An article in the New York Times this morning reported that a truce has been made between factory farmers and animal rights activists in Ohio.  Much of the discussion is focused on caging methods for chickens.

According to the article:

Hoping to avoid a divisive November referendum that some farmers feared they would lose, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio urged farm leaders to negotiate with opponents, led by the Humane Society of the United States. After secret negotiations, the sides agreed to bar new construction of egg farms that pack birds in cages, and to phase out the tight caging of pregnant sows within 15 years and of veal calves by 2017.

While the agreement does not require existing egg farms to change their caging methods – one farm packs six or seven hens in cages about the size of an open newspaper – it does provide some measure of hope for proponents of cage-free egg production.

What seemed most striking from the article, though, is that the agreement was made primarily because the Governor of Ohio leaned on farmers out of fear that a public referendum on the issue would backfire.  That means that consumers are getting the attention of politicians on the issue of factory farming (at least in states like California and Ohio that have referendums).

Of course, the issue now will be whether consumers will be willing to pay for the increase in cost per egg at the grocery store that is likely to come from these kinds of state-by-state changes in the way eggs are harvested.  If not, they may want to look into getting their own chicken coop.

Trans fats,�an invention of the 20th century, permitted the development of such synthetic�food-like products as margarine and coffee whiteners.� Neither of these products�existed around the time my great-grandparents caught their first sight of the Statue of Liberty.� Nevertheless, as a result of focused, sustained, and wildly successful marketing campaigns to gain their recognition and acceptance,�they became an integral part of what is now considered �traditional� kosher cooking.� In 1912, for example, after Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati launched a nationwide campaign for Crisco, its new vegetable shortening,�it enlisted the support of American orthodox rabbis, notably Rabbi Moshe Zevulun Margolies (the �Ramaz�) of New York, to endorse Crisco as ritually pure.� P&G advertised that �the Hebrew Race had been waiting for 4,000 years� for a solution to its shortening problems.� Mazola worked with the Hebrew Ladies� Aid Society in Fargo, ND, to teach interested parties how to use their product, and made contributions to the local women�s burial society for every unit sold.� Other examples abound.

I went to my local supermarket to check out the ingredients in�pareve margarine and coffee whitener.� Mother�s lists �liquid and partially hydrogenated soybean oil� first. �Fleischmann�s lists partially hydrogenated soybean oil second, after liquid corn oil.��The first three ingredients in original Coffee-Rich are, in order,�water, corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oil.� The first three ingredients in fat-free Coffee-Rich are, curiously, identical.� �Partially hydrogenated� means trans fats.

What’s wrong with trans fats?� The problems are numerous, diverse, and well established.� Trans fats cause heart disease.� They increase insulin resistance, which causes diabetes.� Trans fats decrease good cholesterol and increase bad cholesterol. �They suppress the immune response, interfere with reproduction, and decrease the nutritional quality of milk.� They alter the properties of cell membranes.� They enhance deposition of abdominal fat.� In a famous study of 85,000 women conducted by Harvard University,�individuals with heart disease were found to have eaten significantly higher amounts of trans fats.

Trans fats have been banned in other countries, and in several cities throughout the U.S., but they have yet to be banned across our nation.� What the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has mandated is that food containing less than � gram of trans fat per serving may be advertised as�”trans-fat free.”� That�s not good enough.� In the case of Coffee-Rich, a serving is 1 tablespoon.� This morning I felt like making my�coffee extra light, so I put 4 tablespoons, or � cup, of milk into�the mug.� If I had used Coffee-Rich, that would have added up to almost 2 grams of trans fat.� Just for the first cup.� So it would be easy, on any given day, to consume quite a bit of trans fat solely from trans-fat-free food.� That�s a problem.

What are our alternatives?� First and foremost, skip the coffee whitener.� Drink your coffee black, or choose tea with honey or lemon.� Try coconut, almond, soy, or rice milk if you�d like.� Bake pareve as our foremothers did for a thousand years, with coconut oil, which stays solid below 75 degrees Fahrenheit.� Decline to make�recipes that call for pareve margarine.� Don’t use it in place of butter; make different recipes.� We vote every time a bar code passes over a scanner, so don�t buy margarine or coffee whitener for your home, office, or synagogue.� There is no place for synthetic trans fats in a healthy community.

The affects of our crazy winter weather are not passed us yet. Generally, we think of bad weather as leading to increases in the prices of food.  Examples include, damaged oranges when the temperatures drop below freezing or farmers having to charge more since, they had to remove 3 feet of snow from their potato crops. But this time, the cold winter is going to make your produce cheaper.

Florida’s cold weather caused a delay in the harvest date for Florida’s strawberries. The delay caused Florida and California to strawberries to hit the markets at the same time. Last week, 80 million pounds of strawberries were picked – a new record for this time of year. In 2009, a pound of strawberries cost $3.49, while this year strawberries will go for $1.25 per pound.

I don’t have any go to strawberry recipes, but since the high is over 90 degrees in Washington, D.C. today, I have been researching frozen fruit cup recipes. I think I am going to make this one from Cooks Recipes.

1 (6-ounce) can frozen concentrated lemonade
1 (6-ounce) can frozen concentrated orange juice
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup granulated sugar
8 ounces fresh or frozen strawberries
3 bananas, peeled and sliced
1 (8-ounce) can pineapple chunks

Combine lemonade, orange juice, water and sugar in a large bowl. Add strawberries, bananas and pineapple.
Spoon into individual serving dishes.
Freeze for at least 1 hour before serving.

Check out this great article in the L.A. Times about the Progressive Jewish Alliance organizing a tour of food deserts in Los Angeles. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Jewish community groups aim to broaden the growing local and national campaigns to attract more supermarkets to poor neighborhoods, where limited access to healthful food has been linked to obesity, diabetes and other diseases. Programs are sprouting up in Louisiana, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

Read more here.

Recently I had the chance to speak with Noah Alper, founder of the eponymous Noah’s Bagels.  Noah, who sold Noah’s Bagels in 1999, has been in the food business since the 1970s, when he started Bread and Circus, the East Coast natural food chain (bought by Whole Foods in 1992).  He’s kept kosher since the early 1990s, and at one point Noah’s Bagels was the largest kosher retailer in the country.  (For those on the prowl, there’s still one kosher Noah’s Bagels, in Seattle.)  Nowadays, he’s committed to preaching the gospel of socially responsible business practices, and to that end he’s come out with a book called Business Mensch that aims to connect Jewish principles to good business practices and convince business leaders that community values are good for their bottom line.  Basically, it’s a Jewish business handbook for the post-Madoff world.  Noah and I chatted about how the food movement has changed since his days as a natural foods grocer, how the Hazon food conference stoked his interest in eco-kashrut and why the Bay Area is a foodie mecca.

Q: What drove your interest in going into the food business?

Noah Alper: My father was a manufacturer’s representative for main brand food brands in the New England area, so I grew up with it as a kid.  It was a kind of logical transition.

Q: And how did you become interested in natural foods?

N.A.: In the early 70s, the natural food movement was just beginning, and my former wife was very interested in natural foods.  Through her I got an understanding that this was something important.  In those days, it wasn’t so much of a sustainability issue, but it was more about health, getting rid of processed foods and what alternatives were available.  There were also almost no natural food stores, so it interested me as a business opportunity.

Q: How has the food movement and the public’s interest in organic and sustainable food changed since you opened Bread and Circus?

N.A.: When we were getting started, brands like Celestial Seasonings and Tom’s of Maine were just beginning.  Now they’re mainstream American items, as are natural food stores themselves.  Natural food went from Ma and Pa stores to a Whole Foods in every neighborhood across America.  It’s like a whole generation of people came to see the importance of eating natural foods and leading a healthy lifestyle.  Probably around the early turn of the century, I saw the sustainability issue becoming more important.  I think that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie was a major influencer in people’s understanding of their impact on the earth.  The ecological movement kind of merged with the health movement, and also with the gourmet movement, which I was also involved in the late 80s.  For different reasons, Americans were going to fresh ingredient meals, partially for taste and aesthetic reasons, and that merged in with the natural foods movement as well. 

Q: Why did you choose to open Noah’s Bagels as a kosher chain?  Did it add complications from a business perspective? 

N.A.: It was about making a whole community feel comfortable eating there. It had a perception amongst the population at large that there was a higher level of inspection, and we attracted kosher eaters, travelers, and so forth who were drawn to the restaurant because it was kosher. There were complications in certifying the stores, but most of the ingredients, like bagels and lox, are kosher anyway.  We also had an image and reputation, by closing for Passover and keeping kosher, that this was authentic, this was the real deal. It was good for business. 

Q: Do you feel that your kosher practice has an ethical as well as a ritual meaning?

N.A.: I think it should, and I think that things like Magen Tzedek [the Conservative movement’s forthcoming eco-kosher hekhsher] and these new movements are trying to make that connection, which I don’t think has typically been made.  I’ve long felt that way regarding unhealthful ingredients.  They may be within the letter of the law, but they’re certainly not in the spirit of the law, which should be offering healthy food that is kosher.  Not to mention recent discussions about fair trade and ethical treatment of workers.  We’re getting beyond the previous narrow definition that’s just about being ritually correct. 

Q: As a businessman, do you think that Magen Tzedek will be successful in attracting producers to pay for certification?

N.A.: I think on the consumer end of it, there’s a big demand and interest.  On the part of the producers, I think they have to be convinced that it’s important enough for their clientele to spend the money.  I think it’ll take some time, but I think it will catch on.   You’re already seeing fair trade coffee being a gold standard now.  I don’t see why it shouldn’t be across the board in the food milieu.  I think it will be up to Magen Tzedek or whoever leads to pack to demonstrate there’s enough interest on the part of the consumer to make the manufacturer interested.  It’s up to anyone who’s going to do this to appeal to the non-Jewish audience as well.  Something like 70 percent or more of people who buy kosher are not Jewish.  It’s because they’re vegetarians or they eat halal or they think there’s a higher level of inspection, and I think likewise Magen Tzedek has to make that case to the manufacturer at large.

Q: How long have you lived in the Bay Area?  Why do you think this area is so energetic about food issues? 

N.A.: I’ve lived here for 25 years.  We’re so close to the food source here, many, many food sources.  I don’t know what percentage of the country the Central Valley feeds in terms of fruits and vegetables, but I have to believe in the winter it’s pushing the 80 percent level.  I think the other thing is the Bay Area has always been a nexus of fresh ideas and new ideas that have socially redeemable values at the core of it, from civil rights to gay rights to 60s antiwar stuff.  Again and again and again, California leads the way.  Also, in the late 80s the whole gourmet thing started in San Francisco.  You get all of those things impacting one another and you come up with the origins of new movements.

 For more about Noah Alper and his book, Business Mensch, go to his website, www.businessmensch.net.

The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby.  Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH.  “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.

So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes.  As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh.  I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda.  I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way.  The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes.  But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film.  If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.

Green Screens and Independents Night Presents
FRESH
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 6:30 p.m.

Director Ana Sofia Joanes will join David Haight, New York Director of American Farmland Trust; Hudson Valley Farmer Cheryl Rogowski (winner of a 2004 MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant) and moderator Jen Small of AFT and Flying Pigs Farm for a discussion and reception following the screening at Lincoln Center 70 W 63RD St New York, NY 10023

And if you don’t find yourself in NYC this Tuesday, you can click here to find a screening near you.  Or you can also host your own screening, for more information click here or check out their website www.freshthemovie.com

My dad has strong memories of his mother’s chicken soup: the aroma, the flavor, and the chicken feet at the bottom of the bowl. He especially liked biting into the pads of the feet, which were nice and chewy.

Like many ethnic cuisines that evolve at least in part out of deprivation, Jewish food has long mined the more interesting parts of the animal (think tongue). But though the tip-to-tail movement has made offal, bone marrow and pork belly trendy, I don’t know any Jewish cooks these days that serve chicken feet in their soup. I set out to dip a toe into the world of off-cuts by buying a bag of beef bones at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market in San Francisco.

I admit this was a conservative step: no head cheese for me yet. But I had a modest goal. I often cook soup and rice dishes that call for stock, and I’d gotten annoyed by how expensive the store-bought varieties are—four dollars at my local market for four measly cups. My cooking is mostly vegetarian, but on the couple of occasions that I’ve served chicken, I boiled up the bones with carrots and onion and got large pots of the most delicious soup base I’ve ever tasted. (Once, a friend roasted a turkey and gave me the carcass. I was thrilled.) I was looking for a cheap shortcut to homemade stock that would make use of what might otherwise be discarded and wouldn’t require me to either buy a whole chicken or clean out the produce section of my corner market. I contemplated making vegetable stock, which is what I normally buy, but the recipes I’ve seen call for pre-roasting a great variety of vegetables in order to get a full flavor, and it seemed like a lot of trouble and expense. So on a beautiful Saturday at my local farmer’s market, I asked the butcher (of grass-fed and pastured meats) if he had any leftover bones.

I wasn’t expecting him to charge me for them. Bones seemed like the kind of thing that should be a freebie. But in the conscientious foodie heaven that is a San Francisco farmer’s market, I suppose I wasn’t the first with this idea, and the butcher is certainly entitled to charge for his products. I paid a little over three bucks for a pound of beef bones.

A quick roast and three hours of stovetop bubbling later, that three bucks yielded me at least three times what I would get from a container of store-bought stock. Though it didn’t have the heavenly delicate flavor of my homemade chicken stock (which may have to do with my reluctance to let the broth reduce too much, though I hate to see all that goodness boil away), it made a flavorful base and over the course of a week made its way into a stew, tomatillo salsa, a Turkish spinach and dill dish and Indian eggplant bharta. I finished it off in a catch-all, empty-out-the-fridge vegetable soup.

Though I’ll probably play around with the recipe, my beef stock experiment gave me exactly what I was looking for: a cheap, easily-prepared kitchen staple made from just a few ingredients. And if I get tired of stock, I can try what the butcher recommended: roast the bones and spread the marrow on toast.

Here is the stock recipe I used, adapted from Donna Hay’s cookbook, New Food Fast:

[First, a couple of caveats: the original recipe calls for six pounds of bones in 10 liters of water (don’t even ask me to convert). I didn’t measure the water and only used one pound of bones because I’m cheap. I’ve similarly skimped on chicken broth and it has turned out wonderfully, but you might want to experiment with more bones for a richer flavor. Also, almost every stock recipe I’ve seen calls for celery, which I refuse to buy because I detest it and the leftovers rot in my fridge.]  Okay, onward:

1 pound beef bones
1 ½ cups dry red wine
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
8 black peppercorns
4 stalks parsley
2 bay leaves

Preheat oven to 400. Put the bones in a baking dish and brush them with oil, then roast for 30 minutes. Then add the onions and carrots to the dish and continue to bake for another half hour. Take the bones and vegetables out of the oven and transfer them to the largest pot you own. Fill the pot with water almost to the top (leaving room for it to bubble), and bring it to a simmer. Then add the wine, peppercorns, parsley and bay leaves and keep the pot at a low simmer for three hours. During this time, you can alternately cover and uncover the pot to control how much the stock reduces. (I left it covered for about half of the time). The more it reduces, the more concentrated the flavor will be, but you will have less to show for it in the end. Check occasionally to see if any scum has accumulated at the surface of the stock, and if so, skim it off with a spoon. When it’s done cooking, strain and allow stock to cool. Lasts several days in the fridge (that’s the official line, but I used it for a full week), and freezes excellently.

I keep my kosher salt in an Israeli style pottery canister with a spring locked lid. It was a mishloach manos from my synagogue one Purim. I always feel like a kitchen alchemist when I reach for it.

Recently I was lunching with a business colleague in a casual Beverly Hills restaurant whose menu made a smug reference to its use of imported fleur de sel. My colleague said she’d been given some as a gift and it tasted wonderful.

The discussion rattled some of my assumptions about this elemental ingredient.  Is hand-harvested French sea salt at $1.42 an ounce the best choice for the savvy gourmet in the kitchen? Or is it lunacy, when coarse kosher salt costs me 6 cents an ounce?

Why is kosher salt different from all others?

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Because salt never spoils or decays, it is symbolic of the eternal covenant between the Jewish people and God. As salt adds flavor to everything it comes in contact with, so our bond with God adds meaning to every moment of our lives. A Jewish table is considered to be an altar. Having salt on the table brings to mind the days of the Temple when salt was offered with every sacrifice. It’s a Jewish tradition to dip bread (not just challah and not just on Shabbat) in salt before eating it because of its symbolic link to God.
• Kosher salt is used to make meat kosher. Technically, it should be called “koshering salt.” It is shaken over the meat to help drain the blood from the meat as required by the laws of kashrut. Its coarser and more open grain stays on the surface of meat and draws out the blood more effectively than other types of salt.
• Kosher salt is raked during processing. This gives the grains of kosher salt a structure that looks like stacked cubes. The larger, more open surface area means that it can absorb more moisture than a regular, single cube-like grain of salt.
• Grains of kosher salt take up more space than an equal weight of regular table salt. This is because kosher salt grains are larger, irregular and vary in size. Many brands of kosher salt have usage tips for compensating for this. (Morton Coarse Kosher Salt recommends using its salt teaspoon for teaspoon to replace table salt up to amounts of a quarter of a cup.  If you’re using more than that, Morton recommends adding an extra tablespoon of coarse kosher salt per quarter cup of salt called for.)
• Kosher salt – like pickling salt – doesn’t have iodine in it. (Iodine is often added to salt to prevent goiters.) While the iodine doesn’t affect the flavor of canned or pickled foods, it causes the brine to become cloudy. Food pickled or brined in iodized salt has a grayish, unappetizing appearance.  (Pickling salt — in contrast to kosher salt — is fine grained to dissolve faster.)
• Kosher salt typically has no additives such as anticaking agents that keep salt from clumping in humidity. (Morton Coarse Kosher Salt, however, has ferrocyanide to prevent caking.) Such agents include tricalcium phosphate, calcium or magnesium carbonates, fatty acid salts (acid salts), magnesium oxide, silicon dioxide, calcium silicate, sodium aluminosilicate, and calcium aluminosilicate. There are growing concerns about the effects of aluminum compounds, although both the European Union and the U.S. FDA permit their use. (The lack of anticaking agents is another trait that kosher salt shares with pickling salt.)
• Kosher salt is not generally recommended for use in baking where there is only a small amount of wet or liquid ingredients being mixed with dry ones.  Without enough liquid, the coarser kosher salt won’t dissolve well. The resulting baked good may be gritty.
• The coarseness of kosher salt helps it cling to the rims of bowls or cocktail glasses.
• The flakiness of kosher salt grains helps it dissolve faster than table salt. This makes it easier to spread the salt through food more quickly during preparation.  This is one reason that chefs prefer cooking with kosher salt. Some chefs say it also has less after taste.
• It’s easier to see how much you’ve added to a dish when cooking because kosher salt is coarser.

The following recipe for preserved lemons is from the Morton Salt website, which offers an extensive list of recipes that use coarse kosher salt.

12 whole fresh lemons

3 tablespoons coarse kosher salt

1 tablespoon sugar

Slice 6 lemons and place in large bowl. Toss with Morton® Kosher Salt and sugar. Cover; set aside. Process (with hand-held or electric juice machine) remaining six (6) lemons into juice. Arrange sliced lemons in wide-mouth jar. Pour lemon juice over slices. Cover jar tightly and store in refrigerator at least 3 days before using. Turn jar upside down on occasion to incorporate flavors. Lemons can be stored in refrigerator for up to 6 weeks.

You can use 1 tablespoon finely chopped lemon slices in marinades for chicken, fish or vegetables, mixed with two cups cooked rice or couscous or on top of grilled vegetables. The preserved lemons can also be used in vinaigrettes for salads or other grilled vegetables.

Could my taste buds appreciate fleur de sel, hand harvested from the salt marshes around Guérande, Noirmoutier or Carmargue? I’m sure.  But when I cook, it’s the vegetable, fruit, chicken or fish I want to stand out — not the celebrity salt.

Oh dear readers, the Shmethicist has been AWOL for a while.  But now I’m back and better than ever (not unlike that pea soup that was even more delicious when we reheated the leftovers!).

Dear Shmethicist,

I am currently feeding a family of four (two adults, two toddlers) on a very small food budget ($150 a week).  A couple of years ago, my husband and I were able to buy all organic dairy and produce, and free range meats and eggs.  Now, it is a rarity.  Our costs are so tight, that even at $150 a week, we only cook nice dinners on Shabbat.

We have noticed a difference in how we feel and would absolutely love to do this again. We do not have our own yard in which to garden, which I would love to do someday.  There are several farms near here, but they are not open to the public (instead, they drive their goods to the farmers markets in the large city, which is over an hour away and which we cannot afford to drive to regularly, at $20 gas for the trip and $10 parking for the day).

With the only food access regular grocery stores and the occasional (every 2-3 months) Costco trip, how do you make the best (ethically and healthy) choices?  If you can only afford 1 organic thing out of your grocery trip, should it be eggs, poultry (free range is almost always too expensive ($10 for two breasts!), we have been buying frozen Foster Farms chicken breasts from Costco), beef (we rarely eat beef because of price, and when we do it is a pot roast on sale or from Costco), milk (this we always splurge on organic, because my kids love milk), or produce?

What are some money-saving tips at the grocery store (or at home, I can cook) that would allow for more organic and ethical purchases, and healthier meals for my family?

Signed,

Hungry for Help

Dear Hungry,

Healthy, ethical, and affordable—alas, not an occasion when even the most heartfelt rendition of “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad,” will do the trick.

I’m pretty sure that Meat Loaf wasn’t kosher, organic, or healthy, actually.

Your question raises a number of shmethical dilemmas.

For one thing, as I have noted elsewhere, we should buy organic produce not merely to protect ourselves from harmful chemical exposure (that’s just the pareve icing on the cake), but to protect farm workers and their families, since they are the ones suffering most from Big Agra’s long-term love affair with toxins.

For another thing, your question about how to prioritize organic purchases suggests that there is some logical way to make such a choice.  Which there isn’t.  Because really, no one knows for sure the long-term effects of choosing organic milk versus rBGH-free, non-organic milk, versus  “conventional milk” (that last phrase being one that only makes sense if you happen to believe there is something charmingly customary about farm animals being kept in confined spaces, fed who knows what, and pumped with antibiotics and artificial hormones).

Why doesn’t anyone know about the relative long-term effects?  That, at least, is a question I can answer:  Because the folks who (nominally) regulate our food supply haven’t cared to find out.

Which means pretty much the entire state of Nevada couldn’t lay accurate odds on what your one best organic purchase (milk? eggs? meat? produce?) might be.

Nevertheless, I am the Shmethicist, and as such, am ready to tell you what to do.  Or at least to suggest some ways to make choices that will have you and your family feeling good in as many ways as possible.

Although my meat-loving lover may not want to admit it, one of the best ways to dine ethically, healthily, and cheaply is to give up meat.  Doing it now, when your kids are too young to notice, can mean a lifetime of easier food choices for them.

I realize that “give up” sounds so, well, deprivational.  But actually healthy food choices don’t always have to involve sacrifices.

Or at least, not sacrifices that you’ll regret.  Last year, I got a little freaked about the chemical exposure inherent in eating canned foods.  So my would-be carnivore and I ate our way through the larder (note to self:  should I be calling that the Crisoer?) and then stopped buying canned foods.  With legumes as our at-home dietary staple, that’s meant a lot of time in the bulk aisle, scooping up dried beans.  Which I’ve now realized are cheaper, tastier, healthier (because we control the sodium content) and (because they’re shipped at a much lighter weight than cooked beans) better for the environment.

Besides bulk bin bean-ocentric begetarianism (oops, guess I went a little boverboard on the balliteration),you should also making your dreams of future gardening come true today.  If you fashion yourself a Che Guevarberg, try some guerilla gardening. If you’re not ready to join the underground just yet, you can always spy out some unused land in your community and ask the owner if you can have permission to turn it into a food plot; offering to share your bounty may sweeten the deal.  But if you, like your dear Shmethicist, have a chronically brown thumb (seriously, am I the only one who ever planted zucchini and produced not a single succulent squash?), log onto Local Harvest and check for a CSA near you.

Even if all you have is a sunny spot somewhere around (or inside) your house or apartment, try growing a few fresh herbs.  I’ve already managed to kill my basil and my mint (it’s a weed and still it is shriveling and dying . . . seriously, how bad a gardener can I be?), but even I have managed to sustain rosemary, thyme, sage, and parsley.  All of which make any home-cooked dish taste superdeluxe.

The more you cook from scratch, the more you can control cost and assure the healthiness of ingredients.  And as produce is plentiful this summer, you might try preserving things to enjoy year round.

Okay, let’s face it, I’m a Jewish girl from Long Island.  I’m about as likely to can vegetables as the Pope is to order from the Glatt kosher menu at CitiPark.  But I do know that the extension arm of the state university here in the Oregon Territories has great tips for home canning (which doesn’t even involve cans, good news for keeping the BPAs at bay), and thus I heartily pass that idea along, in case you need something to do while I proceed to belt out Side B of Bat Out of Hell, which has been catching in my head lo these many paragraphs.

Meanwhile, dear readers, any other tips for Hungry for Help?

Or other questions entirely for the Shmethicist?  Cause I’ve got a whole lot more 70s rock I’m itching to quote.

Tahina, the thick, brownish-gray paste of ground sesame seeds, is one of the latest foods to turn “gourmet” – at least in Israel. If supermarkets once sold only one brand of tahina, today it comes in squeeze bottles and glass jars with fancy labels; brands with Arabic on their labels proclaiming their “authenticity” vie with the all-Hebrew labels of the standard brand. (As far as I know, however, Melo Hatene is the only place to actually offer tahina tasting — the ultimate sign of a gourmet food.)

Once tahina was mostly found thinned to a watery sauce in the corner felafel stand or served in a neat glop in the center of a plate of hummus. At best, you could be served green tahina – a thick concoction mixed with chopped parsley – for dipping pita. Nowadays, the additions can run to chopped tomatoes, different herbs, and even (what else?) pesto.

Some hints for mixing the perfect tahina: