, the swift demise of those raspberries that hosted a mold convention—several different molds—within a day of being washed and refrigerated (I have a strict policy of having no “wounded soldiers” by eating any berries I buy on the way home).
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It’s U-Pick time! This weekend I had the great pleasure of going berry-picking — blueberries and cherries — and I am feeling overwhelmed and in awe of the shefa, abundance, of the earth’s produce.
It’s true, I’m working on a farm this summer, and I have my fill abundance right here. We’re just starting to reap the most amazing gifts from the Sadeh: basil, tomatoes, cabbages, kale, collards, swiss chard, beets, daikons, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash — and today, for the first time, garlic!
And on Shabbat last week we had several dishes that were made mostly or entirely from food that we had grown, or made from our animal products. Tzatziki from our cucumbers, garlic scapes and yogurt we made from our goat milk (if anyone has any ideas for local replacements to lemon juice, let me know!) A zucchini-carrot caserole with eggs from our chickens, and our own squash and onions. My favorite creation is a garlic scape pesto: finely chopped garlic scapes, olive oil, kosher salt and red chili flakes makes a tasty sauce for just about anything.
But this didn’t keep me from going out this weekend to pursue even more of the season’s delights: FRUIT.
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