It seems my earlier pessimism about the threatened value added tax (VAT) on fruits and vegetables was premature. For now, fruit and vegetables will remain tax-free commodities in Israel.

 Was it concern for our health or the state of Israeli agriculture that prompted this turn-around? Not exactly. The Byzantine ins and outs of coalition politics are what saved the day. The Shas religious party, a member of the governing coalition, decided to press the issue, and they refused to accept the offered compromise in which the tax would start low and gradually increase over several years. 

Yesterday was the first day (finally!) of my local farmers’ market here in NJ, and I’ll admit I went a bit fruit happy, coming home loaded with local blueberries, strawberries, and cherries. It took some detective work to figure out what things were not local–the farmer may be Pennsylvania Dutch but those sure aren’t local peaches, not yet. I’m much stricter about eating fruit locally and seasonally than I am vegetables. I can go months without fresh berries or stone fruit, hoping that it counts towards my balanced diet if I eat many servings of fruit in the summer and far fewer in the winter. Sure, there are days towards late February when I am sick of citrus fruit, grapes, and bananas, and look longingly towards the plums flown in from California. But in my heart, I know they will disappoint me.

Rte. 44 is a two-lane rural road more or less in the center of Israel. Coming from Ramla, right before the community of Karme Yosef, sits a square building faced in limestone set back from the road. A modest sign identifies it as Melo Hatene. (The name loosely translates as The Overflowing Cornucopia.) I had passed the building more than once, but had not really given more than a moment’s thought to what this structure – too classy to be a packing shed – was doing in the middle of an agricultural field. It was my sister, stopping to explore while on a bike ride, who discovered what was inside and brought us there.

In the daily inundation of political scandal, violence, government infighting and general economic and social mayhem that we Israelis can’t seem to live without (judging by our consumption of news media), a proposed new tax on fruits and vegetables has garnered little public outcry. 

Until now, fruits and vegetables have been exempt from the 16.5% value-added tax (v.a.t.) placed on nearly every other consumer item. But foods like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and eggplant had been considered basic daily necessities, like bread and milk (both of which are still price-controlled). 

This optimistic article points to an issue felt acutely in “inner cities” around the country: a lack of fresh produce being sold at market.  This problem was controversially or famously addressed in my city by the New York City Green Cart initiative but this certainly hasn’t solved it and plenty of other cities have the same issues (NYC isn’t even mentioned in the article, though LA, Newark and Detroit are, and the article is mainly about Chicago.)  Could it be that looking to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s as examples, however, are more detrimental than good?  As big a supporter of organics as I am, I think encouraging people to eat “conventional” produce would be a big boon over Mickey-D’s and would be a lot cheaper and easier than the “greenest” route.  Even frozen produce makes a nice, healthy, easy and inexpensive meal most of the time.

On Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah, we also celebrate the offering of the first fruits in the Temple, the bikurim.

The offering was a supremely humble gesture: the fruits which form first on a tree are often smaller, less perfect, only hinting at the abundance to follow. In ancient Israel, these offerings were gussied up, surrounded by the more beautiful fruit which grew later, brought sometimes in gold baskets, accompanied by flutes, processions. All the trappings of art and wealth were used to beautify the offering. Yet without the small, perhaps wrinkled fruit of the bikurim, there could be no offering.

It was at this moment of offering that the Torah teaches us to recite the story of redemption, the same one we now read in our Passover haggadah. The story was also a garland, as it were, for the bikurim offering, connecting our history to the very physical redemption of another spring and another growing season.

Among the numerous food-based scares that have surfaced lately (Salmonella from Spinach! And peanuts! And pistachios! Mercury in HFCS!), this one takes on a different flavor:  An infiltration of Israeli produce into enemy territory?!?

Fear and outrage spread recently in Tehran after Iranian authorities discovered that certain citrus fruit being sold there were marked as Israeli-grown Jaffa Sweeties.  Never heard of the Jaffa Sweetie? Click here to learn more.  Basically, It’s a deliciously sweet white grapefruit-and-pomelo hybrid, and is considered a citrus delicacy of sorts in some circles.

However, possessing, selling and certainly eating Israeli fruit in Iran is apparently assur (prohibited).  According to the BBC News, Hossen Safaie, the head of the Tehran Fruit & Vegetable Distribution center, was outraged at the presence of the fruit in his city and said his organization “will not allow those who want to make a profit ignore the Iranian citizens’ religious and revolutionary learning”. Ouch.

But wait…the saga continues with an interesting twist! Read more after the jump…

So you’re probably wondering why I’ve posted a picture of a bag full of strawberries (some really beautiful ones) to begin this blog post…  It all started over a year ago when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I’m a huge fan of her writing in general and really liked the book.  At that time I was a bit tied into the sustainable food world but I’d say that book (along with Omivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food) really made it click for me.

There were a few things from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that stuck with me.  The first is the chapter about the turkeys and the second relates to farmer’s markets and sustainability.  I remember her buying tomatoes in large quantities at the end of the season and canning them for winter.  She goes on to say that this is helpful to the farmer since he/she needs to get rid of produce that will go bad and will allow you to have a wider variety of food throughout the year while still eating locally.  In California the growing seasons are longer and we’ll probably have berries long into the fall but recently I started thinking of doing my own version of this.

I’ve never canned anything before, last summer we went strawberry picking and tried our hands at making jam and I think that’s about as far as I’ll get.

While reading Eli Margulies’ recent recipe for poached pears using apple juice, I was reminded of my favourite apple juices. For our readers in England, this is a reminder of two delicious products they may already know about. And for our other readers, here is something you’ve probably never heard of, let alone even tasted. These juices are something I always look forward to drinking whenever I visit the UK. Even if they were exported (and I’m not sure they are: the food miles would be fearsome and the quality might suffer significantly!) there’s something about English apples that always makes me delighted to come back to the UK. So first, here are some thoughts on apples in general, in the US and the UK; for the juice recommendations, you’ll have to read to the end.

Loquats (“shesek” in Hebrew) are recent newcomers to the Middle East: Their native home is China. But just as the almond trees in Israel always seem to bloom right on cue on Tu B’Shevat, the first fruits on my loquat tree always ripen just before the Seder.

Figs, grapes, pomegranates and dates are about the only truly native Israeli fruits. Jaffa oranges, those mainstays of Israeli export, were brought by earlier travelers and settlers; and sabras, the prickly pears whose name is synonymous with native Israelis, are not in the least indigenous. In other words, the fruits we claim as our own are really as far-flung in origin as the immigrants and children of immigrants who make up Israel’s population.

Thanks to Rabbi Chai Levy, Associate Rabbi at Congregation Kol Shofar in Marin County, CA for this great guest post.  Rabbi Levy writes a monthly Torah column in J magazine, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Jewish weekly.

What’s charoset like at your seder table? I grew up with the Ashkenazi recipe of chopped apples, nuts, and wine. Maybe your version is the Yemenite paste of dates and figs, or perhaps your family is Persian or Sephardic, and you use ginger or apricots.

We’ve all learned that charoset symbolizes the mortar that we used in building for Pharaoh while enslaved in Egypt. But that’s only half the explanation of charoset. After all, whatever your family’s recipe, didn’t you also learn to make it sweet and delicious?

The recipe for charoset is found not only in Passover cookbooks, but in the Talmud! Several rabbinic opinions are offered to explain how and why charoset is made. (Pesachim 116a) Rabbi Yochanan offers the reason for the texture:  it’s a remembrance of the clay used to make bricks, and so it must be pressed like clay. Rabbi Levi, however, gives a different reason for the ingredients: it’s a remembrance of the apple. What apple, you ask? Rashi explains in his commentary: the apple tree under which the Israelite women gave birth to their children, as it is written in the Song of Songs, “Under the apple tree, I aroused you. There your mother conceived you, there the one who conceived you, gave birth to you.” (Song of Songs 8:5)

Pesach is the holiday of spring. It’s not only the hard-boiled eggs on the Seder plate that remind us of new beginnings in this season. The parsley, though it’s supposed to be bitter, has always seemed to me to embody the new green sprouting from the earth. Pesach also marks the beginning of the Omer – the countdown to the wheat harvest in late spring/early summer.

Just before Pesach, then, is a great time to visit the open market – the “shuk” – to see what fruits and vegetables are in season, and decide which will be gracing our Pesach table. The shuk nearest kibbutz Gezer is in Ramla. It’s not exactly on the tourist track, but it’s one of the best, and on Wednesdays and Fridays it’s bustling with people from all over and from every walk of life.

Growing up, dried fruits were always a background food, something on the table that was never really meant to be eaten, unless you were a senior citizen. Their untouchable status might have had something to do with their reputation as an antidote for the withering effects of all that matzo on one’s gastrointestinal system. No matter how graciously they were laid out on how elegant a platter, they were often still there, all alone on a plate, long, long after the afikomen had been found. Sometimes when cleaning out the pantry we would discover something resembling a deceased mutant rodent, last year’s leftover dried fruits. Then, the California Dancing Raisins arrived, and dried fruit burst into my lifestyle as a hip purveyor of my emergent adult identity – an organic vegetarian who eschewed cultural materialism.

One of the central themes of Purim is the acknowledgment that the order the we treasure in our lives is as precarious a blessing as any we can imagine. The entire holiday features numerous inversions of that order – from the myriad role revearsals in the Book of Esther to the costumes and hidden identities that feature in the story and in our celebrations. These role reversals and moments of revelatory chaos remind us that the universe is not completely under our control – a message even more crucial in our day when we have attempted to subdue the very forces of nature to fulfill our every whim.

Here, then, is a fun and unique way to embrace the topsy-turvy world of Purim through our tastebuds!