An article in the New York Times this morning reported that a truce has been made between factory farmers and animal rights activists in Ohio.  Much of the discussion is focused on caging methods for chickens.

According to the article:

Hoping to avoid a divisive November referendum that some farmers feared they would lose, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio urged farm leaders to negotiate with opponents, led by the Humane Society of the United States. After secret negotiations, the sides agreed to bar new construction of egg farms that pack birds in cages, and to phase out the tight caging of pregnant sows within 15 years and of veal calves by 2017.

While the agreement does not require existing egg farms to change their caging methods – one farm packs six or seven hens in cages about the size of an open newspaper – it does provide some measure of hope for proponents of cage-free egg production.

What seemed most striking from the article, though, is that the agreement was made primarily because the Governor of Ohio leaned on farmers out of fear that a public referendum on the issue would backfire.  That means that consumers are getting the attention of politicians on the issue of factory farming (at least in states like California and Ohio that have referendums).

Of course, the issue now will be whether consumers will be willing to pay for the increase in cost per egg at the grocery store that is likely to come from these kinds of state-by-state changes in the way eggs are harvested.  If not, they may want to look into getting their own chicken coop.

This article is Cross Posted on DrCate.com

Milk may be the single most historically important food to human health. Not just any milk, mind you, but raw milk from healthy, free-to-roam, grass-fed cows. The difference between the milk you buy in the store, and the milk your great-great grandparents enjoyed is, unfortunately, enormous. If we lived in a country where raw milk from healthy, pastured cows were still a legal product and available as readily as, say, soda or a handgun, we’d all be taller and healthier, and I’d see fewer elderly patients with hunched backs and broken hips. If you’re lucky enough to live in a state where raw milk is available in stores and you don’t buy it, you are passing up a huge opportunity to improve your health immediately. If you have kids, raw milk will not only help them grow, but will also boost their immune systems so they get sick less often. And, since the cream in raw milk is an important source of brain-building fats, whole milk and other raw dairy products will also help them to learn.

It’s a common misperception that milk drinking is a relatively new practice, one limited to Europeans. The reality is that our cultural—and now, our epigenetic—dependence on milk most likely originated somewhere in Africa. It is highly likely that milk consumption gave those who practiced animal husbandry such an advantage that it rapidly spread across the continent and then into Europe and Asia. With such widespread use, it’s likely that to allow for optimal expression, many of our genes now require it. In those countries where people’s stature most benefited from the consumption of raw milk, when raw milk is replaced with a processed alternative, their bones take the hardest hit. It’s a case of the bigger they are the harder they fall. In places like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, people now suffer from particularly high rates of osteoporosis and degenerative arthritis.^[i]

Our genes have been infused with real dairy products for tens of thousands of years. Recent geologic and climatologic research reveals that between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, the Sahara was a lush paradise of grassland. During that window of abundance, the human population exploded. To deal with the consequential depletion of wild resources, people began experiments in “proto-farming,” a term coined by biologist and historian Colin Tudge to describe humanity’s slow-motion leap from living in harmony with the land as hunter-gatherers to adopting the now-familiar program of altering the ecology to suit our interests. Author Thom Hartmann explains in his book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight:

Something important happened around 40,000 years ago: humans figured out a way to change the patterns of nature so we could get more sunlight/food than other species did. The human food supply was determined by how many deer or rabbits the local forest could support […]. But in areas where the soil was too poor for farming or forest, supporting only scrub brush and grasses, humans discovered that ruminant (grazing animals like goats, sheep, and cows) could eat those plants that we couldn’t, and could therefore convert the daily sunlight captured by the scrub and wild plants on that “useless” land into animal flesh, which we could eat.

Or drink, as the case may be.

For millennia, much of the world’s population has depended largely on milk for nutritional sustenance. However, the medical world has been ignorant of milk’s nearly ubiquitous use, confused by the issue of lactose intolerance. Because Europeans have lower rates of lactose intolerance, most Western physicians presume that only European populations have historically practiced dairying. But this confusion arises in part because most Western physicians don’t know very much about fermentation.

Lactose Intolerance

Lactose is the major type of sugar in milk. Nearly everyone can digest it while we’re babies and dependent on our mother’s milk, but many people lose the lactase enzyme in the lining of the intestine, growing lactose intolerant as they get older. Fermentation breaks down lactose, and so you don’t need that enzyme as long as you only eat fermented dairy products, such as yoghurt and cheese. The reason people living in warmer climates tend to be lactose intolerant more often than Europeans stems from the fact that fermentation progresses rapidly in warmer climates. Once fermented, the potentially irritating lactose sugars are gone. A child living in a warmer climate would, after weaning, have such infrequent need for the lactase enzyme that the epigenetic librarian would simply switch the gene off. In cooler European climates, fresh milk stays fresh for hours or days, and was presumably consumed that way often enough to keep the lactase enzyme epigenetically activated throughout a person’s life. If you have true lactose intolerance, as opposed to a protein allergy, you should be able to tolerate yoghurt, cheese, and cream (dairy fat contains little to no lactose—and minimal protein).

Why Most Milk is Pasteurized Today

Most of us also have heard that milk needs to be pasteurized to be safe. But we haven’t heard the whole story. For perhaps thousands of years, people who gave their animals the basic, humane care they deserved survived and thrived drinking completely raw, fresh milk. The need for pasteurization was a reality when in-city dairies housed diseased cows whose hindquarters ran with rivulets of manure. Tainting milk’s reputation even further, around the same time, dairymen were often infected with diphtheria, spreading the deadly bacteria through the medium of warm, protein-rich milk. But no epidemics have ever been traced to raw milk consumption when the cows were healthy and the humans milking them were disease free.[ii] If the animal is sickly—as they invariably are when raise in crowded, nightmarish conditions—its milk should probably not be consumed at all. When that’s your only choice, then, yes it ought to be cooked first to reduce risk of potentially lethal infections including undulant fever, hemolytic uremia, sepsis, and more. But it’s not your only choice.

If you erase any ethical entanglement, impulse of social responsibility, nagging moral prohibition, and investment in human health, you could call milk pasteurization a good thing. In terms of volume of product output per production unit, pasteurization plays a crucial role in converting small family farms into perfectly efficient milk producers for the national brands: cheaper feed (silage and grain instead of fresh grass and hay), more cows per square foot, more “milk” per cow. That explains why big agribusiness roots for pasteurization. But how did the rest of us get convinced?

Our fear of fresh milk can be traced to the energetic campaigning of a man named Charles North who patented the first batch-processing pasteurization machine in 1907.[iii] A skilled orator and savvy businessman, he traveled small towns throughout the country creating publicity and interest in his machines by claiming to have come directly from another small town, just like theirs, where people were dying from drinking unpasteurized milk.[iv] Of course, his claims were total fiction and doctors were staunchly opposed to pasteurization.[v] The facts were on their side. Unfortunately, North had something better—fear. And he milked that fear right into a small fortune. The pasteurization industry mushroomed from nonexistence to a major political presence. Today, at the University of Pennsylvania where medical professors once protested that pasteurization “should never be had recourse to,”[vi] medical students are given lessons on the many health benefits of pasteurization.

Whenever I have a patient who was raised on a farm, one who looks tough and boasts how rarely they get sick, I ask them if they drank raw milk as a child. Nine times out of ten, they say yes. Every family dairyman I’ve talked to keeps raw milk around for their own families and happily testifies to its health benefits. Unlike meat or fruit or really any other food, milk is unique in that its one and only purpose is to nourish something else. Not only is it loaded with nutrients, it is engineered with an intricate micro-architecture that is key to enhancing digestive function while preventing the nourishing compounds from reacting with one another. Processing fundamentally alters this micro-architecture and diminishes nutritive value significantly. How much of a difference does this make? Enough that, based on their health and bone structure, I can guess with a high degree of accuracy which of my patients had access to raw milk as a child and which did not.

Since 1948, when states began passing mandatory pasteurization laws, raw milk fans have waged a bitter battle against government intervention. During hearings in which laws requiring pasteurization have been challenged, pasteurization proponents deny any nutritional difference between pasteurized, homogenized milk and raw. But as dairy scientists point out, heat denatures proteins, and homogenization explodes the fat droplets in milk. This is significant. Even to the naked eye, there’s a difference: Unlike cooked milk, the fresh product has a layer of cream floating at the top. But to fully understand how these two products differ, we need to bust out the microscope.

The Difference Between Fresh and Processed

If we put a drop of fresh milk on a slide, we see thousands of lipid droplets of varying size streaming under the cover slip and maybe a living lactobacilli or two wiggling from edge to edge. These come from the cow’s udders which, when well cared for, are colonized with beneficial bacteria, as is human skin. We want good bacteria in our milk. These probiotics protect both the milk and the milk consumer from pathogens. Good bacteria accomplish this by using the same bacterial communication techniques we read about in the section on fermentation.

Using the powerful electron microscope, we can magnify milk 10,000,000 times. Now we can see casein micelles, which are amazingly complex. Imagine a mound of spaghetti and meatballs formed into a big round ball. The strands of spaghetti are made of protein (casein), and the meatballs are made of the most digestible form of calcium phosphate, called colloidal calcium phosphate, which holds the spaghetti strands together in a clump with its tiny magnetic charge. This clumping prevents sugar from reacting with and destroying milk’s essential amino acids.

Each tiny globe of fat in the milk is enclosed inside a phospholipid membrane very similar to the membrane surrounding every cell in your body. The mammary gland cell that produced the fat droplet donated some of its membrane when the droplet exited the cell. This coating performs several tasks, starting in the milk duct where it prevents fat droplets from coalescing and clogging up mom’s mammary passageways. The milk fat globule’s lipid bilayer is studded with a variety of specialized proteins, just like the living cells in your body. Some proteins protect the globule from bacterial infection while others are tagged with short chains of sugars that may function as a signal to the intestinal cell that the contents are to be accepted without immune inspection, streamlining digestion. Still others may act as intestinal cell growth factors, encouraging and directing intestinal cells growth and function. As long as the coating surrounds the milk fat globule, the fat is easily digested, the gallbladder doesn’t have to squeeze out any bile for the fat to be absorbed, the fatty acids inside the blob are isolated from the calcium in the casein micelles, and everything goes smoothly. But if calcium and fats come into contact with one another, as we’ll see in a moment, milk loses much of its capacity to deliver nutrients into your body.

Let’s go back to the light microscope to take a look at pasteurized, homogenized milk and identify what distinguishes it from raw. One striking difference will be the homogeneity of fat globule sizes and the absence of living bacteria. But the real damage is hiding behind all this homogeneity and is only revealed under the electron microscope. Now, we see that these fat blobs lack the sophisticated bilayer wrapping and are instead caked with minerals and tangled remnants of casein micelles. Why does it look like this? The heat of pasteurization forces the sugar to react with amino acids, denaturing the proteins and knocking the fragile colloidal calcium phosphate out of the spaghetti-and-meatballs matrix, while the denatured spaghetti strands tangle into a tight, hard knot. Homogenization squeezes the milk through tiny holes under intense pressure, destroying the architecture of the fat globules. Once the two processing steps have destroyed the natural architecture of milk, valuable nutrients react with each other with health-damaging consequences.

Processing can render milk highly irritating to the intestinal tract, and such a wide variety of chemical changes may occur that processed milk can lead to diarrhea or constipation. During processing, the nice, soft meatball of colloidal calcium phosphate fuses with the fatty acids to form a kind of milk-fat soap. This reaction, called saponification, irritates many people’s GI tracts and makes the calcium and phosphate much less bioavailable and more difficult to absorb.[vii] How difficult? Food conglomerates have a lot of influence on the direction of research funding. And the dairy industry is big business. Little wonder that no studies have been funded to compare the nutritional value raw, whole cow’s milk to pasteurized head-to-head. But studies have been done on skim milk and human breast milk comparing fresh versus pasteurized, and the difference is dramatic: Processed milks contained anywhere from one half to one sixth the bioavailable minerals of the fresh products.[viii]^,[ix] When fresh, the milk fat globule carries signal molecules on the surface, which help your body recognize milk as a helpful substance as opposed to, say, an invasive bacteria. Processing demolishes those handy signals and so, instead of getting a free pass into the intestinal cell, the curiously distorted signals slow the process of digestion down so much that it can lead to constipation.[x] Heat destroys amino acids, especially the fragile essential amino acids, and so pasteurized milk contains less protein than fresh.[xi] But the damaged amino acids don’t just disappear; they have been glycated, oxidized and transformed into stuff like N-carboxymethyl-lysine, malonaldehyde, and 4-hydroxynonanal—potentential allergens and pro-inflammatory irritants.[xii]

And there’s more. Many of the active enzymes in fresh milk designed to help streamline the digestive process have also been destroyed. Other enzymes, such as xanthine oxidase, which ordinarily protect the milk (but cause damage inside our arteries) can play stowaway within the artificially formed fat blobs and be absorbed. Normally our digestive system would chop up this enzyme and digest it. But hidden inside fat, it can be ingested whole, and may retain some of its original activity. Once in the body, xanthine oxidase can generate free radicals and lead to atherosclerosis and asthma. One more thing that makes raw milk special is the surface molecules on milk fat globule membranes, called gangliosides. Gangliosides inhibit harmful bacteria in the intestine. Once digested, they’ve been shown to stimulate neural development.[xiii] Homogenization strips these benefits away.

What does all this scientific data mean to you? It means that the processed milk you buy in the store is not milk, not really. If you can’t find a good source of fresh, unprocessed milk, what can you do? Get the next best thing: yoghurt made from organic, whole milk. The fermentation process rejuvenates damaged proteins and makes minerals more bioavailable. A breakfast of yoghurt, fresh fruit slices, and nuts is nutritionally far superior to cold cereal and processed milk. But if you aren’t ready to give up milk for breakfast, then get organic whole milk (not low fat), preferably from cows raised on pasture—not grain! Non-organic dairy may seem cheaper, but in reality you get far less nutrition for the dollar than you do with organic because at least organically raised cows produce milk. The stuff that comes out of malnourished cows living in cement milk-factories hardly qualifies as such. Whatever you do, avoid soymilk. The primary difference between Yoohoo, a junk-food beverage snack sold in your local 7-11 and the soymilk sold in the health food stores is that Yoohoo is flavored with chocolate.

Splendor in the Grass: Anti-Cancer CLA

Source matters. The anti-cancer properties of a fatty acid called CLA (conjugated linolenic acid) are extremely potent. In a new clinical trial investigating the ability of CLA to reverse cancer in women undergoing biopsies, Dartmouth-Hitchock investigators use a single, approximately 800 mg dose and believe regressions will be visible in ten days. Ruminant animals’ (goats, sheep, cows, camel, etc.) milk and meat offer us the only natural source of CLA. But not all that ruminates fits the bill.

Milk from cows feeding on freshly growing grass contains more than 500 percent the CLA of milk from cows fed grain.[xiii] To give you an idea of the difference, 2-3 Tbs of grass fed butter (200-300 calories) are equivalent to the 800 mg being studied to reverse cancerous growths at Dartmouth-Hitchocock, but it would take 10-15 Tbs of grain-fed butter (1000-1500 calories) to get the same dose of CLA. (If you aren’t into dairy, then gently cook one untrimmed NY strip steak, or bone-marrow medallion, or other fat-rich bit of bovinious bliss from an animal that’s been properly pastured.)

The best time of year to introduce yourself to raw milk varies depending on your local climate. You want the animals to be eating fresh, growing grass because that’s their natural food and they will be healthier. Best of all, the milk will taste delicious and the cream to die for. (I add extra cream to my milk and it’s as good as ice cream.)

Safety First!

Still, you can’t just drink raw milk from anywhere. You really really need to do your homework. Tainted milk can contain pathogens such as brucella, listeria, and invasive E. coli. Raw milk must come from a trusted source, from a dairy committed to cleanliness, protocol, and animal welfare.

How do you identify a trustworthy source of fresh dairy? What I have to do, as with all animal products, is get in my car and drive. I go to local butcher shops, farmers markets, and farms, and meet the people who make my dinners possible. When I find a rancher or farmer who talks about caring for animals in ways that make me think he or she actually gives a damn, I know I’ve found someone who deserves my money.

Excerpts from Dr. Shanahan’s book Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

and from Food Rules: A Doctor’s Guide to Healthy Eating

Copyright 2008, 2010, Catherine Shanahan, MD and Luke Shanahan, MFA

[ii] The Milk Book: The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized. William Campbell Douglass II, MD. Rhino Publishing 2005.

[iii] Continuous Thermal Processing of Foods: Pasteurization and Uht. Heppell NJ. Springer 2000 P194

[iv] Dr. North and the Kansas City Newspaper War: Public Health Advocacy Collides with Main Street Respectability. Kovarik B. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (72nd, Washington, DC, August 10-13, 1989) accessed online dec 27, 2007 at www.radford.edu/wkovarik/papers/aej98.html

[v] The Milk Book: The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized. William Campbell Douglass II, MD. Rhino Publishing 2005.

[vi] The Milk Book: The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized. William Campbell Douglass II, MD. Rhino Publishing 2005. p11.

[vii] Modificiations in milk proteins induced by heat treatment and homogenization and their influence on susceptibility to proteolysis. Garcia-Risco MR. International Dairy Journal 12 (2002) 679-688.

[viii] Soluble, dialyzable and ionic calcium in raw and processed skim milk, whole milk and spinach. Reykdal O. Journal of Food Science 56 3, pp. 864–866. 1991

[ix] Calcium bioavailability in human milk, cow milk and infant formulas—comparison between dialysis and solubility methods Roig MJ. Food Chemistry Vol 65, Issue 3, P353-357.

[x] Carbonylation of milk powder proteins as a consequence of processing conditions François Fenaille. Proteomics Vol 5 Issue 12 pp3097-3104

[xi] Modificiations in milk proteins induced by heat treatment and homogenization and their influence on susceptibility to proteolysis. Garcia-Risco MR. International Dairy Journal 12 (2002) 679-688.

[xii] Chemistry And Safety of Acrylamide In Food, Friedman M. p141. Springer 2005

[xiii] Dietary Fat Requirements in Health and Development, Thomas H Applewhite, American Oil Chemists Society 1988 p30

[xiv] Conjugated linoleic acid content of milk from cows fed different diets, J Dairy Sci. 1999 Oct;82(10):2146-56.

A letter from CSA member Tara Broyhill

My kids and I had so much fun at Oxbow farm on Sunday I have to tell you about it. First off the farmer Adam is one of the most kind, generous and energetic people I know. I didn’t know him before introducing myself to him a couple of weeks ago at the Ballard farmer’s market, but now I feel like he’s a friend. After spending four hours at the farm learning about it from Adam, weeding the beets and cucumbers with Michele and my two sons, and eating produce right from the field – this is now my farm. I’m hooked.

It feels like the perfect place to be. It’s filled with love, friendship, respect for all life and natural beauty (not to mention really good food!). It was a mixture of hard work and calm relaxation that seemed just right. True, it was a beautiful day and that undoubtedly helped form my opinion, but that wasn’t all. It could have been a hot summer day spent weeding in a shadeless dirty field filled with bugs and sweat. It wasn’t.

A new film is being produced on Haiti’s crisis, its roots and its future.  Hands That Feed has made a short intro video about their project in order to try to raise the necessary funding for the film’s production.  The film will explore questions about what the real problems facing Haiti are, and from the video it’s clear that the recent earthquake was simply an exacerbation of pre-existing problems.

Haiti’s dependence on food aid seems to be an unnecessary and reparable problem.  The film shows how the organization, Nouvelle Vie, is working to empower young people to take back their nation’s food production.  Through education, this program creates sustainable aid that will allow the participants to learn about agriculture and teach it to others.  By employing active solutions on the ground, Nouvelle Vie seeks to help Haiti both recover and grow.

Watch the video and visit the kickstarter website.  In order to get funding for the entire project, the group needs to raise $15,000 by Monday.  If they do not raise the money, all donations will be returned and the project will remain unfunded.  However, a generous donor has offered to independently match the next $2,000 raised, so go check out the site and consider making a donation.

Haiti’s self-determination has been undermined by food aid.  Hatians have been turned into dependents, relying on rich nations for food, when they have everything they need to take back control.  Help this story be told about a new generation of leaders rising up who will create sustainable change.

Originally published by The Jerusalem Post, written by Ehud Zion Waldoks

Israeli agricultural technology is among the best in the world, and Manuela Zoninsein, 28, would like to help introduce it to China.

Zoninsein was in Ramat Gan last week to attend the fifth annual conference of ROI, which encourages young Jewish entrepreneurs from around the world. She sat down with The Jerusalem Post to explain her idea.

“I am launching a business intelligence newsletter called Agrigate in September, focusing on agricultural technology,” she explained. The newsletter, she said, would survey the Chinese agritech business scene, highlighting deals, technology, developments, innovations and more, with an audience of Israeli and US agritech companies.

The Brazilian-born and US-raised Zoninsein has been living in China for the last three years and working as a foreign correspondent, writing for Newsweek, Engineering News Record and Climate Wire.

Surprisingly, it was her work as the dining editor for Timeout Beijing and her environmental activism that led to Agrigate.

“The foodie culture is focusing more and more on what’s happening at the source. Food also has a huge environmental impact, as agriculture is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases and I think rejiggering food production is easier than rejiggering transportation,” she told the Post.

Zoninsein sees a logical link between Israeli agritech and China.

“China is facing a lot of the same issues that Israel does: desertification [and] scarce clean water supplies,” she said.

“The government has begun investing in biotech to achieve complete food independence.

Right now, China is importing 30 percent of its foodstuffs and has maxed out on arable land.

They’re interested in developing pest- and drought-resistant seeds, where Israel has expertise.”

According to Zoninsein’s market research, Agrigate would be the only English-language newsletter focused on the Chinese agricultural scene.

“I think there’s little understanding of China [in Israel and the US], and the level of Chinese spoken in the US is very low as well,” Zoninsein, who has learned the language, said.

In parallel to the newsletter, she intends to work as a consultant to build up her credentials and credibility as a knowledgeable source. To that end, she met with Israeli players in academia and the private sector during her stay in Israel, and will connect with US players in September at the Ag 2.0 conference in New York.

Turning specifically to ROI, Zoninsein was enthusiastic about its support. The fifth year conference of 120 people was open only to those who had attended a previous conference.

“They give us business training and lots of networking,” the Harvard graduate concluded.

“We met very interesting Israelis and met [representatives from] Israeli cleantech VC funds during the organized events.

“ROI also encourages collaborations.

I met my web designer here last year. I also got to practice pitching my idea. The people were really supportive and no one called me crazy, so it gives me confidence to go beyond this circle to the larger world and test my idea out on another 120 people.”

There’s been a huge rise in Jewish farmers over the past several years, Emily Jane Freed, 34, told The Jerusalem Post last week, on the sidelines of the ROI conference in Ramat Gan.

Freed is the assistant production manager for Jacobs Farm, which has five ranches and three greenhouses in California, where it grows 250 acres of organic culinary herbs.

“If you lined up the farms side by side, it would take about four and a half hours to drive by them – about the distance from Jerusalem to Eilat,” Freed explained.

In addition to her full-time job as a farmer, Freed was also last year’s volunteer coordinator of the Hazon food conference.

Part of the rise in Jewish farming, she said, is “the tank in the US economy. People realize they need to fend for themselves more. The other part is more and more people wanting to know where their food comes from and what’s in it.”

Hazon has become the central organization for the intersection of Judaism and food, according to Freed, and drew 650 people to its food conference last year. It was also asked recently to present the Jewish take on food at a conference on religions and food at the White House organized by First Lady Michelle Obama, Freed said.

While initial reactions usually took the form of “What are we going to talk about? Kugel?” Freed explained the focus of the conference.

“The idea was to talk about what kosher means [in the 21st century], composting, shmita, pork, the Tu B’Shvat Seder and how to connect to the land,” she said.

The conference also helped expand Hazon’s Tu Ba Aretz program, which connects Jewish communities or synagogues with CSAs (community supported agriculture).

“It’s a good deal for both sides – the community connects to its food and the farmer gets 30 to 100 signups at a shot for his deliveries.”

The desire to know the source of one’s food is not restricted to the Jewish community, she noted. Part of Jacobs Farm’s success rests on its organic credentials, while another part is due to the sheer quantity of herbs it can produce.

“November and December are our busiest months,” she said. “We pick 10,000 pounds a day of fresh herbs to ship all over the country to meet the Thanksgiving demand, and then we do it again in December for Christmas.”

The company recently acquired the Safeway supermarket account, which Freed called “a really big deal.” She opined that while often considered food for the elite because of its higher prices, organic would reach the masses when chains like Safeway started carrying it at lower costs.

Freed also offered a fun fact.

“We have a five-acre field just of mint – all of which goes to the Cheesecake Factory bar and restaurant chain for its mojitos,” she said with a smile. “They get their own shipment every Monday and Thursday.”

Originally posted on Food Forever – The AJWS Food Justice Blog.

When I think about international food aid, what comes to mind are the challenges of distribution—who’s getting what and how much of it? But then there are the hidden costs of shipping. A recent IRIN article discusses the results of a Cornell University study that revealed the alarming fact that U.S. taxpayers spend about $140 million every year on non-emergency food aid in Africa. They spend roughly the same amount to ship food aid to global destinations on U.S. vessels.

$280 million. That’s a LOT of money. And the truth? It only benefits a very small constituency at the expense of taxpayers and recipients.

The article explains:

“Little has been written about the costs and effects of a policy called the Agricultural Cargo Preference (ACP), which affects the shipping sector of the “iron triangle” [comprised of agribusiness, the shipping sector and some NGOs] and USAID, the world’s largest food aid programme. The ACP requires that 75 percent of US food aid be shipped on privately owned, US registered vessels, even if they do not offer the most competitive rates. Some of these costs are reimbursed by the Department of Transportation’ Maritime Administration, but ultimately the US taxpayer foots the entire bill.”

It’s clear that there’s an urgent need to reform our food aid policy. Most donors have moved toward cash transfers or vouchers so that recipients can buy food, instead of providing food as aid, but the study points out that most countries have agribusiness and some NGO interests to contend with while reforming their food aid policy.

Just think: The $280 million we spend could be a game-changer to help many more people grow and distribute their own food sustainably. We could help local farmers invigorate their livelihoods and stabilize local markets.

To this end, we’ve been by calling on friends and supporters to encourage their senators to pass the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act—a piece of proposed legislation that clearly articulates U.S. aid priorities for the $2 billion committed in U.S. aid to Haiti, sets up benchmarks for success and requires local procurement. It also includes a transparent reporting and accountability system so both U.S. taxpayers and Haitians can see where money is going and whether or not it is achieving the desired impact.

There is absolutely no reason why we should be wasting our tax dollars on the cost of food shipments that are benefiting so few. We need to start getting money into the hands of those who have the knowledge, skills and creativity to make sure food is produced equitably and is distributed fairly.

Today is the six-month anniversary of the Haiti earthquake and, even though the world’s attention is fading, there’s been a lot of news and blog coverage about the work that lies ahead. Most of the focus has been on Port-au-Prince and, while the earthquake took its major toll on an urban center, we can’t forget about the devastating impact it had on rural communities, agriculture, and Haitian farmers.

A fantastic article from Agence France Presse about Haiti’s food security echoes many of the concerns we’ve raised before about aid distribution and food aid policy. The article emphasizes a need for “technical culture” and “training of farmers.” Which begs the question: what sort of training do Haitian farmers need the most? Irrigation? Tilling?

Meanwhile, our friends over at ActionAid wrote about Haiti’s housing crisis and reconstruction plans. Jean-Claude Fignolé, ActionAid’s Haiti Country Director, said:

“The Haitian people must be included in the reconstructions plans. At the moment the plan is more reflective of donor country interests and that is wrong. It is imperative that Haitian people be directly involved in their own recovery and lead the reconstruction process.”

We couldn’t agree more. Haiti’s future should not be determined by the international community, but by Haitian people themselves who can inform decision-makers about what they need most.

In recognition of the six-month anniversary of the earthquake, we’re asking our readers to support the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act, which aims to create a transparent reporting and accountability system for the $2 billion in U.S. aid that has been committed to Haiti.

And, as part of AJWS’s commitment to transparency and responsible grantmaking, we invite you to review our three-phase, four-year strategy for working in Haiti, which includes our work to revitalize Haitian agriculture and ensure that the Haitian economy can thrive by enabling local production and procurement of goods.

AJWS stands by the people of Haiti as they continue to recover and rebuild. Their resilience and courage inspires and motivates us in our work around the globe to confront disasters with tenacity and challenge adversity with hope.

Crossposted to Kayam Farm Kollel Blog Photo from Kayam Farm

Shalom!

My name is Joel Mosbacher, and I was the “Brachot captain” for week one of the Kollel here at Kayam Farm. I am a rabbi at Beth Haverim Shir Shalom in Mahwah, New Jersey, and I’m spending six weeks of my first-ever sabbatical sweating and studying here at this incredible place. I love it here, and would recommend to all of my colleagues to spend a week, a month, a summer, or whatever time you possibly can here at Kayam when you get a vacation or a sabbatical!

We spent the first week of the Kollel focusing on Tractate Brachot (Blessings), so as the weekly captain I will try to share some of the highlights from our ten hours of learning over the course of four days. After reading this blog entry, please feel free to respond with your own musings, questions, and comments, right here on the blog page for all to see and enjoy.

Early in our week, we thought about how here at Kayam we see farming as something good, apleasurable challenge; something miraculous and necessary, something exciting and full of promise. The Torah, however, seems to view agriculture as a punishment—a curse upon Adamfor eating the forbidden fruit in in the Garden of Eden. The difference between our positive perspective on sustainable agriculture and Biblical view of accursed farming is important to keep in mind as we work and study here together.

It seems as though Americans have deeply internalized the Torah’s view of farming: we don’t want to work for our food. Americans want our food fast, easy, and cheap, and it’s great whensomeone else does it for us. We don’t know or care what it takes to provide us with endless,cheap monocultures of staple foods providing minimal nutritional value, maximum environmental harm, and a dissolution of local economies. Spray pesticides, outcompete small farmers, hiremigrant workers- do whatever it takes- just as long as most of us don’t actually have to be farmers, working hard in order to produce food for people to eat.

Kayam’s mission is to embody and inspire social and ecological responsibility by transforming our community through hands-on Jewish agricultural education. But perhaps our greater vision is to return to gan Eden mikedem (like Eden of old)—so that we begin to see tending the garden asa blessing, becoming God’s partners in the beautiful and abundant unfolding process of creation. Or, as Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang so beautifully, “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden…”

In our text studies this week, we looked at excerpts from chapters six and nine of TractateBrachot. We examined many rabbinic perspectives about why we should say blessings, and food blessings in particular:

-In order to see the universe, our role within it, and God’s role more clearly

-Because everything belongs to God, so saying a prayer before consumption redeems that which we consume

-Because eating is a continual opportunity to bring Godliness into our lives

-So that we recognize the everyday miracles all around us

-In order to open a gate and allow God’s goodness to pour into the world

Some other rabbinic tensions we discovered this week:

-Food is food, whether it is whole or ground up. Yet the rabbis teach that not all food is created equal. We make distinctions between whole food and torn foods, between the sevenspecies of Israel and other species, even between store-bought/processed food and homemade. Contrary to what we might think as local-organic-homemade enthusiasts, the rabbinic perspective sees commercially processed bread as higher quality than a home-baked loaf.

-What do you do between saying hamotzi and actually eating? The Babylonian Talmudargues that one can take one’s time, serve the humus, and even feed one’s animals before eating the bread! The Jerusalem Talmud differs, saying there should be no break whatsoever between the blessing and the eating. Why? Perhaps because Jews in Eretz Yisrael felt amore immediate connection to the land and its produce, and therefore abhored anydisconnect between blessing one’s food and the accompanying act of eating. The exiledJews in Babylonia, in contrast, had less of a connection to land, so perhaps they were not as concerned about maintaining the immediacy and intimacy between blessing and eating. What do you think?

-The rabbis seem to have preferred processed foods- can you believe it?! Perhapsprocessed foods back then were actually safer and more nutritious, with the opposite being true today.

-Are we allowed to write our own blessings? The Talmud, and the Rambam, seem to permitus to compose our own blessings, but only by mistake! If a person does not know the official,rabbinically ordained blessing, he/she can say whatever he/she feels and that blessing counts, ie. permission is granted retroactively for that creative blessing. But if he/she knows the official wording of the blessing and consciously avoids it, then that seems to be prohibited. There was much lively debate about this, and what the problem is, if any, with coming up with new blessings today. What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll all start saying too many blessings, and become too creative in expressing thanks for all the wonderful things in our lives? Oh no! What will we do?!

-Our final day of learning revolved primarily around the challenging rabbinic instruction to bless God for evil as well as for good. Intellectually, we could make sense of this through a number of prooftexts from Psalms, Job, and even the Shabbat morning liturgy. In practice, however, we have each had experiences where it is difficult to praise God. Sometimes it’s hard to praise God with joy, or with a full heart. And yet this is our charge- to be accept all things in our world, no matter how hard they can be.

Learning Brachot this week made us remember to praise the Source of all life, and to constantly recognize that our food does not come from Food Lion or Trader Joe’s. And even when we feel cursed, we are taught to affirm that there is justice and truth in the universe.

We have all eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps Adam and Eve’s sin was not eating the fruit, but instead, failing to acknowledge the Source of that fruit. And is it now a curse, a punishment, to work the land? Can we not work the land together in joy, in community, and in blessing?

When we bless God, Hashem, HaBorei, HaMotzi, Ha’Omer v’Oseh, we have, the opportunity to redeem that fruit. Let us all turn curse into blessing in our home and in our field, at the table, every meal. And may it all be for a blessing.

B’shalom,

Rabbi Joel Mosbacher

2010 Kayam Farm Summer Kollel, Brachot Captain

This article is crossposted to Intermountain Jewish News and was written by Chris Leppek.   Photo by Shari Valenta

If you listen carefully, you might hear new and curious sounds emanating from the Denver Jewish community.

Such as a rake drawing its tines through freshly turned earth.

Or a hoe chucking its way through clods and weeds.

Or the hushed plinks of water drops falling from hoses to dirt.

Or, perhaps, even the barely perceptible whisper of a young plant springing forth from a seed in search of sunlight.

Gardens and small farms are appearing in the city in all sorts of unlikely places, including Jewish places — in the shadow of a synagogue, on newly-acquired land that might one day become a Jewish high school, on an empty lot amidst the hustle-bustle of downtown itself.

Although part of a growing national movement that values urban farming, organic food and a philosophical return to nature and hard work, these are Jewish gardens.

They are reminding modern urban Jews of their distant agricultural past. They are reconnecting them with the seasons and cycles of their own ancient religious calendar and providing precious opportunities to honor the commandments of their tradition and faith.

They are, in many ways, helping 21st century Jews rediscover something elusive yet powerful, something essentially human and mystical — the timeless harmony between man and nature.

In physical terms, raising crops is hard and unromantic work. Bringing forth food from the land means getting dirty and sweaty, enduring blistered hands and sore backs, as it always has. It might also mean disappointment and loss when the weather is at cross purposes with the farmer.

But ask any of Denver’s modern urban Jewish farmers whether they regret it when the summer begins to wane into autumn and the first crops are ready for harvest.

As they hold the fruit or vegetable they raised from a seedling in the spring, nurtured and supported during the summer and harvested in the fall, they’ll be happy to tell you that few human victories are as sweet as theirs.

GAN Kehilati is Denver’s first synagogue garden.

In fact, the small plot of land situated on the south side of the Hebrew Educational Alliance is so new that as of early June its small cadre of gardeners hadn’t quite completed the first planting.

HEA member Fred Karp, who came up with the idea of Gan Kehilati — which means community garden — a few months ago, says that this spring’s late snow and cool spell put the farmers a bit behind schedule.

Karp, a Denver attorney by trade and a longtime home gardener by avocation, chuckles, perhaps at how agricultural he sounds after only a few weeks in the dirt.

The HEA garden seemed to be an idea whose timing was perfect, he adds. After coming up with the basic idea, Karp ran it by the synagogue’s board, executive director and rabbi and says he encountered absolutely no opposition along the way.

“The rabbi,” he says of Rabbi Bruce Dollin, “responded very warmly to this idea.”

Rabbi Dollin, in fact, plans to incorporate the idea of the garden into his spiritual leadership, using Gan Kehilati to discuss Jewish perspectives on food, agriculture and related subjects.

Karp uses such modest phrases as, “It’s so small as to be almost experimental this year.” Yet, his pride in the new garden project is obvious.

Composed of six raised beds about 12 by 5 feet each, the garden is located on empty land between the synagogue and the Thomas Jefferson High School baseball field.

A “sort-of” committee of HEA members have signed onto the garden project and have already done a good deal of work, Karp says.

The volunteers roto-tilled the plot and helped set up an automatic irrigation system of drip and soaker hoses connected to strategically positioned spigots. The crops are varied and their selection is left up to the planters. So far, Gan Kehilati boasts budding crops of peppers, tomatoes, watermelons, cucumbers, brussel sprouts, broccoli and herbs.

Karp says not to expect a gigantic harvest, at least not this year.

“I don’t think there’s going to be an awful lot of food,” he says, ‘but this is part of a larger idea of investigating food. Rabbi Dollin plans to do some teaching on the Jewish aspects of farming and food. And if there is any surplus food, we’ll be likely to donate it to the JFS food pantry or the food pantry at New Life Fellowship on Iliff.”

If the idea catches on — and Karp hopes that it will — next year’s harvest might be considerably larger. There is additional land available and the synagogue is already discussing the idea of garden expansion.

Karp is asked why any of this is important.

“It’s good to know the sources of our food,” says Karp, “It’s local, it’s fresh and it’s nominally organic. There’s also the fact that some of these foods will be vegetables that we’re not necessarily familiar with from grocery stores. There will be a variety of things that we wouldn’t be likely to shop for.”

The educational dimension, both in the practical and spiritual dimensions of farming, is of considerable value, in Karp’s view.

“Learning will take place on two levels,” he says. “Less experienced gardeners will be shown how to create a bed and how to begin and care for plants. Local experts will be invited to teach both basic and advanced lessons in growing, from soil preparation to seed saving.”

Gan Kehilati is part of a larger food focus at HEA, which ties in with the national Conservative movement’s new ethical hechscher program and a ‘CSA’ (community supported agriculture) movement that is gaining momentum nationally and locally.

The congregation is teaming up with Temple Sinai on a CSA arrangement with Grant Family Farm, setting up a subscription-like system by which members regularly acquire fresh produce from a regional farm.

Karp adds that another source of inspiration for HEA’s nascent team of farmers is the example set by the early settlers of Israel, the halutzim, who often worked in agriculture, a critical realm for the nascent Jewish state.

“There is an identification with those people,” Karp says. “It’s not life and death for us like it was for them, but there’s still an identification.”

Ekar is Denver Jewry’s largest — and only — farm.

There’s really nothing else to call some two acres of newly tilled and planted land.  Located on previously unused land owned by the Denver Academy of Torah — and possibly destined in the future to become the site of a high school — Ekar itself could expand as time goes on. The vacant lot is a total of five acres, and might soon all be cultivated.

The idea for a farm adjoining an Orthodox day school came from several sources, says Ilan Salzberg, a volunteer with a farming background who more or less manages and oversees the farm.

“It came from a lot of places. There were people from DAT who said, ‘Hey, we have this piece of land, let’s do something with it.’ There were people at DAT who were interested in the garden because of the food movement as a whole. Rose Community Foundation was interested in pushing the food movement forward. There were a lot of people who wanted to see something happening in food.”

A former organic vegetable farmer from Boulder, Salzberg is a law school grad and former realtor. He’s Jewish, but has no formal ties with DAT besides having friends there.

He was planning to be a stay-at-home dad after his twins were born last December but grabbed the opportunity to become a volunteer farmer when he was contacted through the RCF Roots & Branches group.

“I was thinking that this is something that I have the skill set to do,  I have the time to do, and it’s the kind of thing that I could give to my twins that would have more value than money,” he says about Ekar and his willingness to work the land without pay.

The largest part of Ekar is the actual farm, which occupies the eastern part of the plot. Most of the crops raised here by volunteers will be donated to the Jewish Family Service food pantry. A few people are also buying $180 memberships which will give them the right to harvest for their own consumption.

Other funding events will help sustain the farm. On July 25, for example, Ekar will participate in “Prep for the Schlep,” a 16-mile roundtrip bicycle ride from Ekar to Delaney Farm to the east, to help raise funds.

The farm’s first crop includes tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, onions, squash, melons, zucchini, pumpkins and a small patch of lettuce.

Lettuce, Salzberg explains, makes him nervous because it has to be harvested with knives and many of the harvesters are expected to be children. It is one example of how running an organic, family-oriented and volunteer-driven farm can be a tricky business.

Salzberg expects this fall’s Ekar harvest to be quite impressive.

“The goal is about $200,000 worth of produce from this site,” he says. “This year will be less because it’s our first year and the soil is still not that great. I use that number to give people an idea what’s coming out of here. Over time, we can probably continue to up that number.”

Although Ekar’s crops will be technically organic — meaning grown without chemical fertilizers or insecticides —  it’s unlikely that the organizers will actually seek certification of that.

Such formalities don’t really mean that much to Salzberg and the rest of the farm’s supporters. He’s not particularly enamored with the whole organic food movement or the “Jewish food movement,” for that matter.

“To me, eating is fundamental,” he says. “It’s nice to know where you are. For me, very selfishly, I want my kids to know where they are and what they’re coming from. And where you are and what you’re coming from is the dirt that’s around you.

“It’s climate. It’s location. All of those things that make you feel very deeply human are part of the growing process. I know it’s spring because little green sprouts are coming up, because of the way the air feels in the morning. You feel far more connected when you have a seed in the ground. When it snows in May and you’ve got tomatoes in the ground, it snows on you. You feel it in a way that you don’t when you’re just sitting in your condo or townhome or house. I feel that those are things that make you feel deeply alive.”

It’s also about feeling deeply Jewish, he adds.

“Because I am Jewish and that’s what I know, my way of understanding the seasons is helped by that cycle of time. My connection to the Jewish calendar is very agricultural. It’s not an accident that people eat apples on Rosh Hashanah. Apples are harvested in September. Those connections connect me into my Jewishness in a very fundamental way.”

It’s also about the value of simple hard work.

On a recent cool Friday morning, Salzberg was joined at the farm by fellow volunteer and executive committee member Eli Goldstein who, thanks to a recent stretch of business success, is spending much of this summer toiling away in the garden.

Asked what his role at Ekar is, Goldstein replied simply: “I work.”

“I love working with my hands,” he elaborates. “I love being outdoors. I love getting dirty. I really enjoy having people come out here and seeing the satisfaction on their faces when they’re finished. I like being a part of making that possible instead of staying at home and doing sales. I much prefer getting a little burn and maybe some dirt on me.”

He smiles and prepares to go back out into the field.

“It’s pretty much as simple as that.”

Salzberg echoes his colleague’s appreciation for the nobility of physical labor out in the fresh air.

“I feel that there’s a deep value to working,” he says. “You see these kids coming out and they just love it. They want nothing more than to fill up a wheelbarrow and run it around. That’s really cool.”

Tiri’s Garden is Denver only downtown garden.

Nestled at the corner of 15th and California Streets in the heart of Denver’s business district, it is 8,000 square feet of aesthetically landscaped and meticulously maintained greenery amidst towering skyscrapers and honking rush hour commuters.

Technically, it is not a Jewish garden, since its primary beneficiaries are homeless children of all backgrounds, but its progenitor and backer, Christie Isenberg, is Jewish, as is Evan Makovsky, the real estate developer who is allowing his vacant land to be used as a garden.

Not to mention the golden Jerusalem limestone used in the garden’s center, an arbor-covered seating area that seems perfectly suited for some serious meditation.

Tiri’s Garden has already had one growing season under its belt. It produced its first harvest in the fall of 2009 after Isenberg, the wife of Denver hotel baron Walter Isenberg, convinced Makovsky that she had a pretty good idea for vacant property that would, in better economic times, constitute prime commercial real estate.

“He had this empty land just sitting there,” says Isenberg.

It’s probably not a permanent arrangement, she acknowledges. When the economy picks up and development gets going again, she expects the garden will have to find another location, which she fully intends to do.

“We work with a lot of non-profits in Colorado,” Isenberg explains, “and Urban Peak happens to be one of them. We thought this idea would be good for the city and also for Urban Peak.”

Urban Peak is a shelter for homeless children in Denver, offering them school, room and board. Isenberg felt the children could learn a lot about farming and healthy eating habits while helping at the garden and the produce would help supplement their diets there.

It seemed a classic win-win situation.

Isenberg, however, wanted to take it a step further.

She says that she finds many urban gardens to be rather unsightly places, often not very well kept. She is also aware that downtown is a very image-conscious part of town. Tiri’s Garden sits directly across from the Hyatt hotel and near a lot of upscale downtown housing, so it was important that it look nice.

Which it certainly does, with its raised planting beds, gravel pathways, teak benches, pagoda-style arbors, sundial and wrought iron fence.

“We did not want it to be overgrown,” she says. “We wanted it to be manicured. We were very conscious of how it looked.”

Designed by Europa Landscaping, which used many donated materials, and planned with the assistance of Denver Urban Gardens, Tiri’s Garden is currently growing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables — squash, beans, lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes and more.

“We try to plant what will be easy for the kids to harvest,” Isenberg says.

While Europa performs regular maintenance, the Urban Peak kids are at the garden on a regular basis, helping to plant, weed and harvest.

“It really gives them a sense of ownership in the garden,” Isenberg says.

THERE are any number of corollary benefits, she adds.

“I think that people need to eat healthier and I think a lot of schools were not providing that. People are growing much more conscious about that and I think that this will all help tie into that. Several studies show that kids who work in gardens become much more aware of eating healthy.

“I also know that with Urban Peak, when they were working in the gardens they were getting better grades. It gives them a sense of pride when they’re eating what they’re growing.”

The name of the garden comes from Tirunesh — nicknamed Tiri — the four-year-old Ethiopian girl the Isenbergs adopted last year. “We actually named the garden in her honor before we picked her up last year,” her new mother says

Their daughter thinks the garden named in her honor “is pretty special,” says Isenberg, “and she thinks she’s pretty special too. In fact, she says, ‘That’s my garden.’”

Tiri has been to the garden several times and has enjoyed watching the other children working in it. The idea for Tiri’s Garden didn’t come from a personal passion in gardening, admits Isenberg, who works as the director for the Concert for Kids charity in Denver.

“I like to play around with flowers in the yard,” she says, “but I don’t actually have time to garden.”

Nonetheless, the value of urban gardening is certainly not lost on her. She is already working with Denver Public Schools to set up similar garden plots on DPS property in several locations. She would like to have school curricula harmonize with the operation of the gardens.

“The plans aren’t yet finalized, but we’ve already targeted a couple of schools,” Isenberg says. “We’d like to next year hopefully have three to four of them underway. There are so many positive things that come out of it.”