Recently, Michael Pollan linked the reduction of medical costs to the even more controversial reformation of the food industry, what he calls the elephant in the national debate about the health care crisis. While Washington dukes out the legislative challenges to securing a healthier national environment, the country’s children have already returned to another school year and the Jewish New Year is upon us. Can we really wait for all this legislation to be enacted? Not me. I’m joining others who believe that change begins at the kitchen table. This year we are going to do a family food tashlich and symbolically cast away the elephants in our own refrigerators, the habitual bad food practices of everyday life.
To participate in the sustainable food movement today is to live on the edge of irony. Especially if you’re taking part in the movement from a seriously urban setting like, say, Washington, D.C.
What do I mean by this? Just look at this summer. Over the past few months, I’ve taken digital pictures of my hands covered in garden soil, emailed for advice on thinning carrots, Googled rustic local farms, and watched a documentary about real food from a plastic seat in an air conditioned theater.
It’s not just me. Recently, more and more small farms, local food organizations, and gardeners have set up blogs or created Facebook groups.
(Story excerpted from Tablet Magazine)
On the occasional Friday afternoon, a makeshift farmers market appears inside the popular soup shop Marakiya in Jerusalem’s city center. Israelis peruse the goods: dried figs, almonds, creamy labaneh, bottles of grape honey, and briny stuffed olives. It’s a familiar scene in a country known for its fresh produce and sumptuous food markets. But this souk aims to produce more than a good meal.
Behind one of the tables, Yahav Zohar, a 29-year-old tour guide and translator, chats with a customer about a bottle of organic olive oil. While his deep tan and scruffy beard might suggest otherwise, Zohar is not a farmer. Rather, he is something of an altruistic middleman—traveling once a week to the West Bank in search of growers and small-scale food producers whose products he buys and resells at a small markup. “The other day, I bought 500 eggs from a farmer at a shekel apiece,” he said. “In some cases, our purchases end up being a big share of a family’s income.”
Many years ago, I escorted some at-risk urban youth to a park. Blinged and tattooed, these kids’ gestures stiffened into armor and their faces hardened into leather expressions of defiance and danger. Then they spotted the recently picked apples that had been brought along for a snack. They lunged, giggling and pushing to get their hands on those apples first. When a butterfly passed overhead the boys tore into a chase, yelling, “A butterfly! A butterfly!”. They held onto their bitten-into apples as they ran. Can urban lives be changed one piece of fruit or vegetable at a time? Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s urban food movement is counting on it.
Bustling with tall, lean, small, and stout people hovering about the baked goods, the cider, last year’s apples or this year’s first peaches, the NYC farmers market on Columbus Avenue at 79th – 77th street, displayed its early summer harvest – especially greens, berries, shelling peas and young onions. The children placed the fresh organic milk into the cloth bag that hung over my shoulder. The sun danced friskily with the cool breeze, and we grabbed onto our hats as we headed arms around arms to the cheese stand. It felt so right, so connected, so sustainable.
Then, my son remembered a camp bus conversation. Tenuously, he asked, “Do you make your cheese with rennet?”
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Plastic tables at the farmer’s market are straining under their bounty, colors are popping from veggies of every stripe and new garlic is out of the ground, drying on racks and tarps and hanging in braids in barns around the country, the smell of fresh heads mixing with the with last year’s pungent hay.
It seems my earlier pessimism about the threatened value added tax (VAT) on fruits and vegetables was premature. For now, fruit and vegetables will remain tax-free commodities in Israel.
Was it concern for our health or the state of Israeli agriculture that prompted this turn-around? Not exactly. The Byzantine ins and outs of coalition politics are what saved the day. The Shas religious party, a member of the governing coalition, decided to press the issue, and they refused to accept the offered compromise in which the tax would start low and gradually increase over several years.
It’s pretty easy to eat local food in New York City. Scattered throughout the five boroughs are farmers markets and CSAs are plentiful. Since I moved to Brooklyn I’ve joined the Park Slope Co-op that displays a map of its farms and suppliers on its website. There are also plenty of restaurants that feature local and season foods on its menu (I recently went to Nick and Toni’s Café, which I highly recommend)
And for those desiring to gather and produce their own local fare, we have illicit urban agrarian societies in New York that go foraging or keep bees. But as it turns out, not all local foods are created equally.
Israeli sellers laugh, not scream to sell produce
The opening of a new open- air food market is far from headline news in Israel. Nearly every city in the country has a daily or weekly market, where shouting crowds and whistles are heard from miles away. “But this isn’t an ordinary market” affirms co-founder Michal Ansky, “this is Israel’s first real farmer’s market.”
Having just celebrated its one year anniversary, the farmer’s market, located in Tel Aviv’s new port, is officially recognized as an Earth Market-only the third of its kind in the world. Established by two female journalists and culinary experts- Shir Halpern and Michal Ansky- this market enables the public to bypass the ‘middleman’, and directly purchase food from producers. As a result of this direct interaction, the public can associate names, faces, and stories with their fresh food (a bit more interesting than bar codes and price tags, not to mention tastier). According to Slow Food, the market’s sponsor, this special relationship enables the public to become somewhat actively involved in the food production process, transforming them from merely anonymous consumers to ‘co-producers’.
Yesterday was the first day (finally!) of my local farmers’ market here in NJ, and I’ll admit I went a bit fruit happy, coming home loaded with local blueberries, strawberries, and cherries. It took some detective work to figure out what things were not local–the farmer may be Pennsylvania Dutch but those sure aren’t local peaches, not yet. I’m much stricter about eating fruit locally and seasonally than I am vegetables. I can go months without fresh berries or stone fruit, hoping that it counts towards my balanced diet if I eat many servings of fruit in the summer and far fewer in the winter. Sure, there are days towards late February when I am sick of citrus fruit, grapes, and bananas, and look longingly towards the plums flown in from California. But in my heart, I know they will disappoint me.
You know it’s spring in the northeast when you can find fresh rhubarb at your local farmers’ markets, food co-ops, and green grocers. This bitterly pungent, stringy plant, that is actually a relative of buckwheat, can be eaten cooked or raw. However, its leaves contain a poison, making just those lovely stalks edible for consumption. Because it has such a high oxalic acid content, eat rhubarb in moderation. Rhubarb is high in vitamins C and A, and in potassium. When buying rhubarb, many people tend towards the redder stalks, but you can choose any shade of color. Smaller stalks have a more tender flavor.
Many fruits are symbolic of summer – watermelon, peaches, corn on the cob. But perhaps none so much as the juicy, ripe tomato. I associate late summer with slices of red tomato lightly salted, or diced tomatoes mixed with fresh corn, garlic and basil in a salad. This year, it seems, summer is early. Farmer’s Markets in Northern California often are a mix of seasons as it is – with most items stretching into the early and late sides of their seasons. But this year in particular, perhaps because of the unusual weather patterns, the market is a symphony of seasonal tones all blaring at once – dark leafy greens, succulent lettuce leaves, new potatoes, cherries, and on and on. It’s loud. But most surprising of all is the late May tomato.
This optimistic article points to an issue felt acutely in “inner cities” around the country: a lack of fresh produce being sold at market. This problem was controversially or famously addressed in my city by the New York City Green Cart initiative but this certainly hasn’t solved it and plenty of other cities have the same issues (NYC isn’t even mentioned in the article, though LA, Newark and Detroit are, and the article is mainly about Chicago.) Could it be that looking to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s as examples, however, are more detrimental than good? As big a supporter of organics as I am, I think encouraging people to eat “conventional” produce would be a big boon over Mickey-D’s and would be a lot cheaper and easier than the “greenest” route. Even frozen produce makes a nice, healthy, easy and inexpensive meal most of the time.
A New York Times article from Saturday highlights some college students and graduates who have gone from academics to organics and agriculture. While the article brings up a good point - that American youth want to find a way to do their part, to contribute to society in a way that they find valued and sustainable – this trend is not a new one. Idealism and wanting social change have been a part of college student and twenty-somethings’ culture for generations.
I’d like to take us back to May 2000…
Advice, Family & Kids, Farmer's Markets, Farming, Participate!, Personal Story, Rosh Hashanah, Spirituality, Sustainability
