First there was the locavore - the folks who lived and breathed (as well as ate and drank) locally grown food. They enthusiastically joined CSAs, left their jobs in the city to start a farm, and launched local-food experiments in their backyards or window boxes.

Then there was the lazyvore - the media-created, slothful twin sibling to the locavore. The people who want their food local, but don’t want to lift a finger, or a shovel, or even a CSA canvas bag.

Now, locavore and lazyvore seem to be welcoming in yet another cousin - the practicavore (yes, this “adding vore to other words” thing could go on for just about ever.) The Washington Post documented the emerging trend yesterday in an article about people who are - either fed up with or economically hampered by rising food costs - growing their own food. Unlike the locavore who plants mostly out of a desire to get back to the land, the practicavore plants because food at the grocery store is just too darn expensive:

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On a sunny and pleasant spring afternoon, while my husband and I were sowing greens and transplanting heads of lettuce, a local reporter showed up at our farm. He was a young man, working for a suburban newspaper and researching an article about the rising cost of fuel and its effects on the small enclaves of agriculture still left in our area of Northern Virginia. His main question: How are rising fuel prices affecting our farm business?

We both paused in thought and struggled to come up with a clear answer.

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Thanks to Holly Rossi for this guest post, which talks about the trend of American churches growing food on their property. (Maybe Hazon should hook these churches up with our Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA program?) Holly is a freelance writer and the Health editor at Beliefnet.

A nice Jewish girl walks into a sprawling evangelical mega church in the heart of Idaho and asks, “Where do you grow your organic vegetables?” Within minutes, she’s being whisked away on a golf cart to a patch behind the massive church: “Welcome to the Garden o’ Feedin’!”

No, this isn’t a pitch for a Twilight Zone remake on the Planet Green TV network. It’s a scene I actually experienced at the Vineyard Church of Boise, a church that grew over 20,000 pounds of organic produce on a 1/3-acre plot last year. On assignment for Search magazine, I was looking to explore the newly fertile connection between evangelical Christians and the environmental movement. What I found inspired me to imagine the world we could live in if every house of worship in America took a stab at growing food on its little piece of God’s green earth.

Read an excerpt from the article below.

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Monday (7/21) New York Times article, The Food Chain: Mideast Facing Choice Between Crops and Water, was a good reminder to me as to why I am glad to be involved with Hazon, and the work that we do to create a healthier and more sustainable world. Learning a bit about the crises that have already presented themselves, particularly in the Middle East, also reminded me of just how much work we have ahead of us to bring about a world where healthy, nutritious, ethically raised food is a right of human existence and not a privilege. Water and land shortages are, of course, hitting hardest in the poorest places of the world where there is no money to invest in creative solutions.

The article presents a pretty bleak world. But, Hazon’s Israeli partners – the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning & Leadership (of the Hike) and The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (of the Ride) are both doing critical work towards addressing some of the issues raised in the NYT piece in Israel.

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Last Thursday, The New York Times published a front-page article about Community-Supported Agriculture. Not an article about CSAs filling up too fast this year, about chefs who will cook your CSA vegetables for you, or some other new angle - just an introductory, 101, “welcome to CSA” article.

On the one hand, a certain part of me feels cynical - Hazon and other organizations (like the amazing Just Food, which got a nod in the article), have been working to educate people about Community-Supported Agriculture for what feels like eons. And, the best part is, we’ve been successful! When I first started working at Hazon four years ago, I had to explain the CSA concept to just about everyone - and trust me it got old. But that is no longer the case. I just can’t help but wonder if this topic isn’t a little bit “past ripe” for the Times breaking news-focused front page? (Admittedly, I might just be jealous of the author and/or irked at myself for not realizing that CSA was still front page news at the Times!)

That said, I’m still thrilled to see CSA continuing to get so much media attention. And, after reading that some CSA members can’t even describe what Community-Supported Agriculture means, perhaps we really still do have a ways to go.

Coffee has been a staple of my diet since I was 14, and as much as possible I like to buy certified fair trade and organic coffee. Yes, it’s usually pricier, but I’m willing to pay a little more to invest in something I really believe in.

A friend recently turned me on to a coffee that’s not only organic, kosher and free trade, but it’s grown by a cooperative of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Uganda. The co-op is called Mirembe Kawomera, which means Delicious Peace in Luganda. You can buy the coffee off their website, for $10.50 for 12 oz. which comes out to almost ten cents less per ounce than some blends at Starbucks. And if you can arrange a big order for your community (20 lbs or more), prices go down even further, to $8.00 for 12 oz. Coffee that saves me money, is free trade, organic, kosher, and part of a project that promotes peace and interfaith initiatives? The only way it could get any better would be if it found me a boyfriend and cleaned the cat litter. Read more »

An article in the food section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle features Nigel Walker, the farmer of Eatwell Farm.  Walker is “our” farmer at Tuv Ha’Aretz in Berkeley.  (San Francisco’s Tuv Ha’Aretz’s farm, Capay Valley, is also mentioned.)

While the article talks about how CSAs are becoming more and more popular, one of the more notable points indicated that many consumers are not ready to give up certain non-local fruits and vegetables:

While the true CSA model means only getting what is coming straight from the farm or neighboring farms, [home organic delivery services like] Farm Fresh to You also offer the additional option of receiving bananas from Mexico and apples from Washington.”People are drawn to CSAs for different reasons. Some are on the local-sustainable bandwagon,” says Moyra Barsotti of Farm Fresh to You. “There’s also the facet that finds it convenient.”Barsotti points to a survey of her customers that asked what was most important to them: Whether food was local, sustainable or organic. They answered local. Yet in a separate section asking what their favorite fruit and vegetable was, bananas were the top pick.

Interested to find out more about organic delivery services?  Click here.

Long time readers of The Jew & The Carrot might remember Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz as the couple who left their urban apartment in Brooklyn and traveled 40,000 miles around the country in search of a new lifestyle as goat farmers. (Margaret wrote a book about their experience called The Year of the Goat).

These days, Karl and Margaret live on a farm outside of Portland with their two children, Charlotte and Beatrice, and their dairy goats.  And I had the opportunity to write about their lives and how they merge their sustainable lifestyle and Jewish tradition for Jewish Living Magazine (think an eco-friendly, Martha Stewart Living with a Jewish twist!)

Read an excerpt of the article below the jump. Read more »

I don’t mean join a CSA. I actually mean, hire someone to do it for you. In San Francisco, that someone is a business called MyFarm, whose employees will come over, design a garden in your backyard, and then do maintainence for it on weekly visits. You can read about it here.

I have to admit I am torn by this idea. By growing a garden in your own yard, of course you are much more connected to your food. But by paying others to maintain it for you, you introduce yet another middle-person.

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Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. This is her second installment of “Unboxed” - posts that demystify summer’s most seasonal produce.  See her first post on rhubarb.

There is something very special about the first pick-up of the Tuv HaAretz CSA season. Having invested in a farmer’s harvest-to-come in the cold dark of winter and then waited patiently through the spring, the initial sight of tables piled high with the first produce of the season is a delight in the midst of the densely built environment. No wonder our ancestors were enjoined to bring offerings of first fruits to the Temple in gratitude for the blessing of the earth’s bounty!

At Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York City last week, new and returning Tuv HaAretz members gathered shares of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and eggs from Eve and Chris Kaplan-Walbrecht’s Garden of Eve farm. Early summer greens prevailed. Red lettuce, mesclun, and arugula went into bags and boxes of all shapes and sizes along with elegant asparagus spears, bunches of red radishes, and a single stalk of rhubarb each. Then there were the leeks. Sturdy and humble in appearance, these gangly onion and garlic cousins fit awkwardly among the leafy beauties.

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Thanks to Moshe Cohen for this guest post. Moshe is participating in Hillel’s Sustainable Agriculture Alternative Break at Kayam Farm in Maryland and sending in “reports from the field.” The alternative break is being led by the Jewish Farm School.

“I had a convo with my chi,” said Alison Fields, recently of Indiana University, leaning on her shovel during a work break in the shade.  After our first full day at Hillel and The Jewish Farm School’s Alternative Break at Kayam Farm, we have already taken a complete tour of the grounds, dined on white mulberries right off the tree, sampled new vegetables out of the garden like garlic scapes and kohlrabi and participated in a morning Chi Gong session (hence Alison’s “chi conversation”).

Every day we have three work blocks where we split into teams to tackle a variety of assignments, working and learning together with farm staff and trip organizers. The first major project we undertook was constructing a fence to keep the deer out of the lettuce, reminding us that our food cycle intersects with other living things, as well. Some of us picked leafy greens from the garden and snuck away from the hot sun to “kasher the harvest” in the kitchen.

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One of the primary differences between shopping at a supermarket and joining a CSA is that, in the latter model, customers benefit along with their partner farmer when the weather is good, and share the burden when the weather is excessively hot, wet, or dry, and the crops fail. The farmer does not suffer alone, and the customers are more deeply connected to the seasonal shifts that impact their food source.

The following guest post, by farmer Vicki Westerhoff who farms at Genesis Growers with her family in St. Anne Illinois, is a pair of letters she wrote to Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA members about the recent flooding across the Midwest. In response to the flood damage, Tuv Ha’Aretz members will head out to Genesis Farms this month to help them replant their fields.

Friday, June 7

We are flooded. On Wednesday night last week we had a furious storm roll through the farm. It pummeled us with five and 1/4 inches of driving rain. The wind gusts exceeded 60 mph. The devastation I suppose could be worse, but what happened is bad.

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Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post.  Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.

Growing up, Shavuot for me meant lasagna - a delicious, cheesy creation that my mother would make for the one Jewish holiday on which we did not eat meat. (Actually, I was an adult before I realized that non-kosher lasagna was made with meat). I loved the lasagna, and Shavuot wasn’t bad either. Special food, staying up late the first night with my friends- Shavuot was a hit, and I didn’t think about it more than that.

One synagogue I went to hosted a “bikkurim (first fruits) procession:” they had people bring in baskets of produce and leave them on the bimah. I’d never seen a community mark Shavuot through any way but through a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (staying up all night to study) and by eating blintzes, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. It seemed a little pagan.

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Thanks to Rebecca Bloomfield for this guest post. Rebecca is an alumni of the Adamah program and a garden teacher at The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation and founded by Alice Waters.

The highlight of my week this week involved watching two of my students fight. Dodging the carefully-cultivated garden beds, one student ran after another. I hurdled over the strawberry patch to intercept the pursuer and was met by a stern pout that melted into a grin with the words, “she stole my snow peas.” I heard giggling and crunching behind me as the winded friend approached us both, handing us the peas. We snacked and returned to harvesting.

The Edible Schoolyard, in Berkeley, CA, is a force of healing and transformation for middle school students. As children turn soil, plant seeds, harvest produce, and build compost piles, they deepen their connection to food. As the garden transforms, so do the students. It is a space for things to change from that which is to that which can be: seed to sprout, compost to fertile soil, flower to fruit. Like the Mishkan that the Jews were commanded to build during the Exodus, the garden is a sacred space where a divine presence dwells. School gardens the nation over provide space for children to learn that they have choices when it comes to their food, their bodies, and their environment: things do not have to be the way they currently are.

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