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'Eco-kosher' Jews Have an Appetite for Ethical Eating As is the custom, the guests observed Shabbat with a meal, but with a twist: They were sharing a "sustainable" dinner on this Friday evening, with food that was locally grown, mostly organic and intended to elevate their practice of Judaism
Community Access To Good Food Can Help Curtail Obesity More people are seeking out local and organic foods at farmers' markets, through community-supported agriculture subscription programs, and at restaurants. Not all of the food news, however, is good...
When 'Local' Makes It Big On Tuesday, five potato farmers rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, kicking off a marketing campaign that is trying to position the nation’s best-selling brand of potato chips as local food.
In an era where just about everyone is counting pennies as well as calories, Berkeley-based husband and wife filmmaking duo Shira and Yoav Potash recently embarked on the “Food Stamp Challenge” where they ate on roughly one dollar per meal and a documented their low-budget food adventure in the film Food Stamped. The film was screened last year at the Hazon Food Conference. But you can catch the film this weekend at the JCC in Berkeley, CA.
Join the thinkers and doers of the new Jewish Food Movement — where contemporary food conversations meet Jewish traditions. The fourth annual Hazon Food Conference is the only place in the world where farmers and rabbis, nutritionists and chefs, vegans and omnivores, come together to explore the dynamic interplay of food, Jewish traditions, and contemporary life. Read more »
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? Read more »
Photo by Julian Darwall. Illustration by Nick Shepard.
Attention Jewish Foodies! Check out this article, “Culture Clash in the New Jewish Food Movement”, published recently in New Voices, describing the question of elitism in the New Jewish Food Movement. The piece is meant to start a conversation about the multiplicity of entry points and priorities in the Movement, and I hope you find it interesting. As an active member in the New Jewish Food Movement and a reporter on this piece, I found myself in some fascinating conversations that I hope will continue with all of you.
This past Thursday I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn – for a garden. Yeah, there were a bunch of other reasons, but I did some serious downsizing for the opportunity to be an urban gardener. But more on that in a minute.
Moving in New york, if you’ve never done it, is a real big pain. In a city where you can’t normally find parking, where are you going to put a 14-foot rental truck while your friends (for the price of some pizza and your eternal gratitude) help you load all your worldly possessions? All things considered the move went pretty well until we showed up at my new apartment with all my stuff to find my new bedroom only half painted and an apologetic note from the new roommate. So settling in was going to have to wait until the painters could finish the job – Saturday. So with my life boxed up in the living room, I decided to head over to the Brooklyn Food Conference, which was free and a convenient walking distance from my new digs.
Even if you don’t live in Brooklyn, and won’t be at the Brooklyn Food Conference this Saturday, this is a really terrific video you should check out anyway.
I really love it when my boyfriend gets excited about a meal. He stops, breathes in. “Oh,” he says quietly, “oh, wow” a little louder. That usually makes me pause. “Oh this is amazing,” his eyes go wide and a smile begins to play across his face, “I can’t believe how good this is.” Sometimes he reaches across the table to include me in the moment, sometimes he revels in his experience alone.
We had one of those moments last night. Earlier in the day, I had been bored at work so I checked out Facebook and noticed an invitation to several restaurants with a focus on sustainable food that were donating a portion of their proceeds that night to the Brooklyn Food Conference. Since I was planning on being in the neighborhood of one of these restaurants, I decided to check it out – boyfriend in tow.
Over the past few years, a growing number of Jewish foodies, farmers, rabbis, chefs, teachers, students, families and many others have brought meaning to those words, asking why and how one can eat in a way that is both deeply Jewish and deeply sustainable.
It is time to ask a new question: where will this movement be in 7 years? Last Rosh Hashanah ended the last shmita (sabbatical year) cycle, and we’ve begun the countdown to the end of the next shmita cycle in September 2015. Using the shmita cycle, with its wisdom about our relationship to the land as a guide, what should be the goals of the Jewish food movement? How do you envision that the Jewish community (in the United States, Israel, the entire world) will look and act differently in its relationship to food by September, 2015?
Sasha Perry reports from the Food Conference for JTA – see her story below:
(If you have a good internet connection, when the video is playing you can click on the arrow in the bottom right corner and switch to ‘watch in high quality.’)
Thanks, Sasha, for telling so many of the stories of the Hazon Food Conference! Have your own memory you want to share? Leave your comments below.
Umami is so hot right now. Barbara Kingsolver talked about it in her food movement tome “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, NPR covered it, it’s been scientifically proven, and now it’s basis of a new Kikkoman advertising campaign, one that tells folks they can add umami to any dish to make it dazzling.
So what is umami? It’s glutamate, a non-essential amino acid that breaks down proteins in food. It also has the effect of exciting the neurotransmitters in human brains. When it’s bound to other amino acids, as in whole foods like tomatoes, asparagus, cheeses and meats, it has no adverse effects and makes life better from the tongue on down. When it’s free-floating though, as it is when used as an additive in the form of Monosodium glutamate and it’s many incarnations, in any savory processed food, and, unfortunately, in some delicious by-products like brewer’s yeast, that old neurotransmitter stimulation gets out of control. In up to 25 percent of the population (depending on your source, of course), MSG can cause side effects from over-stimulation of neurotransmitters. The side effects include a range of neurological and cardiac responses from the mild and incident-specific to the life-inhibiting and permanent, depending on the person doing the eating and the amount that they consume. (This article has a list, though I can’t vouch for or against their sources)
One of my favorite things about Hazon’s Food Conference is that it inspires people to do something more after they leave. That “something” can be any number of things, from composting, to joining a CSA, to vowing to cook more meals at home.
While I am already a CSA-belonging, farmer’s market-shopping, frequent cooking, recycling, composting, herb-growing kind of person, I was curious to see what effect the conference would have on my husband.
He is an enthusiastic omnivore, to be sure, and is completely supportive of all my efforts to live more sustainably. He mostly came to the conference to support his executive committee member wife, and to see for himself what this Hazon thing was all about.
I had my hopes, though, which I didn’t exactly keep a secret. My husband has been an on and off home-brewer for years. In the past year, he and his friend Michael have taken it up together, starting what they call “East Bay Lovin’” in Michael and his wife’s San Francisco apartment (why it’s called East Bay Lovin’ and is brewed in San Francisco is a story for another day). My hope was that he would attend the sourdough workshop at the conference, and come home equally interested in this other kind of fermentation.
It may have passed under the radar for those who missed the Hazon Food Conference, but Hekhsher Tzedek, the ethical certification seal for the kosher food industry, has now evolved into Magen Tzedek. The name change serves a number of purposes. Aside from easing arguments over spelling, dropping the term hekhsher would better enable the seal to be applied to products that aren’t food. The main motivation behind the name change however, is to allow the seal to coexist with other rabbinic kosher seals. Orthodox supervision organizations such as the OU were none to happy at the thought of a rival Conservative hekhsher telling them that their meat was kosher. In the meantime, it seemed like the founder of Hekhsher Tzedek, Rabbi Morris Allen, was spending half of his time explaining that the new seal was not intended to be a rival kashrut certification but an ethical seal. Thankfully, after discussions with the OU the parties have agreed on a new name. You can read more about Magen Tzedek in the official press release, or in this article from the JTA.
Why am I so excited about the name change? Because I suggested that Hekhsher Tzedek change its name on this very blog way back on December 11. Now, I have no evidence to suggest that my comment led to the name change….
The Hazon food conference was my first trip out to California, and boy did I fall in love. After a few days hiking in Big Sur, where sheer cliffs dropped down hundreds of feet to the blue ocean, foam rising rhythmically around small mountains of eroded rock, stretching as far as we could see, I drove North to San Francisco to visit friends. These particular friends had made the move from New York a year before, and they accepted me and my travel buddy on their futon with only a few days notice. At the very least, I owed them breakfast, and in honor of my new surroundings, I tried a new dish.
Our baked eggs that day were made from what was available at the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Baked eggs make a very easy, and pretty impressive main course for brunch. They’re versatile as far as seasonality, since eggs, cheese and cream are year-round commodities, and the casserole on the bottom of the dish can change depending on the veggies currently in season. In December in San Francisco, our eggs included mustard greens, spring onions, shitake mushrooms and canned tomatoes preserved with garlic and a few leaves of basil. When I returned to New York in early January, I made my next batch with potatoes sauteed with garlic, onions, lots of ginger, kale, more preserved tomatoes and a few flax seeds sprinkled in for good measure.
Michael Ableman is a farmer, an author, a photographer, a recognized practitioner of sustainable agriculture, and a proponent of regional food systems. He has written several books, essays, and articles, and he lectures extensively on food, culture, and sustainability worldwide. Michael is currently farming at the Foxglove Farm on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia and developing The Center for Art, Ecology & Agriculture there.
