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.
You are invited to apply for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food! Brought to you by Hazon and the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, this tour will not be a culinary Tour of Israeli gastronomy (though there will amazing eating). Instead, this one-of-a-kind mission will highlight developments in Israel towards more sustainable food production and consumption, including:
Just a strange little pick me up for all you Jew and the Carrot readers out there. This Huffington Post story about a “bull” wandering into an Irish supermarket demonstrates irony just delightfully, yes? My favorite part is how they keep referring to it as a bull though it is, at best, about six months old and totally freaked out. Well, enjoy.
Three weeks ago, the lamb stand I work for got a new product. Eugene, the usually tactiturn farmer (except on his blog), was telling everyone who’d listen that lamb belly was the new pork belly; Frank Bruni or Mark Bittman, or some big shot at the New York Times, had said so. Good news for us. We were selling lamb bacon.
My (lovely) mother is a proper woman. It was a rare meal when we were allowed to place a food container directly on the table. For the most part we would decant the mustard or horseradish into a small bowl and take from that. In many areas I have followed in my mom’s footsteps, I too do not like putting cereal boxes and drink cartons on the table but that is because it bothers my aesthetic senses (i.e. they get in the way when they clutter a small kitchen table) and I want to shield my children against obnoxious marketing and advertising.Yet, unlike my mom I have had to cut corners and fallen a couple of rungs on the proper-ness ladder. By child number two, I stopped making my own tomato sauce and with child number three the days of homemade pie crusts were over.
A few months ago, the Times had an article that my mom cut out and sent to me about money saving measures one could take in the kitchen. I didn’t find it all that earth shattering but one thing it said was that sticking a few soup veggies in a pot is always better then store bought consomme. I love to cook but I also need time saving measures. Osem’s soup mixes, which can be found in most kosher food sections, are tasty and can offer that je ne sais quoi to rice dishes, cholents, and of course soups. In the past year Osem came out with a new chicken consomme that boasts all natural ingredients. Perhaps this new version can help us save time in the kitchen and will offer a healthier alternative to the original. Let’s see:
Now that Purim has passed (unless you live in Yerushalaim or another walled city and celebrate Shushan Purim),the countdown begins.There is a full lunar month between Purim (the 14th of Adar) and Pesach (the 14th of Nissan). Which really isn’t very much time at all, especially when you’ve just been inundated with major chametz!Prior to Pesach, a Jewish home must be free of chametz. So, ideally that means you get rid of all your chametz.Uh-oh. Couldn’t resist that humungous tub of pretzels that was on sale at Costco the week before Pesach? Rest assured, the Rabbis have you covered. You can “sell” your chametz to a non-Jew for the duration of the holiday, keep it in a cabinet labeled “off limits” and “buy it back” when the holiday is over. I realize that sounds extraordinarily strange, but it saves you from say, having to toss a whole bunch of cookies. (Click here to learn more about selling your chametz-on line!)
“Oh, there’s no blue cheese in it. We just call it blue cheese,” the diner waiter informed my mother with a perfectly straight face. It’s been a running joke in my family ever since.
Purim offers the opportunity to contemplate costumes in many form – including disguised food, which vegetarians may encounter more than others. As an omnivore, I prefer the straight-up veggie offerings: beans, nuts, legumes, and oh, vegetables, perhaps. However, to feed my vegetarian partner, the fake sausages and other meat substitutes find their way onto my grocery list with regularity. Why this compulsion for fake meat products? It could be to add some variety to a vegetarian diet. (But, think of all the meat eaters who eat only chicken all the time. Where is the variety in that?) It could be the belief that someone who doesn’t eat meat will miss it, and must therefore want these poor substitutes.
Over at Mixed Multitudes we’ve been running a Jewish food tournament based on March Madness for the past few weeks, and we’re down to the final four. Right now it’s latkes vs. brisket, and early next week we’ll see Challah vs. lox and bagels before the championship matchup. I’m so excited!
I encourage you to head over and vote for your favorite, but Jeremy, who’s running the tourney, wants to make it very clear that we’re voting on which is the most Jewish food, not the food we like best. Since you can get latkes at any diner, to me they don’t scream Jew, but hey, vote however you like. Cast your ballot!
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)
Deciding what to eat for lunch can be a challenge – but deciding what hundreds (or thousands) of other people should eat for lunch is decidedly harder. But such is the charge for the many hospitals, schools, and other institutions across the country that feed people, en masse, on a daily basis.
In the past few years, a growing handful of institutions (e.g. Yale University and Kaiser Permanente) have attempted to bring institutional food away from Lunch Lady Land – sourcing produce from local farms, offering less junk food in favor of more fruits & veggies, increasing the number of homemade meals (vs. “heat-n-serve” foods) etc. The Jewish community has jumped on the institutional food reform bandwagon too as synagogues, day schools and JCCs across the country begin to question their dependence on Styrofoam coffee cups and greasy kosher pizza.
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.
Thanks to David Elcott for this guest post, in conjunction with COEJL’s blog, To Till & To Tend. David boldly ripped up his lawn last spring to make room for a small farm in his suburban front yard. This is his third and final post of the season, where he takes stock in the experience. For the back story, check out his first and second post.
Who would have imagined that from June until the middle of October, we would only be eating vegetables from our own garden: multi-colored summer squash souflee and barbecued okra, leeks and parsnips and carrots in a cabbage soup, eggplants in abundance, stuffed Napa cabbage, baby spinach and enough spicy greens and snap peas to feed an army, a cherry tomato tartine in gold, red, yellow and orange, a banquet of roasted fingerling potatoes, beans that never stopped giving, all flavored with garden herbs.
I prepared cold sweet cucumber soups with the added tartness of rhubarb and ate beets for the first time as part of a root vegetable medley. We decorated our salads with nasturtium and zucchini flowers. And corn, corn, corn – much of which never made it to the kitchen but eaten fresh off the stalk. A time for rejoicing indeed!
Over the last 30 years, Americans have grown accustom to food being (falsely) cheap and abundant – so the recent sticker price hikes have likely come as a shock. But one doesn’t have to look very far into the past to find other times in our country’s history when food was neither cheap, nor abundant.My 85-year old father, for example, grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. While he does not recall ever feeling overwhelmingly hungry (his father, a minister, was often paid in eggs and other food, and his mother was known for making a chicken stretch in twenty ways), he does remember the backyard garden his family relied on for a substantial portion of their fruits, vegetables, and other food.
If ever there was a day for foodies to curl up with a mug of fair trade coffee and the newspaper, today’s the day. The New York Times Magazine’s (first ever, I believe) Food Issue hit stands this morning, so if you haven’t already scanned the whole thing online, find yourself a comfortable chair and a couple of hours to savor it the way papers were originally intended to be read.There’s a LOT of good stuff inside – enough to be slightly overwhelming. So before you dig in, take a look at The Jew & The Carrot’s recommendations on what to read, skim, and skip. Get the most out of the magazine and still have some daylight left to play. Below the jump!
