In 2008 Maya and Zach Kassutto embarked on a father-daughter photo-documentary project of their Hazon Community Supported Agriculure project at Kol Ami in Elkins Park, PA.

As Zach says, “it was Maya’s bat mitzvah year, and she wanted to engage in a mitzvah project that was meaningful to her. Her bat mitzvah coincided with the harvest holiday of Succoth. Photographing the CSA seemed like the perfect project, especially since she also has a passion for vegetarianism, the environment and photography.”

As a result, they opened a gallery show at the host synagogue of the Hazon CSA, Kol Ami. You can see the photos they took together by clicking here. The show, entitled “A Season in the Sun: A father & daughter’s exploration of community supported agriculture” is a lovely chronicle of the CSA season.

Mark continues, “The photos in the exhibit aim to capture a myriad of connections and relationships; between individuals and food, between those who grow the food and those who eat it, between members of a caring community, and between people and the earth.”

As a part of their project, the Kassuttos visited a farm and farmer in Lancaster County, PA, and they followed the path of the food from the Lancaster County farm to the CSA in Elkins Park and documented the community that was created and enriched by the CSA process.

Enjoy their beautiful photos here – and for information about the Hazon CSA in Elkins Park, click here.

How does the food movement intersect with issues of poverty?  For the hundred or so participants at the Growing Food Justice event last night we got a little taste of some of the issues and what we can do about it.  The event was sponsored by the AJWS-Avodah partnership and was co-sponsored by Hazon. They brought together three activists who are fighting in very different ways to prevent hunger in New York City.

Joel Berg, the Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? started out with some numbers: 1.4 million New Yorkers living in households who cannot afford enough food and an estimated 400,000 (1 out of 5 children) in the City are hungry.   “But,” he said, “hunger is not about lack of food – it is about the ability to earn enough money to afford enough food.”  What’s the solution?  A serious focus on living wage jobs and a serious support of food safety net programs and support local community support systems.  Food justice not just food charity.

Karen Washington, who started her discussion by describing herself as an urban farmer is also the President of the NYC Community Gardens Coalition.  “Let all the rich people pay for everything and food should be free,” she said.  Other points she made from her impassioned speech included: When you talk about changing the food system, it needs to be inclusive. Until rooms like this are filled with the people who are hungry, there will not be real change.  This has to happen from the grassroots up.  We have a generation of children who have no idea where their food is coming from.  We need to educate people around the process of agriculture.  And its not just about access to affordable food, but it is also about jobs.  Welfare and foodstamps was supposed to be a temporary thing – not generation after generation.  When talking about sustainable agriculture, the kids should be involved. Teach agriculture in schools.  Solutions need to be developed from the bottom up, not from the top down.   Food levels the playing field.  It is a right and not a privilege.  The land of milk and honey has become the land of greed and money.  Food is the new civil rights.

Daniel Bowman Simon, who had founded the successful White House Organic Farm Project is now spearheading the People’s Garden NYC – respectfully asking Mayor Bloomberg to allow a Community garden in front of City Hall.  Daniel’s presentation included multi-media like the video above.  He showed photos of his trip across the country in what is now called the topsy-turvy bus.  And we know how the story ends, Michelle Obama planted an organic garden last year and in the process of expanding again this year.  Over half of the food from the garden was donated to Miriam’s Kitchen – a local DC food pantry.  After the White House, Daniel was hopeful that this idea would take root in other public places as well.  Baltimore, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Portland have all planted vegetables outside their City Halls – so why not New York City?  Daniel showed historical photographs of urban gardens in NYC from the early 1900′s.  His petition to Mayor Bloomberg is online here and it can also be printed out to gather additional signatures – like the South Bronx Food Coop does.

At the end of the presentations there was a brief but heated discussion about the state’s Fresh Program.  And interesting discussion of free and reduced school lunches and the idea of universal breakfasts.  There was plenty of time for shmoozing and networking after as well as yummy food catered from a restaurant that has the Tav HaYosher.

Overall it was a terrific event, hopefully the first of many food justice events for the AJWS-Avodah partnership.

Think of the last time you saw something that pissed you off enough to do something amazing about it. Maybe it was a long grocery line or a bumper sticker for the Tea Party, or maybe it takes a humanitarian crisis like Haiti to really get your adrenaline going.

For me, it was orange chicken.

A year ago, I found out that UC Berkeley’s first national fast food chain, a Panda Express, was slated to open its doors adjacent to the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. Like Slow Food in reaction to a McDonald’s next to the Spanish Steps in Rome, we rose to the occasion.

We dredged up some surprising details (all Panda’s menu items except steamed rice are over 50% fat; even their steamed veggies are cooked in meat) and drew hundreds of students to protest. We also gave the administration something they could say yes to: we raised over $100,000 for a student-run café and sustainability hub. The administration eventually rejected the chain, and the Berkeley Student Food Collective was born.

Now, this summer, the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed)will train student leaders on campuses around Northern California to create local, organic, community-run cafes on their campuses. Imagine students hosting fermentation workshops and panels of local food movement leaders in the same space that they and their friends buy an affordable, organic salad and fair trade coffee for lunch (check out the lovely Sprouts Cafe in Vancouver or the raucous Maryland Food Collective).

CoFed is:

• A best-practices business plan to create a financially sustainable platform forfood movement organizing – a community-run cafe.
• A support network of food system stakeholders, thought-leaders and student activists dedicated to a more cooperative food system. CoFed is has formed alliances with these organizations: Slow Money, Slow Food on Campus, Real Food Challenge, FeelGood, Food Coop 500, California Students for Sustainability Coalition, The Food Alliance, United Farm Workers, Veritable Vegetable, The California Center for Cooperative Development, Hazon, Thanksgiving Coffee,
• An intensive, peer-based training: June 15-20th, CoFed will host an intensive boot camp in Northern California, bringing together students from all around the West Coast. Participants will be mentored by local farmers and chefs, create a plan for their campus food co-op, and build their project teams.

Why do we need student leadership?

During college, students are searching for powerful learning experiences and vibrant communities as well as cementing the habits and values that will guide them for their adult lives. By supporting real student leadership towards sustainability, universities can be centers for cultural change, allowing urgently needed systematic shifts to ripple out through newly trained leaders.

In the next two years, CoFed will create a network of self-sustaining hubs for, train hundreds of new leaders to advocate and organize towards, and allow thousands of students to participate in a just and sustainable food system.

It’s time to put cooperative communities right at the center of the struggle for fair and sustainable food. Our fight is greater than cleaning polluted water streams or mitigating climate change, our real challenge is to restructure the values that underpin our social, political and economic institutions – to move our culture’s (and our own, our friend’s and our government’s) focus from fast to slow, from markets to places, from commodities to people. To do this, we’re going to need a vision that includes everyone, we’re going to need to start training a lot of new leaders and we’re going to need a lot of well thought out plans.

Are you ready? CoFed is brand new and needs you! Email yoni@cofed.org to get involved or join the mailing list.

Check out this podcast interview with Val Yasner from the Hazon CSA in Cherry Hill. Val makes a great case for eating locally and sustainably — and she’s hard at work making sure the 2010 season is as strong as last year’s at Temple Beth Shalom. Val’s on at about minute 18 (how appropriate!). Gut shabbes, everyone.

“We learned about what we put in our mouths, why we put it in our mouths; we questioned the ethics and health of good eating. The conference really raised awareness and started conversations,” Carson muses. Back at home in suburban Marion, PA, she suggested that her synagogue start a CSA. At first, the idea was a tough sell.

“We didn’t have a lot of eating local and organic, people didn’t cook a lot, and ‘CSA’ wasn’t a familiar term,” Carson explains of her community. “People weren’t aware of a growing season—at first, they were complaining that there were no tomatoes in their CSA box in May,” Carson remembers. “[CSA members] are now eating chard, beets, parsnips, turnips fresh from the farm—food they’ve never eaten before.”

Click here to read the full story!

As Shavuot approaches and we reflect on the significance of harvest festivals in contemporary (urban) times, the AJWS-AVODAH Partnership is hosting an interactive program on hunger in NYC and what you can do about it! If you are in the NYC area you should definitely check out this event.

Date: Wednesday, May 12^th

Time: Light dinner and registration at 6:30pm, program at 7pm sharp

Place: The Commons on Atlantic, in Downtown Brooklyn

Address: 388 Atlantic Ave (map)

To register: Click here

Speakers include:

Daniel Bowman Simon – Trailblazer behind the People’s Garden NYC campaign and founder of the successful White House Organic Farm Project

Rabbi Brent Spodek – Rabbi in Residence at American Jewish World Service

Karen Washington – Longtime urban gardener and food justice activist and president of the NYC Community Gardens Coalition

Representative from the New York City Coalition Against Hunger

Come and learn about the reality of hunger in NYC and about some innovative (local) approaches to tackling it. Karen Washington will discuss the power and importance of the community garden movement and Daniel Bowman Simon will share his own story of helping to establish the now famous White House Kitchen Garden. He’ll also outline how his newest project aims to bring a garden to City Hall to be tended by public school students with the produce being distributed to emergency food providers. In the spirit of Shavuot, Rabbi Spodek will frame our discussion around Jewish imperatives towards justice.

Guests will be invited to offer concrete volunteer power to the People’s Garden NYC campaign with a post-program action party.

This week, as Earth Day came and went and I attended a fair here or an Earth celebration there, it also donned on me that Spring is here!

So, beyond my environmental excursions, I also attended of variety of events held on my very own Columbia University. Yet, what I found was an inability to fully appreciate some of the events due to the ubiquity of plastic water bottles. Some may laugh, but I find myself becoming more and more annoyed with these obnoxious bottles that I suddenly see everywhere. As I have previously written about bottled water, my awakening began when seeing the movie “Blue Gold: World Water War’s” on instant play on Netflix. Then, I really became irked when seeing “The Story of Bottled Water,” which I posted on this blog.

Last week though, I attended another water documentary screening, this one a full length feature exclusively focused on the water bottle industry. Now, the movie does a lot of pointing fingers. Most obviously, the manufacturers, NESTLE, Coca-cola, and Pepsi Co., bear a large portion of the blame.

Yet, beyond these stormtroopers, the film also criticizes the manufacturing of plastic bottles, or specifically the type of plastic used for water bottles. Called “PET” or “PETE”, this plastic has traces of all sorts of toxins linked to all kinds of health hazards. The most common and perhaps scariest is the link between the toxins in the plastics and fetal development. You would think the Right-to-Life community would be all over this one?

We remember the BPA discovery that destroyed Nalgene and made SIGGs cooler than Uranus, but what we don’t realize is that much of the plastic in your “Poland Spring” “Dasani” “Deer Park” or “Aquafina” contains some trace of BPA, benzene, or some other kind of harmful toxins. Though it seems impossible to escape simply breathing in toxins because of the pollution we all breathe daily, it is more distressing that we choose (most of the time out of ignorance) to put these poisons in our body.

And just to reiterate, Dasani and Aquafina are JUST PURIFIED TAP WATER. It is exactly what you drink out of the sink! Only it’s less healthy because there are some other salts and chemicals in it, as well as, whatever has mixed into the water from the plastic bottles.

And this is the danger. We don’t know why and how these poisons leak into the water contained in the bottle. Now, we know not to drink a bottle if it has been sitting in your car in the heat, yet none of us know where that bottle came from before we bought in the store. Perhaps it was sitting in a heated area. Or perhaps, simply long liquid exposure with the plastic releases some of the toxins into the water. I don’t know, but either way, tests (from the film) found that the water in plastic water bottles is often highly polluted and/or toxic.

So, take all this information and then attend some University events I did this past weekend. Every event had an assortment of drinks, including plastic water bottles. The BBQ on Saturday Afternoon on the South Lawns, in the middle of the heat of the day, had plastic water bottles to drink.

Forget everything I have just written about the health dangers of bottled water. Consider this:

Imagine the price of a 6-pack of .5 L bottled water to be about $6 (let’s say 1 dollar for every bottle)
Multiply that by however many people are coming to your event (let’s say 50 ppl): $300

Already you have spent several hundreds of dollars on something you can get essentially FREE:
84 oz pitcher (from wal-mart.com): around $20
Igloo 10 gallon water cooler: Around $80

So it is obviously much cheaper to have someone refilling the water at your event, then buying bottled water for “convenience” (I’m sure your constituents won’t mind the poison you serve with that “convenient” bottled water).

One good thing about Tapped: The Movie was contact it made with another organization – Food and Water Watch – about how to “get off the bottle” and reclaim the TAP. The produced a brochure about how public events can easily be ran without plastic bottled water. The more we refuse to serve it in our public events, the more people will stop using it.

Please, if you are reading this and you are organizing an event soon, DON’T BUY PLASTIC BOTTLED WATER. There are other, healthier ways of keeping your peeps refreshed.

To read more astonishing facts, here is the No Impact Man’s opinion.

We’ve just begun to distribute our Hazon CSA 2009 Season Report, and we figured that sharing it with our JCarrot readers might be fun for you all. Each of the carrots on the above map represents all of our CSAs for the 2010 season, but to learn more about what happened in 2009 in our longest standing food program, you can download the report. For instance, did you know the following?

In 2009:

• The Hazon CSA program grew to 32 communities in the United States and Canada, with forty-one partner organizations, including synagogues, day schools, Hillels and JCCs and twenty eight partner farms.
• Hazon CSAs brought an estimated 305,350 pounds of fresh, mostly organic, sustainable produce to about 6,100 people in over 2,500 member households!
• and Hazon CSAs put Jewish purchasing power – more than $950,000 – behind local farmers who are committed to sustainable agriculture.

As we link people and families more closely to the land on which their food grows and the farmers who grow it, we are also renewing a sense of connection with the rich Jewish traditions that surround eating and agriculture.  Last year, Hazon CSA communities hosted 120 innovative educational events.  There were many farm visits, including sukkah-building and gleaning on partner farms; at host institutions, programs included cooking demonstrations, text studies on brachot, and special events for Tu B’Shvat.

Hazon is deeply grateful to the dedicated farmers, the passionate volunteer leaders in every Hazon CSA community who plan pick-ups and education events, and the partner institutions that host and support Hazon CSAs. To learn more about the Hazon CSA program click here.

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Check out this Cleveland Jewish News article about the new community garden just starting out at Beth El Congregation in Akron. Ellen Botnick and her friends were, in part, inspired by their connection to Hazon on the Israel Food Tour that we cosponsored with Heschel last Novemeber.  As Ellen says “Food connects us to the earth, to each other, and to something much larger than ourselves. We are building community through this garden.”

Mazal tov to everyone in Cleveland who will have the chance to get to get their hands dirty in the garden, harvest the veggies, feed neighbors at Good Samaritan Hunger Center, and eat the food grown from this new garden! We wish you a bountiful harvest.

Click here to read the full story.

PS – Ellen told me there will be plant markers for all the plants, made from wood that was recycled from the jungle gym they converted to a tool shed.  A volunteer routed the names of the vegetables in the wood, and Bonnie Cohen calligraphed the Hebrew names. The Hebrew School children painted Jewish symbols on the markers. Very sweet and sustainable!

Listen to our new PODCAST, Episode 5 by clicking here!

Co-Founder Julie Wolk sits down with me on the latest Hazon Podcast. Listen to what Wilderness Torah is doing to revitalize the American Jewish Community. Also, don’t forget you can subscribe on iTunes by searching “Hazon”.

Also, don’t forget that it is Earth Day this week, so check out all the options going on in your area. For a good listing, check this website out

They have a map where you can choose where you live and find out what is going on near you!

And finally, for those in the New York area, come see “Tapped: The Movie,” a documentary about water usage and safety in America. It is screening at 5 pm at the Cowin Center at Columbia University (between 120 and 121 streets on Broadway). If you are one of the first 100 people to arrive at 4 pm, you can exchange a plastic bottle for a FREE Klean Kanteen! So look into your recycling bin and grab a plastic bottle. If you come after the first 100 people, you will get a great discount on Klean Kanteen.