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

In my hard-core college vegan days, when I toted around a copy of John Robbins’ Diet for a New America like it was from Mt. Sinai, I often wondered how I would approach the subject of meat eating with any future children I might have. The idealized plan that I came up with (while still a bachelor, of course), was that we would have a strictly vegetarian household until my future children reached the age of Bar/Bat Mitzvah. At that point, I would give them a copy of Robbins’ well-written argument against consumption of animal products, take them on a tour of the closest factory farm and/or meat processing facility, and then let them make their own informed adult decision about whether they wanted to consume meat from that point forward. If they choose to eat meat at that point, more power to them.

Of course, nearly twenty years later as the (flexitarian? vegewarian?) parent of two toddlers, things are not so cut and dry. Nowadays, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma has replaced John Robbins on my shelf, and we are indeed an omnivorous household. Things seemed to be going smoothly – we support our Tuv Ha’aretz CSA, shop at Whole Foods (or at least the organic aisle at Stop & Shop), and  try to follow Reb Pollan’s core dictum: “Eat Food, Not to Much, Mostly Plants.” We try to keep limit any meat we consume in the home to that produced in a sustainable, ethical manner. Emergency roadtrip Burger King stops aside, we’ve done a decent job of modeling the ideals of eco-kashrut to our kids.

Darkhei Noam’s Scholar-in-Residence program with Rabbi Daniel Sperber is hosting a Shabbat luncheon this Saturday May 16, 2009 from 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM in New York City’s Heschel School (270 West 89th Street between West End Avenue and Broadway.)

Join Rabbi Sperber, Milan Roven Professor of Talmudic Research at Bar Ilan University, rabbi of Congregation Menachem Zion in the Old City of Jerusalem and Darkhei Noam’s halakhic adviser, at a lunch and learn program following services.   Rabbi Sperber will be speaking on the topic of “Kosher & Food Ethics: Exploring vegetarianism, meat production, fair labor and other food related ethical issue.”

My parents’ shul and rabbi are mentioned in this article, which should make the notion of an intentionally eco-Kosher Shabbat meal seem that much more normal.  But it doesn’t.  Every meal I host, like nearly every meal my friends host, is vegetarian, with special emphasis placed on organics, etc, during the “food tour.”  This, too, should make it all seem so normal, but it doesn’t.  I have vegan friends (and was vegan myself for 6 years) who host with or request water challahs, no hard-boiled eggs in the cholent (the best part, if you ask me, or most people, judging by the fighting that sometimes happens over them,) etc.  I think the reason it doesn’t seem so normal is that it’s not really.  Are my friends and me, Jews who do the whole Shabbat/Kosher/observance thing and do it in this way, a subculture within a subculture?

You are invited to apply for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food! Brought to you by Hazon and the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, this tour will not be a culinary Tour of Israeli gastronomy (though there will amazing eating). Instead, this one-of-a-kind mission will highlight developments in Israel towards more sustainable food production and consumption, including:

Okay, so we all know there are these lists of the do’s and don’ts over Passover.  But like so much in Judaism, there are multiple rules that can be completely contradictory to one another – just ask someone of Sephardic background what counts as chametz then ask someone with an Ashekanazi upbringing.

This matters a great deal to me this year because a friend and I are planning to host a Seder together and he says he wants a “traditional” meal.  I’m excited about cooking a full Passover Seder, except I don’t really know what “traditional” means. (an orange on the seder plate?)  I didn’t grow up Jewish and so often I hear that you are expected to follow your family customs at Passover – especially in determining what counts as kitniot. But my family is Christian and they typically eat ham (and among other things, butter shaped like a lamb) for Easter – so that is not going to be a very helpful guideline for me now.