I am lucky enough to live in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve got it pretty good here – great weather, great outdoors, great Jewish community, great abundance of local organic food. But Chinese food? Not so much here in Eugene.

As a Bay Area transplant, I crave Chinese food. I often feel like I literally NEED it. After months searching for something that would quench my Chinese food tastebuds – and realizing that to keep my version of kosher (which is eco-kosher: less about what is and what is not treyf and more about eating only meat that is ideally organic and pasture-raised – and if not, is absolutely free-range, never given hormones or antibiotics, and was humanely slaughtered) – I came to the conclusion that I’d have to make it myself. For both taste and my personal kashrut reasons. Which is some kind of a life lesson right there, I’m sure.

I stumbled upon a recipe for Cashew Chicken from the inimitable Martha Stewart and decided to give it a whirl – and my own flair. And to tell the truth, it is delicious and happily graces our Friday night Shabbat table pretty often.

Thanks so much to Emunah Hauser for this heads up.  Emunah is a host at Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, which has been organizing the Referendum on the Deli Menu, which will be held on Tuesday in Berkeley, CA.  Check out Saul’s blog Sustainability Adventures of a 100+ seat Diner.

Can the Jewish Deli be sustainable? Can a retro cuisine be part of the avant- garde?

Local, organic VS. the externalized costs of cheap, industrial food and . . . collective memory and food traditions?

Deli is at a crossroads. In New York, only a handful delis remain from hundreds. Across the country, beloved Delis continue to disappear. Popular expectations of “real” Deli conflict with today’s economic realities. And these expectations conflict with environmental sustainability.

Be sure to check out this article written by Nigel Savage, Hazon’s founder and executive director, published in Sh’ma this month. The piece is a good summary of the lay of the land of the Jewish Food Movement and is sure to give folks some “food for thought.”

Okay, so the job market is pretty lousy right now, but I got this job posting via email and though I’d pass it along.

Sales and Operations Manager

KOL Foods, LLC puts kosher meat and ethics on the same plate so consumers can feel good about the meat they eat. KOL Foods sources and sells grass-fed, non-industrial, healthy lamb and beef and pastured poultry directly to individuals. Since its foundation in 2007, the interest in KOL Foods’ products has grown rapidly, and, consequently, they are now available in the East Coast and the Midwest primarily through our website. As demand is increasing KOL Foods is seeking to expand in the Eastern United States and, in the near future, nationwide.

KOL Foods is unique as it operates differently from industrial kosher meat businesses. As a values-based business, our mission is to produce food that is in harmony with nature, neighbors and tradition – all the way from farm to fork.   For further information on KOL Foods, please go to:  www.kolfoods.com .

What is Jewish food? Avoiding shellfish and pork and never eating meat with dairy? Hummus? Kreplach? Whatever your Bubbe used to make?

What makes a cuisine Jewish?  Other East Asian cultures have vegetarian diets, which by default wouldn’t be mixing meat with dairy.  Hummus is wildly popular throughout the Middle East. And are kreplach so very different than Italian tortellini?

So what is Jewish food?  It’s like what is asking what your comfort food is.  Probably whatever your family makes.  If you have an Eastern European background, brisket, matzoh ball soup and knishes may be the norm.  A Sephardic background may involve more Mediterranean dishes.

But can this identification with food change?  When I was in college, my comfort food was Macaroni and Cheese out of a box.  As an adult, my go-to comfort dish is sautéed mushrooms and kale.  So yes, I’m a believer that people can change.  So can what we think of as Jewish cuisine change?

My dear friends The Wandering Jew and David Levy over at Jewschool, sick with envy that they couldn’t attend the Hazon Food Conference this year, produced this tongue-in-cheek video to vicariously participate nonetheless. Please enjoy their playful snark as we consider how the hell this product fits into the eco-kashrut movement.

Thanks so much to Lailah Robertson for this great guest post about her experience and the Hazon Food Conference. Lailah is a San Francisco freelance writer who writes the blog In My Box about her CSA box and all the delicious vegetarian, gluten-free things she makes with it. This post is NOT intended to endorse any particular diet or agenda, e.g. to say that being vegan (abstaining from all animal products) is the only way to live, or that vegetarians are hypocrites. It merely hopes to be an exploration of one of the least considered aspects of our food chain.

Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, asked us two questions during his keynote speech last night at the Hazon Food Conference. It felt like the beginning of one of those Jewish parables, the ones where the wise rabbi asks or tells us something that means more than it seems on the surface, where you ponder on the teaching and the world opens up in a new way.

“Stand up if you eat meat, but you wouldn’t if you had to kill it yourself,” Nigel called out. A number of people in the packed hall rose from their seats. I applauded them for their self-awareness and honesty, while of course maintaining a certain degree of vegetarian smugness.

Then he asked us another question. “Stand up if you are vegetarian, but would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” This time fewer people stood up, but it was still a significant number.

Then Nigel told us the story of the goat.

The Jew and The Carrot, Hazon’s blog about Jews, food and contemporary life.  The blog has a diverse and inclusive community, where we welcome readers and volunteer writers from across the Jewish denominational spectrum, and from all walks of culinary life.  Our aim is to ensure that The Jew and The Carrot community is a platform for vibrant discussion for anyone interested in food issues.

Late on Friday we received the following letter from Pete Cohon, founder and moderator of VeggieJews, an international, real-world and online, Jewish, vegetarian organization.  He has been a vegan and animal rights activist for 22 years and a vegetarian for 27 years.  A former San Francisco trial lawyer, Pete now lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Below his letter is the response from Hazon.  We encourage a vibrant debate, but please ask commentators to refrain from personal attacks on any views.  We reserve the right to remove  any comments that violate our Community Guidelines.

An open letter to Nigel Savage, Executive Director of Hazon, and the groups members:

The Hazon group claims that it works to create a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community, fight climate change and promote a more sustainable world for all.  I understand that the group even hosts vegetarian meals at which it promotes its programs.

That sounds great.  But I’m concerned that Hazon is not living up to the promise.

Recently I had the chance to speak with Noah Alper, founder of the eponymous Noah’s Bagels.  Noah, who sold Noah’s Bagels in 1999, has been in the food business since the 1970s, when he started Bread and Circus, the East Coast natural food chain (bought by Whole Foods in 1992).  He’s kept kosher since the early 1990s, and at one point Noah’s Bagels was the largest kosher retailer in the country.  (For those on the prowl, there’s still one kosher Noah’s Bagels, in Seattle.)  Nowadays, he’s committed to preaching the gospel of socially responsible business practices, and to that end he’s come out with a book called Business Mensch that aims to connect Jewish principles to good business practices and convince business leaders that community values are good for their bottom line.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is not for the faint of heart. His recent article in the New York Times (excerpted from the first chapter) includes stories of his grand-mother, a holocaust survivor, which he uses to define himself as well as frame his book. The Jew and The Carrot’s Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus wrote a nice post about it, including:

“But I what I found most moving was the way he connected his own ethical commitment to vegetarianism to his grandmother’s commitment to kashrut, even under the most extreme circumstances. She gets the last word in the dialogue he recalls,

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.

This was published on August 14, 2009 in the Cleveland Jewish News and was written by Arlene Fine

Ariella Reback and Amalia Haas, owners of a new pastured kosher poultry business, have a lot to cluck about. Their free-range chickens, ducks and turkeys are being raised to provide healthy fare for their clientele and to eventually feather their own nests.

Two years ago, Haas, 40, a Jewish environmental educator, planted the seeds of the women’s fledgling business they named “The Green Taam.” (taam means taste in Hebrew). Intrigued with the idea of raising her own poultry, she bought 14 ducklings online, allowing them to roam freely in her fenced Beachwood backyard. They fed on grass, clover, bugs, and organic feed and had access to fresh water.

Thanks so much to Marion Menzin for this great guest post.  Marion is co-director of LoKo, a non-profit organization bringing local, kosher, sustainably produced meat to the Boston area. She is the mother of three boys, an occasional freelance writer, and now a chicken plucker.  

Two years ago, I was one of many, many Jews frustrated with the lack of access to ethically produced, nutritious, kosher meat. By now it is common knowledge that the unnatural – there is no better word – conditions that prevail in industrial factory farming mean two things: cruel treatment for animals and corn- and soy-fed meat for humans, which leave us deficient in essential fatty acids and vitamins.  I firmly believed that our bodies, especially the growing bodies of children, are made to eat meat and need it to stay healthy, but I simply was not willing to feed my family industrially produced meat any longer.

There seemed to be only one alternative: find a shochet, convince a local farmer to work with us, and bring them together to raise, slaughter, and kasher some animals. A local Orthodox rabbi recommended a shochet, and I was lucky enough to find Dave, an extraordinarily open-minded small farmer in central Massachusetts, who agreed to let the shochet do the shechita and kashering in his barn with the assistance of his farm crew. Another family joined us, and together we weathered the difficulties that arose during the first experimental batch of chickens.

Check out this article in The Jewish Week that features the Hazon CSA at the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the Northshore in Long Island, NY. The syanagogue’s cantor Eric Schumiller highlights the cooperation between his synagogue and the farm, as well their emphasis on environmentalism.

Photo Credit to Lauren Pulver