What do you get when you cross Friday night with with more than 350 ethically-aware, foodie Jews?  Shabbat dinner at Hazon’s Food Conference!  The harder question is, what do you feed them?

Bay Area resident, Roger Studley, is currently working to create a kosher, free-range/humanely-slaughtered meat business on the West Coast.  In the meantime, he is busy coordinating the schecting and preparation of nearly 20 heritage turkeys, which – if all goes as planned – will be served to conference participants  on Shabbat.  As far as I know (and as far as my little bit of researching/asking around has revealed), this is the first time a Jewish conference has ever sourced its own kosher meat directly from a local farmer – aside from Hazon’s food conference last year, of course!

The Jew & The Carrot got in touch with Roger to find out how planning was going, and hear his opinion on Agriprocessors, the Jewish vegetarian debate, and his vision for the future of kosher food.

Read the interview below the jump and join the fun by registering for Hazon’s Food Conference here.

When it rains it pours.  A little less than 6 months after the raid on Agriprocessors, the serious fallout – of the “going out of business sale” variety – has begun.  Last week the company was sued for $10 million dollars, and former CEO Sholom Rubashkin was arrested.

Now, according to The Des Moines Register, the company is running, but just barely, with a meager 35 cars in a parking lot that generally holds hundreds and fairly dismal prospects for recovery in the near future.  Read the full story below the jump.  And, kosher keepers – has the lack of production impacted what’s available on the shelves yet?  Where are you getting your kosher meat from these days?

Pictured: Sholom Rubashkin
(hat tip to Failed Messiah)

Agriprocessors’ former CEO, Sholom Rubashkin, was arrested this morning in Iowa.  The charge?  Knowingly conspiring to harbor illegal immigrants at Agriprocessors.  (Not necessarily “surprising” news, but pretty darn important.)

The arrest comes on the heels of the company being fined $10 million dollars yesterday for wage violations – mostly for illegal reductions taken out of workers’ paychecks.

Ironically, just this morning during my blissful “30 minutes with a paper copy of The New York Times” ritual on the subway, I read that, “No federal charges have been brought against senior managers and owners of Agriprocessors.”

Well there goes that.

Rubashkin will make an initial appearance in federal court for the Northern District of Iowa this afternoon.  How the kosher community, and particularly the OU responds remains to be seen.  Read the full story in the Iowa Independent and below the jump…

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.

Back in May, with Agriprocessors in the middle of its downward spiral (how far down it goes, nobody knows…), it seemed like there were people in Postville who still had some respect and appreciation for the jobs brought by the slaughterhouse, and felt their town was being unfairly picked on. On their blog Postville Voices, they wrote “We’ve had enough of every organization with an agenda cynically misrepresenting our town and workplace to further their own ends,” and added that, “There is one thing we do know — the people that run Agriprocessors are good, decent, honest people and we trust that they have acceptable answers.”

The Associated Press reported that in response to the raid on Agriprocessors kosher meat plant last May (and the legal fallout surrounding it): “an organization of Orthodox Jewish rabbis announced that it was forming a task force to devise Jewish principles and ethical guidelines on the kosher food industry.”

According to the story, published in the NY Times:

The group, the Rabbinical Council of America, said it would publish the results in a guide. Rabbi Asher Meir, an author and expert in Jewish business ethics, will lead the task force.

Over the next four weeks, Jews will be sitting down to together to more celebratory meals in succession than they likely do the entire rest of the year.  Many of those meals will be kosher, and many more will include meat as either a main or side course – or both.  Meanwhile, Jewish people around the country are also beginning to think differently about the meat that they eat, in light of the immigration raid on the kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors earlier this year, and of all the transgressions related to the conventional meat industry (CAFOs, hormones and antibiotics, worker abuse, etc).  For some people, the easiest response is to go vegetarian.  But for people who choose not to go the veggie route, what are the options?

We asked some of the leading voices of the New Jewish food movement to answer the question:  “If I choose to eat meat over the high holidays, what is the number one thing I should consider?”

Read their responses below – and share your own.

The fact that an announcement about the OU threatening to pull its certification from Agriprocessors came out during the month of Elul is too poignant to overlook.

Shortly after Iowa’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors’ owner, Aaron Rubashkin (for child labor violations), The Orthodox Union decided that unless management is replaced very soon (the quote from Rabbi Menachem Genack claims to have two weeks as its very latest point), they will no longer see the company as fit to bear its stamp of approval.  Many people couldn’t be happier.

In the first of many emails I received about it the OU’s decision today, the sender framed it as the OU bowing to market pressure. I actually fear that many people will see it as such and applaud their boycotts and outraged blog posts. Now, I have stopped eating Agriprocessors meat for quite a while (ever since the first PETA video, and its subsequent rumblings), and have made my share of outraged statements, several times in very public fora, but I firmly believe that making statements about the OU caving to market pressure is counterproductive and bordering on the offensive.

Agriprocessors just keeps getting better and better. Following on the heels of the recent Forward article about conditions for Brooklyn workers, the Times reports that Agri is asking the Supreme Court to deny workers in their Brooklyn distribution center the right to unionize because they are “not documented workers and not allowed to work.” According to the Times, Agriprocessors claimed “to have just discovered that…the workers were illegal immigrants,” just a few days after the 2005 union vote.(1) An image comes immediately to my mind: Captain Renault in Casablanca declaring, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

I don’t get to geshrei on my own website, so I’m going to let it out here. There’s a level of public lying which is not easily excused. A level which is so lowly and bald-faced that there really can’t be any normal or average t’shuvah process (repentance) for it. I think Agriprocessors may have reached that level a while ago.

I first started out in the Jewish environmental movement back in 1981 (I was already an environmentalist of the 70’s variety in high school). Back then the majority of Jewish enviros were ideological vegetarians, the backbone of Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA), people like Richard Schwartz, Jonathan Wolf, and Roberta Kalechofsky. Their zeal for vegetarianism was as strong as any other passion they had for the earth.

Though I empathized with their feelings, they never rang true for me. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 30 years, well more than half my life, and well before I was into Judaism. When people asked me why, I could give a dozen reasons, related to human health, the health of the land, the suffering of animals, etc. But I’ve never been an ideological vegetarian, and I never thought it was my mission to get everyone to stop eating meat.

That’s not to say that I never thought it would be a good idea for more people to “go veg.” Especially now, when we hear about things like what happens on the killing floor at Agriprocessors, vegetarianism looks like the better option.(1) Agriprocessors is not the only great argument for vegetarianism. So is global climate change—a huge percentage of the global warming gases emitted by our civilization come from the two ends of a cow.

Last Thursday, the Forward revealed a new twist in the Agriprocessors’ story – or rather, the same old story, closer to home.

It turns out that the largest kosher meat packing plant in America, the one whose Iowa-based plant was raided by immigration officials back in May, has faced similar struggles with undocumented immigrant workers at their Brookly-based warehouse. Article author, Nathaniel Popper, writes:

“The company has been locked in legal battles for the past three years over its immigrant workers, who wanted to unionize the warehouse [in Brooklyn] because of what they described as mistreatment… The brown-brick meat market in Brooklyn also houses two other kosher meat distributors, Eastern Meats and International Glatt Kosher Meats. Both of these companies have a unionized work force that has health care benefits, paid sick time and a starting salary above the minimum wage. “Every job has its downside,” said Dave Young, regional organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers. “But for the most part, International is a decent place to work. The workers have been there for years. It doesn’t have to be like it is at Agri.”

The news about Agriprocessors is spreading both within and beyond the Jewish community, reaching sites as nearby as a Jewish educators’ conference in Vermont, and as far away as acclaimed political publications like The Nation and The Huffington Post.  Check it out:

The CAJE Conference, a Jewish educators’ conference, which is largely focused this year on the connections between Judaism and ecology (to the collective sound of thousands of die-hard Jewish environmentalists slapping their foreheads and muttering, “finally!”)  reportedly decided to not serve any Agriprocessors’ meat during the conference.  The JTA’s Fundermentalist blogger author, Jacob Berkman, quote conference organizers as saying Agriprocessors’ products are “just not in the spirit of CAJE.”  Berkman also quoted Hazon’s own, Nigel Savage, who commented, “We want to shift the axis of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century so that it necessarily means to be involved in the larger issues that concern us.”  Read it here. (hat tip: Arieh Liebowitz)

The Nation, known for its no-nonsense, lefty political commentary, included a brief mention of the Agriprocessors scandal in their most recent edition.  The Jew & The Carrot and I got a nice little shout-out in the article, along with a tally of how many times the Jewish Press has covered the Agriprocessors’ story over the last three months, since the raid.  (For the record: 11 articles in the NY Times, 12 in The Forward, 14 in The Jewish Week, and a whopping 25 in the JTA.)  Read it here.

More “Agriprocessors, elsewhere” coverage below

Since the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been big fans of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

More, after the jump.

I first read Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld’s thoughts about Tisha B’Av and Agriprocessors (re-printed below) via email this morning.  My fiance’s dad is on a Jewish listserve where the article was forwarded as a d’var Torah, and he sent it along to me.  I was deeply touched by Rabbi Herzfeld’s words – both their emotional and spiritual resonance and also his coherent assessment of Agriprocessors’ rippling impact on the Jewish community. “Who was this Rabbi Herzfeld?” I wondered. More importantly, “Would he let me re-print his d’var Torah on The Jew & The Carrot, so I could share it more widely?”

Then I picked up (meaning read on my laptop) the New York Times – and there he was again!  This time, his words were in the form of an op-ed – slightly edited from the d’var – but equally powerful.  Yesterday, I mentioned hypocrisy on the blog, in the context of examining our own food ethics, and not always liking what we find.  Rabbi Herzfeld picks up on similar themes in his article.  Kol ha’kavod to him for his brave words.