A few weeks ago, The Jew & The Carrot contributor, Ben Murane, posted about Ben & Jerry’s new Jewish themed ice-cream flavors, created in honor of B&J’s launch in Israel. (Choc-Eilat Chip, Wailing Walnut, and Moishmallow topped the list.)
Then we posted that our favorite fellas of frozen flavors (sorry, it’s Friday) not only endorsed Barack Obama, but created a special ice cream in his honor - Cherries for Change.
Feeling uninspired, the folks Slate next attempted to out-name the flavor, seeking submissions from their readers. The current front-runner: Yes Pecan! What do you think, did Slate beat Ben & Jerry’s at their own game? And, more importantly, what would you name it?
(Hat tip to Serious Eats)
One of the biggest criticisms of the organic, locavore, sustainable food etc. lifestyle is that it costs too damn much to be realistic. In other words, I may know that an organic red pepper is better for me and the world, but at $8/lb (versus $2/lb for the conventional pepper), I can’t always justify spending the extra money.
The problem is, the epicure in me gets a little twitchy if I don’t have a fairly regular influx of artisanal cheese or fresh, organic greens in the house. And these days my weekly feeding schedule includes Shabbat dinner and lunch, which, by way of being festive meals, deserve better-than-average food. So how do I satisfy my need for good food without breaking the bank?
Family lore tells me that my grandma Martha was able to stretch one chicken into a nourishing meal for six people, with leftovers. I unfortunately did not inherit this gift, but I have picked up some tricks for eating well on a budget without resorting to dumpster diving (don’t worry Mom, I’m over that phase), or existing on the starving artist fare of rice and beans, or - gasp - bologna and Wonder Bread.
Read more »
Thanks to Jonathan Bloom for this series of photos. Jonathan is writing a book on wasted food in America. He became interested in the topic after a day volunteering at D.C. Central Kitchen. Seeing the truckloads of rescued food that would otherwise have gone to landfills made him wonder how much edible food does slip through the cracks.
As a journalist, Bloom set out to learn why and how Americans waste more than 40% of the food produced for consumption. He started a blog dedicated to the topic and worked at a grocery store, farm and catering company to better understand the problem.
The photos below depict the incredible amount of food wasted in America, and also some hopeful examples of food recovery.
Read more »
First there were Smucker’s Uncrustables - the prefab PB&J sandwiches that resemble mini pot-pies and fit snugly (jam and all) in the toaster. Now, Kraft has introduced frozen Bagel-fuls that come pre-shmeared with cream cheese.
Really? PB&J and bagels with cream cheese are already the definition of “on the go” foods - is there really consumer demand to shave 30 seconds off the morning routine? And wouldn’t these convenience bagels actually take more time since they have to defrost?
More than that, I find Bagel-fuls to be a serious affront to the bagel’s integrity. There was a time when the bagel - crusty, chewy, and drowning in poppy seeds - rivaled challah as the quintessential Jewish bread. And while shrink-wrapped versions (like Lender’s) have already made a mockery of our beloved carb, Bagel-fuls truly represent a new low.
Fight back against this culinary offense - whether you’re partial to plain, scallion, or Toffuti, the right to shmear is yours.
Related bagel posts on The Jew & The Carrot
The Only Bagel
What’s so Jewish About Bagels?
Does it Work for a Knish Too?
Does a Bagel Platter Make us Hypocrites?
(Hat tip to My Jewish Learning)
I suppose it was just a matter of time: Pepsi just joined the world of greenwashed corporations with the introduction of Pepsi Raw.
Like other “natural sodas” available on the market, the new drink comes in glass bottles and is made with ingredients like cane sugar, coffee leaf, apple extract, and sparkling watter. (I suppose you might call it “Kosher for Passover” Pepsi’s eco-friendly cousin?)
While Pepsi Raw certainly beats regular Pepsi’s brew of high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid, and artificial colorings, I’m not planning on running to the stores just yet. Actually, I couldn’t even if I wanted to - as of now Pepsi Raw is only available in the UK. (I haven’t decided if this counts as another nod to the Brits for being one step ahead.)
If you have 20 seconds to spare, I highly recommend checking out Pepsi Raw’s bizarre ”dance dance revolution” website splash page. I’m not yet sure what it has to do with soda, but it’s definitely entertaining.
Last week, an alliance of consumer groups and environmental organizations in the UK called on Heinz to drop its bogus million-dollar advertising campaign that its soups contain: “ingredients that you would find at a Farmers’ Market.” It reminded me of a similar commercial I recently saw that advertised Campbell’s soup as made from “farm-grown” vegetables - something that sounded so delicious and wholesome that even my finely-tuned (read: cynical) advertising ear almost missed the deceit.
When it comes to attracting customers, some food companies will bend over backwards to connect their products to the current zeitgeist, even if the link is tenuous at best. Sustainweb reported:
“The mainstream food industry is keenly aware that descriptions such as ‘local’, ‘seasonal’ and ‘farmers’ market’ are attractive to consumers…disturbingly, our survey showed that such efforts are being hijacked. Big food companies and supermarkets have begun to abuse these valuable descriptions by applying them to products and practices that we believe do not deserve such ethical or environmental credentials.”
This news is not surprising: in-the-know food consumers already understand that a happy cow on a bottle of milk does not necessarily mean the milk is ethically-sourced. The remaining question is, when it comes to lying to customers - how far is too far? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue…
Thanks to Rhea Kennedy of the You are Delicious blog, for this guest post.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me weird food for lunch and packed it in weird ways. God bless them, they sent me off into the world with chunks of tempeh, entire raw portabellas, dark whole-grain bread with thick pieces of cheese inside. These treats were invariably wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother had deemed better for you than plastic baggies or packaging from a factory. As soon as I was old enough to notice this was different from the other kids’ cold cut sandwiches in neat Ziploc bags and individually-wrapped string cheeses, I became mortified.
Around the same time, I started attending Hebrew school in the evenings – something I approached mostly with dedication, although I occasionally dragged my feet about going. After all, it wasn’t the Christian kids’ religion class (which we all just referred to as Religion) that got them out of school early once a week. To me, those who went to Religion sat in the soft cloak of normalcy—and I didn’t.
Fast forward a few years. I now follow Jewish tradition with pleasure and am a zealous whole foods foodie. Although eating and religious study practices may be hard to take for an image-conscious little kid, I now understand eating whole foods, keeping kosher, saying brachot and other thoughtful ways of approaching food are central to my life. Indeed, I’d argue that observing these traditions - in combination - is rather revolutionary.
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There was a disturbing story in the Times today about the alarmingly high level of mercury in both store-bought and restaurant-served sushi-grade tuna. How is it possible that no government agency tests for mercury in our country’s seafood, when even the FDA and EPA have issued warning advisories about the consumption of certain fish that are known to contain unsafe levels of this industrial pollutant?
While it might be fun for my three-year-old son to color in this page from his “Jewish Activity Book (!):
…maybe I should just substitute a page with Joe Camel smoking a cigarette, which would be no more toxic?
The good news for fish-eating Jews everywhere is that there are sustainable seafood choices out there, including smaller fish found lower on the food chain (but just as high up on the kiddush buffet line), which are not only safer in terms of mercury levels, but very high in healthy omega-3 fatty acids. So dig into those herring, sardines and anchovies, everyone!
Just a thought, but could the new food credo of “Eat food not too much, mostly plants,” be a threat to the Kashrut industry as we know it?
I just finished watching a promotional video from the OU. Targeted to the food industry, this video demonstrates the process by which a product receives certification. Using a fictional cake made by Drakes (of Seinfeld lore), the OU rabbi shows how, early in the process the ingredient list of the new cake is sent to the OU to ensure that all ingredients are kosher. Some of the ingredients are found to be problematic, the red sprinkles on top and the emulsifiers that in the words of Rabbi Moshe Elefant “make ingredients mix when they normally can’t.”
According to Rebbe Michael Pollan, food is defined as something your grandmother would recognize. I would bet a big bunch of kale that your grandmother didn’t use emulsifiers to make sure her cake was delicious.
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I still remember the first time my suburban food-bubble was burst, when I realized the implications of fruit sold according to season. I was in Israel, and became completely dumbfounded when I couldn’t find the strawberries…”whaddya mean you don’t sell them in the winter?!?”
Of course, as my sister recently reminded me, even junk food lovers know the comforting seasonal rhythms of Cadbury Creme eggs in late winter (they’re only sold from Jan 1-Easter Sunday), Peeps in the spring, and, of course, Mallomars in the late fall.
Ah, Mallomars…If Proust had grown up in New York, he would have traded in his madeleine for a Mallomar. Respectable journalists have sung its praises to the heavens, this perfect confection, only available during the dark, baseball-less months of November through March, so delicate is its thin outer layer of chocolate, that it can’t survive the trip from factory to store in the heat of spring or summer. And what could be more Jewish than a cookie that comes eighteen to a box, 70% of which are consumed by New Yorkers?
The only cookie that comes close is its Israeli cousin, the Krembo. Similar in construction and seasonal availability, writers also wax rhapsodic about krembo season. Plus, according to its wikipedia entry: Read more »
The fabulous folks at Notschlock came up with the Jewish Food Pyramid T-Shirt, which plays off of the food pyramid that booted the concept of ”four food groups” out of collective consciousness in the early 1990s.
Notschlock’s Pyramid Picks:
Tier 1: bagels, matzah, matzah balls, pita.
Tier 2: Pickles, hummus, tzimmes, dill, figs
Tier 3: shmeers, cream cheese / gefilte fish, lox, pastrami on rye
Tier 4: gelt coins, schmaltz, jelly rings, latkes, blintzes
As a card-carrying Jewish professional, I have the maddening responsibility of thinking two holidays ahead at all times. So while I am trying to put the finishing touches on our second annual (Fair Trade) Chocolate-Covered Tu Bishvat Seder, I’m also looking for a more sustainable vendor for the hot dogs for our Purim carnival. I can’t believe that after several years of serious progress (especially on the krunchy-kosher koasts), no one is selling a kosher organic hot dog yet. Even with some serious google-fu, this is the best I could come up with. Kosher organic chicken dogs. Blech. Maybe we’ll just go with these.
Any thoughts?
(x-posted at Pickled)
Bonnie over at Ethicurean created a fascinating infographic for Wired that overlays the price per calorie of various foods with their energy payoff and sugar content. It depicts what Adam Drewnowski researched and Michael Pollan wrote about for the New York Times: 1. The cheapest available food is often the most fattening. 2. The most calorie-dense foods (usually processed and frozen convenience items) tend to be concentrated in the center shelves of supermarkets.
This supermarket setup seems pretty pervasive - it even holds true at my idealistic, non-profit Food Coop where I spent my monthly shift last night ringing up fancy cheese and (expensive) mixed-drink ephemera like limes and mint for people’s New Year’s celebrations. Check out Bonnie’s graphic above and, when shopping in the “middle aisles” of your grocery store, don’t forget Rambam’s “middle way” - moderation.
No, it’s not a joke:
The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe.
Does this give anyone else the sense of peace and hope for the world that it gave me?
