It seemed like a great way to kill two birds with one stone.  Now I’m wondering if it’s killing—or at least harming—me.

Welcome to my water dilemma.

Last year, my concerns were mounting about both the evils of inherent in the privatization of water and the health risks of exposure to Bisphenol A,  used to produce many common plastics.  So the members of our household stopped using the Brita filter, and started toting straight-from-the-tap goodness with us wherever we went.  Toting it in SIGG water bottles, which were sold as a plastic-free, all aluminum alternative to BPA-laden bottles.

Trust the Swiss their website said.

Yeah, trust the Swiss . . . to sell you out to the Nazis.

Last night I went to hear Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms in Virginia, speak at a benefit for the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, one of my favorite farmer’s markets here in Portland. Salatin is featured in Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and more recently in the film Food, Inc. (BTW, if you haven’t seen the film, go, this minute, and take everyone you know, even if you have to drag them kicking and screaming).

The Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice. It’s an unwieldy name, but to the point. They are an interdenominational umbrella group of clerics andorganizations working at translating environmental consciousness into social justice. Based out of NY, and working mostly in and around the city, the group is co-chaired by NY Faith and Justice (a largely Christian organization) and We ACT for Environmental Justice, but includes a number of representatives from interfaith groups, including our very own Hazon. They host talks, run initiatives and are dedicated to improving the lives of those in lower income communities in the five boroughs.  They take the wild and crazy position that these communities foot the bill for our collective enviro-sins. See? It’s not just about saving baby seals…

When it comes to food, I’ve acted the part of intercessor more than once in my life. I’ve given propagandistic explanations of what CAFO’s are. I’ve pressured room mates and lovers, gently but manipulatively, to give up corn syrup and non-organic produce. I’ve been even more sneaky and covert. When my little sister, who will eat only four things, revealed that she was under the misapprehension that kosher meat was ethically raised, I didn’t disabuse her.

The kosher food industry has been playing its undeserved part as moral intercessor for a while now. An article like this one in Food Quality, shows that non-Jews invest our religious standards for food as a moral litmus that corresponds to their ethics. This revelation makes me feel proud, but also somewhat angry. The world thinks so highly of us that they’re willing to trust our standards, but Agriprocessors showed that the laws of kashrut have nothing to do with the laws of the rest of the world.

Reports released this week disclosed that many foods made with high fructose corn syrup are contaminated with mercury, and that the FDA has known about this since 2005. Testing on supermarket foods with HFCS found detectable levels of mercury in nearly a third of products with HFCS.

Meanwhile, the Corn Refiners Association stands by its assertion that corn syrup is safe. And yes, the FDA did recently give the corn industry permission to refer to corn syrup as a “natural ingredient.”

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)

In Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, one of her characters is sitting in a diner with visitors from another planet. One of the aliens picks up a container of non-dairy creamer and says “Trudy, this is what we’re made of.”

In homage, for years, in my family, whenever we ate something that was super-processed, we referred to it as “alien food.” As in, “What is this soup made of?” “Aliens.” There is even a cake that my mother makes from a mix that we just refer to as “aliens cake.” This Kahn-Troster-ism can be very confusing if you join our clan at a later date, as my husband discovered when he innocently asked what was for dessert, and got the answer “aliens.” Alien food was not something we were defensive about, but the fact that it had its own term signified how small a part of our diet highly-processed food was. And any time I indulge in something with a long list of unpronounceable, unrecognizable ingredients, or with no real nutritional value, I think “This is what we’re made of.”

The more I get involvement in the food movement, though, the more I realize that we’re made of aliens, too.

Last week the New Yorker published a longish piece (registration required) about Orthodox rabbis who criss-cross China certifying that various food manufacturing companies are adhering by all the rules of kashrut. It’s a fascinating little piece about what it really means to be a mashgiach, or a person who checks that food is kosher. Here’s a part that caught my eye:

How does the process of kosher certification inspection work? Here’s a composite scenario, as I witnessed it.
The Schmooze: This takes place in the conference room, which is perhaps adorned with a wood-and-brass captain’s wheel from a ship. On the wall, there might be a framed certificate for “High Tech Enterprise 2006″ or a large painted sign with an adage in English. “Only Faulty Product, No Captious Customer” and “People and Products Working Together” were two that I saw. Among those in attendance could be a plant supervisor, an engineer, an export manager, a sales representative, and a factory-hired translator. There is always a lot of chuckling–about what, I don’t think anyone present ever has a clue. Finally, the mashgiach turns on his laptop, signaling that it is time for…
The Review of the Raw Materials… More

(Emphasis mine.)

What struck me is this whole issue of everyone laughing for no reason, a point that is picked up again later in the article. To me, that’s a little microcosm of everything that’s going on in the kashrut industry. Everyone is smiling and chuckling and looking jolly and pious, but no one really knows what’s happening.

Wow,
The conference was something incredible. I feel so blessed to be a part of this growing community and movement, and I thank those of you who joined us at Asilomar and contributed in a myriad ways to the 3rd annual Food conference. I truly look forward to witness how we all take the next steps forward, through personal choices, communal activity, public policy outreach, the development of new educational opportunities, and ….

At the conference, I was given the honor of sharing my vision for the New Jewish Food Movement, and I thought I would also share it here. So, I have shared those words below. I hope you might get some inspiration from my vision, but more importantly, I hope you will be inspired to think of how your vision fits into Hazon’s work, and even share your vision here on JCarrot.

Happy New Year
zelig

——– (more below the jump) ——–

A few months back on The Jew & The Carrot, we posted about an amazing Israeli social justice organization called Bema’aglei Tzedek, which created an ethical seal for restaurants called Tav Chevrati (social seal).  The seal ensures that the restaurant provides basic rights to workers and also basic accessibility to customers with physical disabilities.  Started only a few years ago, the Tav Chevrati seal is now on a third of all restaurants in Jerusalem, and is expanding to Tel Aviv and other cities.

I recently had a chance to speak with Bema’aglei Tzedek’s Executive Director, Dyonna Ginsburg (pictured at left) and here her thoughts on the socio-economic gaps in Israeli society, the power of public pressure on the Israeli government, and why she only eats in restaurants with the Tav Chevrati seal.

Enjoy the interview, below the jump!

Thanks to Keith Stewart for this guest post. Keith is a writer and farmer in the Hudson Valley. He owns and manages Keith’s Farm, a certified organic farm and CSA. He’s the author of It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life. You can find him at the Union Square Green Market in New York City, where he sells his produce (both legible and edible) on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

These days heirlooms are all the rage. Especially, heirloom tomatoes. At our Union Square Greenmarket stand in Manhattan, this past summer, Brandywines, Cherokee Purples and Striped Germans sold for 50% more than the regular hybrid tomatoes that we also grow. Customers seemed eager to buy our heirlooms, which certainly do taste good (and, incidentally, are more finicky to grow and difficult to transport), but I often wondered if they knew just what it was they were forking out that extra cash for. Here’s a breakdown of the three types of seeds farmers use and what the differences are between them.

I get a little nostalgic around election season – I guess it’s hard to get over your “first time” (voting, of course).  Born in 1982, I was one of those teenagers who was lucky enough to turn 18 the year of a presidential race.  Of course, it happened to be the Bush/Gore, Florida, hanging chad, Jewish grandmothers accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan debacle, so maybe I wasn’t really all that lucky.

Still, I remember campus being ignited with an electric charge of excitement in the weeks before the race.  Everyone talked hopefully about the candidates and the future.  A slew speakers stormed campus to give ostensibly non-partisan speeches – but it was pretty clear where Gloria Steinam, Winona LaDuke (Ralph Nader’s running mate), and Saul Williams stood on the issues  And signs urging voters to “vote YES on 9″ or “vote NO on 12″ plastered every square inch of wall surface in the hopes that, even if people couldn’t exactly remember what “9″ stood for, their Pavlovian response would kick in on voting day.

This year, California voters have the chance to “vote YES or NO” on animal rights.  Proposition 2 – an animal rights ballot measure – would free farm animals (namely chickens, sows, and veal cattle) from the restrictive cages many of them live in now on factory farms.  But not everyone thinks this is such a great idea.

More and two videos on Prop 2, below the jump.

Over the next four weeks, Jews will be sitting down to together to more celebratory meals in succession than they likely do the entire rest of the year.  Many of those meals will be kosher, and many more will include meat as either a main or side course – or both.  Meanwhile, Jewish people around the country are also beginning to think differently about the meat that they eat, in light of the immigration raid on the kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors earlier this year, and of all the transgressions related to the conventional meat industry (CAFOs, hormones and antibiotics, worker abuse, etc).  For some people, the easiest response is to go vegetarian.  But for people who choose not to go the veggie route, what are the options?

We asked some of the leading voices of the New Jewish food movement to answer the question:  “If I choose to eat meat over the high holidays, what is the number one thing I should consider?”

Read their responses below – and share your own.

Even as we approach Tisha B’Av and the broken, darkness this time symbolizes, a bright light is shining in our food world.

Monsanto has finally admitted defeat in a 20-year struggle to gain acceptance of its genetically engineered milk hormone, rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBST, recombinant bovine somatropin – trade name Posilac). Yesterday, Monsanto publicly gave up in the ‘milk wars,” when it announced that it was “pursuing a divestiture of its dairy product, POSILAC(R) bovine somatotropin, in the upcoming months.”

In 1994, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of Monsanto’s controversial rBGH, but gave dairies the right to label milk produced without rBGH as rBGH-free. Since its approval in 1994, rBGH has been at the center of controversy.