Hazon is T-1 day away from The Food Conference!
For the last three days (not to mention weeks and months) the Hazon staff and our wonderful volunteers have been organizing, calling, emailing and blowing many kisses at our poor, overworked copy machine. The advance crew is currently up at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center turning it into a winter foodie wonderland, and the first group of people start trickling in tomorrow afternoon.
We’ll be posting live updates from the Food Conference throughout the weekend - check back to get your taste of the inspirational sessions and panels, cooking and pickling demonstrations, and spirited Shabbat and Chanukah celebration! To view the full schedule, click here.
Multiple people have raised the idea that schecting goats, as Hazon plans to at the Food Conference next week, doesn’t really expose participants to the true horrors of conventional animal slaughter. What would really be effective, they say, is to show a film that conveys the brutality of factory farming.
They have a point - the way in which the Food Conference schecting will happen is not by any means a mainstream practice. But that’s exactly the reason why we’re doing it and also why showing a film just isn’t enough.
Factory farms are one of the worst and most infuriating things I can think of, and they’re a huge part of the reason I’m a vegetarian. And Hazon has no intention of hiding the realities of the conventional meat industry during the Food Conference. Quite on the contrary, in fact.
But there are people - including a growing number of people in the Jewish community - who are seeking out the ethics and practices of responsible and ethical meat eating. They are certainly not mainstream, at least not yet. But to say that the work they’re doing is not part of the “real world” denies them the potential to - God willing - influence the larger Jewish community to eat less meat and to eat it with more kavvanah (intention) and respect.
Perhaps its time to move beyond our outrage towards factory farms and start ”being the change” we want to see in the Jewish community - or at very least, supporting the people who are.
Below the jump, Adamah Program Director, Shamu Sadeh, talks about the realities of “Animals, Life and Death on the Farm.”
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This morning, The Jewish Vegetarians of North America put out a press release that condemns the goat schecting at Hazon’s food conference. As a Jew and a vegetarian, I support this statement. Or rather, I support the legitimate concern for animal welfare and environmental integrity at the foundation of the statement. Still, I think that unless the JVNA plans to condemn ALL the simchas, events, and conferences in the Jewish community that serve meat - then perhaps Hazon’s Food Conference is the one meat-serving conference they should endorse.
Like the majority of Jewish events, The Hazon Food Conference will not promote mindless or wasteful meat consumption, nor will it violate tsa’ar ba’alei chaim by promoting animal mistreatment. On the contrary, the schecting and consumption of the goats at the Food Conference will encourage participants to take responsibility for their food choices.
More importantly, the schecting will not happen in a vaccuum. It will be one of several sessions throughout the weekend that get participants thinking about meat consumption (ethical, kosher, industrial, abstinence from and otherwise). Regardless of whether or not participants attend the schecting or eat the goat meat, they will be surrounded by thoughtful conversations about JVNA’s central question, ”Should Jews be Vegetarians?” For some participants the answer will be no - but if JVNA is serious about the question, they ought to support the Food Conference’s serious engagement with it.
I’ve been a committed Jewish vegetarian for 8 years, but I realized a long while ago that the day I once hoped for (the one where all Jews renounce meat forever) was simply never going to come. And in the meantime, there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the Jews who do decide to eat meat are doing it in a way that respects the land, the animal, and themselves.
Read the JVNA’s full Press Release below the jump.
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This year, Black Friday was significantly lightened by more news on the ethical, kosher meat front (and more shoutouts to Hazon, Kosher Conscience, and The Jew & The Carrot) - this time in the Wall Street Journal by long-time Hazon friend and journalist-extraordinaire, Julie Wiener. Read the article below and find the original text here.
Wall Street Journal
How Kosher Was Your Turkey?
Some Jews demand better treatment for birds.
BY JULIE WIENER
Friday, November 23, 2007
Yesterday, 24 New York City households served turkeys that were not only free-range, organic and raised on a nearby family farm–but also 100% kosher. For that, their guests can give thanks to Simon Feil, a 31-year-old actor who has devoted the past 1 1/2 years to starting Kosher Conscience, a “kosher ethical meat co-op.” The co-op, which 90 people have expressed interest in joining when it begins regular poultry and beef deliveries in a few months, will offer kosher meat that has been treated humanely “at every stage,” he says.
Judaism’s taboos on pork and shellfish, as well as the requirement to separate meat and dairy products, are well known even among gentiles. Yet for many contemporary American Jews the taboos can feel arbitrary, cumbersome and devoid of meaning (only 17% say they keep kosher homes). At the same time, some Jews who do find spiritual meaning in the dietary laws have become frustrated that kosher food production does not always reflect their values.
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On the eve of Thanksgiving, The Jewish Daily Forward (which just this week ran the controversial “Kosher Food Safety Alert” ad) published an article I’m truly grateful for: Kosher Activists Strive To Slaughter With a Conscience. Below is the article in full, which gives shoutouts to Hazon, The Jew & The Carrot, Kosher Conscience, and Heeb n’ Vegan and - more importantly - is one more, very public indicator that the demand for ethical, kosher products is on the rise.
Kosher Activists Strive To Slaughter With a Conscience
Nathaniel Popper
November 21, 2007
The Jewish Daily Forward
After 18 months of planning, New York’s new kosher meat cooperative slaughtered its first animals this week, just in time for Thanksgiving.
It took the founder of Kosher Conscience, Simon Feil, many months to find a shochet, or Jewish ritual slaughterer, who could do the job, and then Feil needed to find a flock of free-range heirloom breed turkeys. But he was not content to deal only with the logistics. When the first turkey went under the knife, Feil was there to cradle it in his arms — feeling the “solemn experience,” as he put it, of life leaving a body.
“It was an emotional day, and I’m still trying to process all the reactions I had to it,” Feil said a few hours after the first turkeys were slaughtered. “You really watch something that is a living creature turn into meat.”
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Margaret Hathaway’s new book, The Year of the Goat
, tells the story of the 40,000 miles she and her partner (now husband), Karl Schatz, traveled in search of the perfect goat cheese - and a new way of life.
Before embarking on their year-long journey, Hathaway was a freelance writer who managed Magnolia Bakery in New York City, and Schatz worked as a photo editor for Time Magazine’s website. Together, they lived in Brooklyn, shopped at the Greenmarkets, and generally enjoyed city life - but they craved something more than the five boroughs could offer. So, they set off on a year-long journey to discover if farming - and particularly working with goats - held the secrets of the next chapter of their lives.
Along the way, Hathaway and Schatz met what they call, a “vivid cast of characters,” including a myriad of goat cheese and meat enthusiasts, a Texas-born Muslim living in Maine and helping the local Somali community in Lewiston acquire fitting goats for their religious festivals, and a Messianic Jew who keeps Shabbat as well as a herd of goats.
I spoke with Margaret and Karl last week about goats (naturally), their adventures in homesteading, the connection between farming and Jewish tradition, and their upcoming event in NYC, the Goatstravaganza (Nov. 8).
Interview continues below the jump…
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Read “Planning the schecting at the Food Conference - part 1″ here.
Having laid all the burecratic ground work for the shechting, I now needed to actually get my hands on a goat! I didn’t know it, but Hazon was planning to use a goat belonging to ADVA Dairy, run by Aitan Mizrahi, who lives and works at Isabella with the Adamah program. I touched base with Aitan, who told me he has some goats that could be slaughtered, but he was planning on slaughtering them in October. He was fine waiting until December, as long as Hazon covered the extra food the critter would need for those 2 months. Seemed more than fair. We would need a few goats, partly to feed all the people at the Conference at least a taste of goat, but more importantly because there was no guarantee that every goat would be kosher.
Despite everything being done properly, after an animal is shechted, it’s lungs are inspected for sirchot, adhesions, which can render the animal unkosher. In order to try and ensure we’d have at least one usable animal, we arranged to shecht 3. Our friend at the OU told me we’d have an excellent chance of most if not all being kosher due to their young age. Apparently, animals over a year old are more likely to develop these lung blemishes and the younger they are, the less likely we’d find a disqualifying sircha. Since these goats will be all of 8 months old, much younger than the market usually deals with, we could be confident that we’d have meat to eat.
Animals, check.
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For all of the back and forth here about whether to shecht a goat at the upcoming Food Conference (which is certainly a noble and lively debate), very little space has been given to the what of shechting. Or the how, I suppose. While certainly secondary, the technical aspects of what goes/would go into slaughtering a goat at a Jewish retreat center in rural Connecticut with no facility set up for such a thing, and kosher are by no means simple. I was given the debatably enviable task (I loved it) of figuring out the answers to all the whats should we move ahead. Given that I’ve spent the better part of 18 months (2 years if you count my initial pangs of conscience) trying to get my ethical, kosher meat co-op off the ground, I figured I’d know all the pieces by heart and would just smooth them into place- heck, 1 little goat vs. dozens of cows? Piece of cake. Turns out that’s only half true.
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As the logistics (and debate) of schecting a goat at Hazon’s Food Conference next month continue, Alexander Lane over at Chow, describes how he decided to “kill Thanksgiving dinner.” Lane writes:
“Here I am in Maine, having relocated in April after spending my first 34 years around major cities like New York and San Francisco. Strange things happen here, such as wild turkeys wandering out of the woods behind your apartment complex. Even stranger, you develop the desire to shoot and eat them...”
Lane then goes on to describe his choice to forego the shrink-wrapped, store-bought turkey, to have a go at killing and preparing a real live animal.
His food story fits into the newly emerging “do it yourself” genre, which has Brooklyn families running full-scale farms in their backyards, and former supermarket goers jumping at the chance to kill their own animals for meat. These, “how I decided to get in touch with the food system by….” stories seem to be a hybrid of post-Omnivore’s Dilemma” ethics and American’s obsession with reality TV.
Whether DIY foodism will become a mainstay of how American’s source their food, or stay sparse enough to continue being story worthy, remains to be seen. For now, check out Lane’s article, “Gobble, Gobble, Bang,” here.
Will the goat shechting event happen at Hazon’s Food Conference this December? Signs point to yes, pending the logistics get worked out. In the meantime, the idea has stirred up a significant amount of debate and - it seems - inspired artwork. Graphic artist, Mat Tonti, created an ”alternative” Food Conference postcard (below). Quite an interesting contrast/foil to the original postcard, which you can see below Mat’s rendition.
To find out more about the Hazon Food Conference, Dec 6-9, click here.
(For the record - despite the Hazon logo that graces Mat’s postcard, Hazon was not involved in its creation.)
Erev Yom Kippur / 20 / September 2007
Dear All,
I had one of the most astonishing and fascinating conversations of my life over Rosh Hashanah. It was about killing two goats, and I wanted briefly to share it with you ahead of Yom Kippur and Succot.
I spent Rosh Hashanah at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, and – after visiting the goats there – I sat down with Aitan Mizrahi, Freedman’s very own goatherd and the founder of the Adva Goat Dairy and Rachel Gaul, another goatherd friend of Aitan’s. This Yom Kippur will be exactly a month since I posted a piece on The Jew & The Carrot, titled Schechting a goat at the Hazon Food Conference? The conference will be at Freedman, and the key part of the conversation went roughly as follows:
-You know, of course, that if you want to schecht two goats at the Food Conference [in early December], you’ll have to pay to feed them from October till December.
-Why?
-Well, because otherwise they’ll be killed in October – that’s when bucks [male goats] get slaughtered.
-Why’s that?
-Well, goats give birth in the spring. The kids in due course give milk, so they live for a good number of years; but the bucks have no use, so they’re fed during the summer, when food is abundant, and then typically they’re killed in October, ahead of the winter.
-That’s unbelievable! That’s just incredible! You’re telling me that if we schecht two goats at the food conference, we’ll actually be extending their lives by two months – because otherwise they’d be killed in October?
-Yeah, Nige. You know – “no dairy without death.”
-NO DAIRY WITHOUT DEATH??!!
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The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery ended this past Sunday and I’ll share some highlights that I think will particularly interest our readers.
- “Ecotarian/Ecotarianism” - What do we call ourselves? “Ecotarian” was proposed as a catchall term for most perspectives basically against industrial food, but which vary in emphasis: locavore, vegetarian, sustainable, organic, committed to humane conditions and slaughter of animals for meat - i.e., that diverse group that is us. But is it precise and universally understood enough let’s say to become a meal option on a plane flight, asked Jessica Lee, who proposed the term?
- “Conscientious Production” - another pair of speakers attempted to categorize eco-friendly values as “conscientious production” (in contrast to conspicuous consumption).
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One of the big international foodie events, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, starts tomorrow, 9/8. The topic this year is Food and Morality
- Food and quality – should food be good?
- Food and safety and the environment – should food be clean?
- Food and justice – should food be fair?
- Food and human nature – is it right to take pleasure in food?
and the keynote speaker is Ruth Reichl. The Co-chairs of the program are notable food writers Paul Levy and Claudia Roden. Many of the topics are of particular interest to our readers - ‘ecotarianism,’ organics and consumerism, meat-eating and vegetarianism, eating local, and there’s even one session devoted to Jewish perspectives, at which yours truly is participating. I’m especially intrigued by one of my co-panelists Susan Weingarten’s topic ‘Eating People is Wrong: Cannibalism and Charoset.’ Wouldn’t you be intrigued, too? See the whole list of papers here. I had wonderful dinner table conversation with participants tonight over Jain vegetarianism, Michael Pollan, Irish Jewish foodways, Catholic Bavarian saints festivals, and selling olive oil and wine. I’ll have more to report later.
Dan Barber - my own personal food hero, and one of the featured presenters at Hazon’s 2007 Food Conference - was recently interviewed over at Salon.com. The topic: agriculture, oil, and the 2007 Farm Bill. Barber said:
In this country alone, food - from growing to processing, transportation and fertilizer — accounts for about 17 percent of all oil we use, a little less than automobiles. Not only is there an ecological cost to transporting food, because of fossil fuels, but there is a huge ecological impact from the way we grow our food - whether it travels 10 feet or 10,000 miles.
And…
The typical American cow is just an oil barrel. It’s [fed] corn. And that corn is fed fertilizer and pesticides, meaning oil. It is trucked from a cornfield in Iowa to a feedlot in Colorado, or wherever, again oil. And then that hamburger meat is processed … in oil. And then that hamburger meat is shipped to all the fast-food restaurants — more oil. [The process is] a gas guzzler.
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