Check out this new special Ride Edition Podcast! If you haven’t heard, Hazon is allocating funds raised from the Bay Area Ride a bit differently than past rides. It’s pretty exciting and really putting the power in the hands (or cycles) of Ride participants, who will get to decide where to allocate the funds they raise.
Also, if you didn’t hear about last year’s NY Ride engagement story, Marc tells us what he was thinking the day he proposed on the Ride.

Check it all out by clicking here!

You can also subscribe to the podcasts through iTunes! The last episode has listeners all the way near the Philippines, so join the global community!

Happy passover!

One day when I was twelve, I toasted a slice of bread over the gas flame on a pancake turner, buttered it, spooned on a layer of cinnamon sugar to melt into it, went to heaven while I gobbled it down, and returned to earth to make another … and another… and another…until the loaf was gone. Fifty years later, I can still taste that gritty richness.

My whole life I’ve been an appreciative and melodramatic eater. When I was 26, I nibbled my way through a tureen of 40 mussels after a hearty lunch. At 29 and pregnant, my regular lunch involved two sandwiches, a bag of carrot sticks, an apple, an orange, a bran muffin or a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies with extra bran, and a little box of raisins—I knew I needed lots of iron! Cooking was an act of love, and eating was an act of pleasure. Not eating felt like denying myself love – not moderation, but deprivation. I feel similarly about eating food that’s just adequate – why waste a meal? And I refuse to eat anything that actually tastes bad to me, whatever the supposed health benefits.

Then, at 40, after two years of intense thought and preparation, I went to the mikveh, where I became a Jew moments before our children. Soon after, I began carting boxes of pots and bags of silverware to the keilim mikveh, part of making my kitchen kosher. I bought different sponges for washing meat and dairy dishes. “blue for moo, and red for dead,” my husband George quipped.

I kashered my kitchen partly from conviction, partly to make a home in which any Jew could eat. It was not easy for me: as my rabbi said, we don’t stop eating pork roast because it’s disgusting, but because even though it’s delicious, G-d says that Jews shouldn’t eat it.

Amazingly enough, that was that. I still remember the succulence of my pork roast, and I still keep kosher. At friends’ houses, I ignore the ham and eat the hummus. We bought a house on Cape Cod, and there I eat —cod; or bluefish. I leave the shrimp and mussels to the summer folks now.

More than just following kashrut, I got creative. I rejoiced when I discovered that beer can sometimes have the effect of milk in baking. I was thrilled to discover how close turkey chops could come to pork chops. I like olive oil better than butter for sauteeing anyway. I bought Sephardic cookbooks, and discovered the spices of Indian Jews. But even though there is no way that meat sauce tastes quite as good without the Parmesan, I have kept a kosher home now for over twenty years. When it comes to kashrut, I control myself.

Why? Numerous reasons come to mind. For one, I promised G-d, not just myself, and the promise was total – you can’t just cook the occasional clam and still have a kosher pot. The strictness of the rules kept me from just trying to think of loopholes. Instead, I put a lot of the “treif” energy into exploring a whole new cuisine. Although I grew up without kashrut, and learned to love a lot of unkosher foods, I have a good memory for tastes, and can still enjoy ham and clam chowder in my head. Making a kosher home is as important a religious duty as prayer, and that adds a facet to the interest I already had in mindful cooking: cooking from scratch, seasoning with spice not chemicals, reducing sugar or increasing fiber as much as was consistent with good taste. Perhaps most effectively, kashrut brought me into a loving community rather than isolating me, as most diets do, from the others at the table who eat carbs, or fat, or whatever is forbidden.

All of these play a part in my kashrut self control. They hold some clues, also, about the other diets that have temporarily worked for me, diets I’ve needed because after 40 years of eating what I wanted with no consequences, I began to gain weight when I ate too much. And I always ate too much, always had, never learned how not to.

I did quite well, in 1989, on Weight Watchers, losing about 15 pounds, and discovering the mango, a fruit of which one could eat a LOT without counting it as more than one portion. Like kashrut, Weight Watchers afforded me community through the camaraderie of the meetings. It also offered mindfulness and reason, two other important aspects of Jewish law. I enjoyed keeping track of what I ate, and I appreciated the attitude that one slice of wedding cake would not send me to hell.

Later, I tried the South Beach diet. I’d seen Atkins work for people, but I adore potatoes and whiskey. I couldn’t live without the one, and I knew where permission to have all I wanted of the other would lead me! The first two stringent weeks of South Beach, without even a piece of fruit or a bite of bread, took me cold turkey off my comfort food addiction. I actually felt strange and a little unbalanced, but I stayed off carbs for the whole two weeks—except for a bite of challah on each Friday night. After that, it was actually not hard to have just one small potato, or one slice of challah, and I didn’t have any desire for a muffin. I liked the vegetable and protein breakfasts, and at dinner, I filled up on heaps of greens with garlic and lemon and one portion of meat.

But once again, I gained back much of the weight.

I am a widow now, and my children are pretty well grown. I need a plan that I can keep to on my own, cooking for one person, eating alone, sometimes content and sometimes lonely. I could be toasting an entire loaf of bread over my gas burner, like I did when I was twelve, but I’m not. While nothing but kashrut has ever consistently controlled my eating, all of my attempts have taught me something. Weight Watchers gave me a well-rounded diet, including barley and whole grain bread and potatoes mashed with garlic. South Beach afforded me permission to have enormous helpings of greens or salad vegetables, because I have never in my life succeeded in being constantly moderate. I like to live large!

Kashrut taught me that my body and my health are G-d’s gift, a gift I’m responsible for tending well. Kashrut also grows from the Jewish attitude that the food itself is G-d’s gift, meant to be respected, conserved, and enjoyed. In fact, kashrut and WeightWatchers share that attitude. Eating and cooking become acts that connect me to both G-d and my community. Now even while eating alone, I can belong to a community of people who eat with and for the world.

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.

In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of doing food teshuvah or repentance: a gradual changing of mindset to try to do better to eat more consciously and sustainably. The comments to the post rightly pointed out the dangers of associating food with sin. There are so many issues to deal with when we make food choices. In the end, over-active guilt about each bite might end up back firing, leaving people to their old habits rather than dealing responsibly with questions like “Is it better to eat local but non-organic, or organic but from 3,000 miles away?” and “What if the only fruit my child will eat are strawberries and it’s the dead of winter?” Indeed, one of the problems with the American diet is that we’ve become so obsessed with the minutia of what goes into our mouths that we have forgotten to take pleasure in eating. We can see the corn stalks but not the field.

I want to suggest that this line of the Al Chet is on to something slightly different. First, its about responsibility. The formulation “We have sinned” requires us to admit that it’s not the chocolate mousse cake that is sinful. We’re the ones who take food for granted in a time when so many people are food insecure.

Perhaps more important is the reminder that this sin is before God—it’s not just about eating sustainably but about eating sacredly. We have to remember the Jewish version of Michael Pollan’s basic rule about eating: “Eat kosher food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Say a bracha.” When we forget to acknowledge that our sustenance depends on God and that we are blessed each day to be able to enjoy it, then we have missed the mark. Judaism provides us with ways to reinforce the sacred nature of our food—as my teacher David Kraemer taught me, we say a bracha not to make the food holy but because it is holy to begin with—saying a bracha thanks God for giving us permission to eat it, and only then does it becomes mundane. On Yom Kippur, we acknowledge as a community that we have been blind to God’s blessings.

There is a beautiful paragraph in the prayer U’netaneh Tokef that describes humankind’s fleeting presence on earth as compared to God’s eternity. One line reads: B’nafsho yavi lachmo, with a person’s very life he or she earns bread. We spend our lives focused on the basics of sustaining ourselves one more day. Learning to eat sacredly means to try to see past those blinders.

Looking deeper, we can see more in the Al Chet to inform our sacred eating. Another line asks forgiveness for sins done knowingly and unknowingly. As sacred eaters, we learn not to eat unknowingly, even if changing our behavior takes a bit longer. In light of recent scandals in the kosher food industry, we should also take to heart the line about sins in our business dealings (Masah u’matan). When standing before God, we cannot compartmentalize our religious obligations from our ethical obligations, and our sacred eating must reflect that synthesis.

It’s especially poignant that we recite this line of the Al Chet on a day when we are fasting. I, like I am sure many of you, end up dreaming about bagels and water as the last hours of Yom Kippur tick down. Most days of the year we can commit this sin. On Yom Kippur, we can’t. This offers us a fantastic opportunity to live our lives differently as soon as the holiday is over—we can begin to eat sacredly as we break our fast.

G’mar chatimah tovah—may each of us be inscribed this year for good in the Book of Life.

Thanks to Devadeva Mirel for this guest post recounting her two and a half weeks surviving the mean girls and the dining hall food as a Jewish camper. Check out her blog and jam company Sabjimata Jam here.

My first time away from home (and in a setting without wall to wall carpet, mind you) was not one full of fond memories. It was the summer between fifth grade and puberty. My parents drove me into “The City” where I, along with the other suburban campers, rode the train from Grand Central Station to Albany. We then all climbed into a camp van which drove us even further away from home, to Young Judea’s “Tranquility Camp.”

My memories of camp are the stuff of ‘tween dramas: bodily insecurity, cruel cliques, and undergrad counselors with bandeaux tops, visible tan lines and a surprising disinterest in anything having to do with canoes or lanyards. For those two and a half weeks of my life, I felt the dull isolation of being disconnected from my friends, family and the soft cotton blankets at home.

Meal times were another source of displeasure. Comfort food for me had always meant onion bagels and Lay’s potato chips. Now comfort food basically meant anything that wasn’t beets from the dining hall. My camp had a policy where campers had to at least taste everything – a scary prospect for me. “Try it, you’ll like it” never sounded more cruel.

Following in the kibbutz tradition, the entire camp’s dinner depended partly on camper labor. In the morning we shucked corn, our socks cold and wet with dew as we breathed out our body’s warmth into the chilly mountain air. My arms were thin and weak. At home I was not even allowed to pour myself a glass of soda and here I was, with the rest of the skinny pre-pubescent girls in my bunk, trying to tear the husk away from countless ears of corn.

If it had really been a ‘tween drama, we girls would have banded together to overthrow our boy crazy, lanyard-adverse counselor. In the made-for-tv version of the drama, we girls would have thrown our arms around one another and felt some sense of Jewish unity, some feeling of pride in our work. We would have felt more kibbutz than gulag, which when I looked around at my fellow campers’ teary eyes and red, stinging hands, seemed to best describe our common experience. On the other hand, it was always clear that despite our labor we were the campers – we were there to be shown a good enough time that we’d want to come back the following year.

Then one evening, my bunk arrived at the meal hall early. We waited outside until it was time to move indoors, kicking stones and jumping down steps. Inside, the hired wait staff was eating their meal. They were not in any rush – just eating at a leisurely pace. There was no indication that they were about to start a work shift, or really any indication that they were “workers.” They just looked like regular, happy folks enjoying their beets.

The normal-ness of the scene appeared odd to my sheltered ‘tween mind. I asked my counselor to explain. Adjusting her bandeaux top, she told me that in Jewish tradition, it was customary for servers to eat first. With a full belly and their needs met, they could then work happily and without anxiety. They ate the same meal we did, she explained, just at a different time.

Looking back, I am curious about where the Jewish tradition of servers eating first stems from. (Anyone have any leads?) At the time, however, I did not question her explanation – it simply made sense. The wait staff would serve us without envy and we would eat, perhaps ironically (this was a Jewish summer camp after all) without guilt.

Thanks to Chana Rubin, RD for this guest post. Chana is a registered dietitian who lives in Israel with her family. She’s the author of the new book Food for the Soul: Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating (Gefen Publishing House Ltd, Jerusalem, 2007). Chana will be guest posting throughout the week – and keep your eyes open for a chance to win a copy of her book!

I have lived in many different Jewish communities in the U.S. and in Israel and have seen the same patterns in most of them. Obesity and the sedentary lifestyle of our communities mimic that of the community at large, with added issues of kashrut, culture, Shabbat and holidays.

Preventative nutrition and nutrition education have always been my interest. It seems to me that it is easier and more cost effective to prevent illness before it happens rather than treat it after the fact. And there are many diseases – Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, to name a few, that are certainly preventable.

Many books address general nutrition, but none of them address the Jewish community in particular. Food for the Soul – Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating does just that. The nutrition information is universal, but tailored to our specific needs and our own food culture.

More and a recipe for Surprise Cupcakes after the jump

Our sages had a lot to say about health and eating. There are references to food and eating in the Torah and the Talmud. And many commentators wrote about the connection between the physical and the spiritual – the body and the soul.

The Rambam had the most to say about Judaism and food and health.

“Overeating is like poison to the body. It is the main source of all illness. Most illnesses which afflict a man are caused by harmful foods or by his filling his belly and overeating, even of healthful foods.” (Hilchot De’ot 4:15)

A more contemporary scholar, Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch had the following to say:

“You may not in any way weaken your health or shorten your life. Only if the body is healthy is it an efficient instrument for the spirit’s activity…Therefore you should avoid everything which might possibly injure your health…And the law asks you to be even more circumspect in avoiding danger to life and limb than in the avoidance of other transgressions.” (Horeb 62:428)

Judaism recognizes the association between proper nutrition and good health. Our tradition emphasizes the connection between physical and spiritual health. While there is still much research to be done, we now have access to a remarkable amount of information on nutrition and health. We know that the risk for many serious diseases can be reduced by following a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Food for the Soul includes practical advice for enjoying relaxed healthy meals. You will find cooking tips, creative menu ideas for Shabbat and holidays and delicious kosher recipes. It combines Jewish wisdom and nutrition science to help answer the question: “What should I eat?”

Surprise Cupcakes (Parve)
Adding carrots, zucchini or beets to these cupcakes add moisture and sweetness.

Yields: 12 cupcakes

Ingredients

2 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 square (1 ounce) unsweetened chocolate, melted
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ cup all-purpose or whole-wheat pastry flour
¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ cups raw grated carrots, zucchini or beets

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners.
2. Beat eggs and sugar in an electric mixer for 1 minute, until smooth. Add melted chocolate, oil and vanilla and mix well.
3. Sift flour, cocoa powder and baking soda together and add to the egg mixture. Stir the grated vegetables into the batter.
4. Spoon into the muffin cups and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Cool the cupcakes on a wire rack.

Find out more at Chana’s website.

Photo from Delectable Tidbits.

Are Passover snacks the new bees? Chametz-free noshes seem to be disappearing everywhere without a trace. First, TamTams disappear from the shelves, and now, the NYTimes reports about a historic New York social club that recently lost its source for the perfect macaroon.

It seems that the bakery which supplied the Century club with macaroons for over half a century has gone out of business, and this article describes the remarkable search by its members for a suitable replacement. I have to say, even as someone who disdainfully associates macaroons with those awful, sticky, cloying, calorie-laden chunks that come in the vacuum-sealed can, I can’t help but admire the passion and discernment by which Century Club members are conducting their search. Here’s how they lovingly describe the perfect macaroon:

“They had just the right amount of texture. They weren’t too crispy. They weren’t too gooey. You know, they didn’t flake or break. They kind of pulled apart. I would say they sort of had a nice elasticity. They displayed a particular combination of crustiness and tensile strength.”

Mmmm…tensile strength. Good luck with that. So much for Macaroons. The cheese(cake) half of this post is after the jump…

The ongoing saga of those edgy vegans continues with yet another NYTimes article (accompanying pic is slightly NSFW), this time about the odd confluence of vegans and strip clubs…

It seems that there is an ongoing tension between some feminists and some vegans/animal rights advocates, about whether Vegan-themed strip clubs, provocative PETA ads, and performance groups like the “Vegan Vixens” are a useful tool to inform an otherwise ignorant demographic about the benefits of cruelty-free eating, or whether their simply another example of the exploitation of women’s bodies for profit. I’m not touching this one with a ten-foot pleather pole, but if you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Photo credit: The New York Times.

(x-posted from Lilith)

We’ve made it to the final stretch of the “holiday season” (read: the inclusive euphemism for Christmas and New Year’s Eve). Despite Nigel’s insistence that, “no one says Merry Christmas in America” (he’s from England where supposedly everyone says Merry Christmas as if they have a tic), the holidays – and particularly Christmas – can literally be felt, regardless of one’s religious beliefs.

This phenomenon holds particularly true with food. No matter that Chanukah celebrations peaked half a month ago – holiday food is ubiquitous. From late November through New Year’s Eve, red-and-green wrapped chocolates seem to pop up out of nowhere. Alcohol, cookies, pie, and heavily salted snacks also take on “how-did-that-get-into-my-hand?” properties. And whether you spent Christmas dinner with friends or celebrated the “Jewish way” with Chinese food and a movie, holiday foods have a tendency to find their way, often in excess, into our mouths.

During this time of year, I often find myself dancing between indulging in these foods, and worrying about gaining weight. On the one hand, I adore surprise chocolate – in fact I think it might be the best kind of chocolate. On the other, I’m bound up in the worry that I might not fit into my pants after December. I enthusiastically read (and then generally fail to implement) the guides to “avoid holiday weight gain” or “get thin in the New Year” that pop up around the internet. Guilt ensues. I make a few pathetic stabs to stop myself but feel rather helpless until the last Ghiradelli square is gone.

The whole thing can be rather stressful and leaves me craving January when all this “holiday season” business is finally over.

Still, I know there is untapped wisdom to be found around holiday eating – wisdom that goes beyond “avoid the eggnog.” At the Hazon Food Conference this past month, Nati Passow of The Jewish Farm School gave a keynote during which he said:

“I’ve heard the expression, “eat to live, don’t live to eat.” The idea being, don’t just go from one meal to the next always thinking about food. But I believe that as a society, we could use a little more living to eat. We need to give more attention to our food, not less. We need to celebrate real food, not consume it in liquid or energy bar form. We need to take hour long lunches, have meals with friends, bake our own bread, brew our own beer, grow our own corn.”

I think Nati is on to something. Perhaps one answer to the holiday feeding routine lies in a shift of focus towards living to eat, instead of struggling to curb our cravings and feeling guilty when we don’t succeed. This idea might sound counterintuitive at first – doesn’t living to eat lead to eating way too much?

But living to eat as Nati describes it does not mean eating huge amounts of absolutely everything. It means releasing our deep-seated fears and taboos around food as “fattening.” It means focusing our lives and celebrations around healthy, nourishing meals. It means getting involved with our food by growing it or learning to make it from scratch. It means eating more “real food,” – food that fills and sustains us without needing to gorge on it.

The holiday chocolate and cookies are not going to go away, nor should they. But my blessing for the rest of this holiday season (and throughout the year), is that instead of fighting with our food, we all discover what it truly means to live to eat.

(x-posted at Lilith) 

* To clear up any confusion – the picture at left is not me!  See below for details…

So, my boyfriend came to Chicago with me for Thanksgiving dinner.  Although he’s met my parents before, this was the first time he’d ever visited the town where I spent the first 18 years of my life.  Overall, the trip and meal went smoothly, but as expected there were some sticky moments. Like when my boyfriend and parents agreed it would be just the most wonderful idea to watch my bat-mitzvah video!

We gathered around the television and watched as visions of my painfully pre-teen self flashed across the screen. On the one hand, I enjoyed this trip down Jewish milestone lane. Although I’d love to forget the braces, the awkward limbs, and bad hair-cut of my adolescense, I was also proud. I enjoyed the opportunity to root for this miniature version of myself and imagine that the “little Leah” could sense the loving presence of her future self, watching as she chanted the haftorah. I also loved the way the video made my parents smile and my boyfriend say, “wow, you were really great!”

On the other hand, it turns out there’s nothing like a little backward glance to shake the foundation of your current reality.  

Like at most bnei mitzvot during my “era,” of the early ’90s, the videographer walked around to all the dinner tables at my party, taping each guest’s special bat-mitzvah message to me. (Do they still do that??) It was mesmerizing to watch people I’ve completely lost touch with say things like, “Oh my God – I’m so glad we’re friends! Congratulations, and you look amazing in your dress!”

The videographer also taped the speeches – the kind where your parents and favorite aunt tell you how wonderful and amazing you are. The kind where they say you’ve got only the brightest of futures, and will make a big impact on the world.

As a “freshly minted” Jewish woman with all her ambitions still ahead of her, those words made absolute sense. Of course I was going somewhere, that’s what people had told me my whole life! But 12 years later – embarking on a new and vulnerable career as a writer and hovering on the fence of being “just out of college” and a fully-accountable adult – they held a far greater weight. Have I made the big impact everyone promised I would? If not, am I heading in that direction or just floundering about and wasting time?

At my parents and boyfriend’s insistence – I also tried on my bat-mitzvah dress which still hung in the closet, pressed and waiting. I’d loved that dress – it was my first grown-up halter and the skirt flaired with lots of tulle. I loved how it hugged my slender body (I’d recently grown about 6 inches, putting me at 5′8 and about 115 pounds) as I danced the funky chicken and was lifted up on a chair with people dancing around me. 12 years and about 35 pounds later later, however, I struggled just to get the dress past my hips and was only able to zip it up while holding my breath.

Although eating disorders run in one-half of my family (the Jewish half), I’ve always had a relatively decent body image. There were moments when I agonized over what I thought were zaftig thighs and swore that I’d lose 10 pounds. Still, I never really acted on it – eating frosting out the can and then running to the bathroom the way some of my friends in dance class did.

But all of a sudden in my family’s living room, I felt like Cinderella’s ugly step-sister straining to fit my gnarled foot into the little glass slipper. Rationally I knew I shouldn’t still weigh what I did as a 13-year old. But it was jarring to have such a tangible evidence – a dress, a video – that I was grown up.

*Check out the amazing New York Times article, “My Big Fat 80′s Bar Mitzvah,” (which is where the above photo is from) here.