From the JTS press release:

Dr. David Kraemer, the author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages [and 2006 Hazon Food Conference Keynote Speaker], will discuss “Jewish Eating and Jewish Identity” at The Jewish Theological Seminary’s Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 4, 2008. The event will take place at JTS, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.

Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages is the first book ever to explore the history of Jewish eating practices from the Bible to the present, and the first to interpret Jewish eating practices throughout the ages as keys to understanding current Jewish identities.

On the Friday night of last year’s Hazon Food Conference I said, “put your hands up if you eat meat – but would not do so if you had to kill it yourself.” And a good number of hands went up.

Then I said: “put your hands up if you’re vegetarian – but you would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” And a different group of hands went up. And after a brief pause, everyone laughed.

They laughed because the two responses revealed what a self-selected group we were – and how fascinating our different distinctions. The first group were essentially saying, “I do like eating meat – but I know the process of killing it is awful – it’s actually so awful that if I had to kill it myself, I just wouldn’t eat meat.”

The second group were essentially saying “I’m vegetarian because I hate everything about how animals are raised and killed in our industrial food economy. But if I actually took responsibility for killing an animal myself, I would feel I was acting with integrity, and in accordance with my beliefs – and therefore, in that instance, I potentially would eat meat.”

And my response, when the laughter died down, was to say “Great: next year we’re going to shecht (slaughter according to kosher law) an animal here at the Food Conference..”

And people went: “Oooohhhhhh..”

So now we’re planning the 2nd Annual Hazon Food Conference, and started to get into this. How do we do it? Is it legal? Where do we do it? Who does it? How do we get it certified as kosher?

The first thing we found out (and this surprised me): meat has to be hung up for a few days before you can eat it. So we couldn’t, for instance, shecht a goat on Friday afternoon and then eat it for Friday night dinner. (Or a lamb either, of course). The solution to that is: we’ll shecht two animals: one on Friday afternoon, and anyone who wants to see an animal being killed will be able to see that. But we’ll also shecht one a week before, and that’ll be the one we’ll eat on Friday night.

So that’s the current plan. We haven’t figured out the other details yet. Adam Berman, the Executive Director of The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center (where the Food Conference is held), told me that they’d already shechted one goat earlier in the year – but although it was a kosher animal, killed by a shochet in the appropriate manner, they couldn’t get it certified for the dining room.

Meantime: as we started discussing this with the Executive Committee Food Conference, we had at least one member say that he thought the idea was disgusting and didn’t want to go to the conference if we went through with it. But the whole point is precisely that it’s disgusting. If we do it, no-one who doesn’t want to see it will have to go. But those who do eat meat, and haven’t seen an animal killed, will have the opportunity to do so.

What do you think?!

(The picture in this post was taken at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center of Aitan Mizrahi with a lamb from a neighbor’s flock.)

AND (for kosher-keeping consumers), is it possible to find ethical meat that is also kosher?

As a result of the rising interest in meat from “happy cows,” a crop of organic family farmers across the country have started offerring sustainably raised and ethically slaughtered meat as part of their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) communities or through special meat coops.  This morning, NPR featured a story about these sustainable meat coops and the enthusiastic response they’ve received from members.

And this week, the Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA in Washington DC launched a program that will offer not only ethically raised, but also kosher meat to their members.

Washington DC’s Tuv Ha’Aretz coordinator, Devora Kimelman-Block, started talking about offering sustainable kosher meat at her synagogue’s Tuv Ha’Aretz at Hazon’s Food Conference last December.  After surveying her community to see if there was interest, and jumping through logistical hurdles to pair a willing shochet with their partner farm, the Tuv Ha’Aretz in DC is now offerring chicken and turkey, as well as beef and lamb from an additional nearby farm. 

So, questions answered?  Not entirely.  From a purely environmental standpoint, all meat, regardless of how it is raised or slaughtered, comes with a significant sidedish: carbon dioxide (from growing the food that, instead of feeding humans, feeds the animals that feed humans) and methane (from, um, cow burps – seriously, 15-20% of the methane that goes into the atmosphere comes from cow digestion!).  Both of these greehouse gasses are significant contributors to global climate change.

That said, as a vegetarian for the past seven years, I have come to grips with the fact that the vegetarian diet isn’t for everyone - and that’s OK.  But for those people who choose to be meat eaters, cutting down on the amount of meat consumption while seeking out ethical and sustainable pathways to source meat is crucial. 

Congratulations Tuv Ha’Aretz DC for your efforts to redefine how your Jewish community thinks about and purchases food - I have a feeling it won’t be long before synagogues across the country follow suit. 

* Find out more about the ethical, kosher meat through the Tuv Ha’Aretz in Washington DC here.

Forum urges Jews to think how did this food get to my plate?
By ALEXANDRA J. WALL / JTA
Dec. 31, 2006
FALLS VILLAGE, Conn — David Frank graduated from New York’s French Culinary Institute without ever tasting a single morsel.

As a culinary student, he braised, flambeed and sauteed – then stepped back to allow his classmates to taste and judge the food over which he labored.

An Orthodox Jew from Forest Hills, NY, Frank is a sales and events manager and consulting chef for a kosher caterer. He always dreamed of becoming a chef, but feared his traditional lifestyle might get in the way.

Not to worry. Frank consulted his rabbi, who – perhaps recognizing that the kosher world could use more culinary talent – told him that handling unkosher food was not a problem.

“Make everything, taste nothing,” the rabbi said.

“I got marked down on my midterm for underseasoning,” Frank said. “But I redeemed myself with my final exam. I made a wild mushroom consomme that made my instructor’s jaw drop.”

Frank now dreams of opening his own upscale kosher dairy restaurant in New York. But in addition to having the traditional kosher certification, Frank wants to use locally grown produce, organic when possible.

He was among 150 people attending a recent conference at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center here titled “From Latkes to Lattes: Hazon’s Conference on Jews, Food & Contemporary Life.”

An organization that made a name for itself with environmental bike rides in the United States and Israel, Hazon now is trying to change the way Jews think about food.

With Tuv Ha’aretz, its community-supported agriculture program, Hazon has five synagogues in cities across the country supporting local farms. Five more, plus one in Israel, are scheduled to begin next year.

Synagogue members buy shares in the farm and receive a box of organic produce each week. In some locations, subscribers must work several days a year on the farm, ensuring that they have not only a direct connection with the farmer who grows their food but the place where the food grows.

Rabbi Shmuel Simenowitz, the conference’s only Chasidic participant, said the community-supported agriculture program, or CSA, has biblical roots.

Simenowitz, who gave up a successful career in entertainment law to be a farmer, runs Sweet Whisper Farms in southern Vermont, which has been described as “Vermont’s only shomer Shabbat, organic, horse-powered maple farm.”

Speaking of the biblical brothers Zevulun and Yisachar, Simenowitz said that while they recognized the value in devoting oneself to Torah study, only Yisachar had the mental fortitude to do so, while Zevulun’s strength was in commerce.

“So they make a deal in which Zevulun says, ‘You sit and learn for me and I’ll go travel the world.’ The CSA embodies that agreement, not only in financial support but in spiritual support as well,” Simenowitz said.

“Yes, you can live on the Upper West Side” of Manhattan, “but join a CSA” to have a direct connection to your food, he suggested.

Knowing how food reaches one’s plate should be just as important as a traditional kosher certification, suggested Rabbi Natan Margalit, a teacher and writer from Newton, Mass.

Citing Michael Pollan’s recent book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” as an example of how disconnected most Americans are from their food, Margalit asked, “Can I look at what is on my plate and take it back to where it was grown? Can I take that journey with it and feel good about it, or if I can’t, what am I saying with my bracha,” or blessing?

While Simenowitz was often humorous, suggesting that farming was perhaps the only way one could be “gored by an ox,” as the Talmud contemplates, he also sounded a serious note.

“I’m more right-wing than Attila the Hun, but we cannot ignore global warming,” he said. “It’s bigger than all of us, and it is why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

At one workshop, an expert offered startling statistics about the growing problem of child obesity. At another, participants practiced eating as meditation, paying attention to the texture of a carrot slice, the crunch of a potato chip, the juiciness of a grape.

Eli Rogosa of the Israel Seed Conservancy spoke about her work restoring nearly extinct Israeli food crops, while some 20-something hippies offered a workshop called “Fun with Fermentation” at which participants sampled homemade sauerkraut and beer.

Jay Weinstein, a New York-based chef and cookbook author, demonstrated at one workshop how to make wild rice pancakes with cumin sour cream, and spoke at another about how disposable chopsticks are depleting the rainforests. Simply refusing chopsticks at restaurants is one small way to make a difference, he said.

Many participants expressed surprise to learn how many Jewish farmers there are now, with many of the farmers tracing their work to its biblical roots.

Leah Koenig, Hazon’s conference coordinator, has overseen the growth of the Tuv Ha’aretz program in the past two years.

“All of Hazon’s food work, plus the work of our friends, is a hopeful testament that we are standing together at the foothills of a national movement around the intersection of Jewish life and contemporary food issues,” she said. “Together we are working to bring joy, cooperation and positive change around food, and doing so in a way that is rooted in core Jewish values and community.”

While Jewish Renewal coined the term “eco-kashrut” some 20 years ago, Hazon Executive Director Nigel Savage asked whether his organization should adopt the term or work to ensure that a traditional kosher certification includes the new parameters as well.

Indeed, such issues in food awareness have reached new heights, Savage said.

“More and more Jews are thinking about not only kosher food but more contemporary issues, like where our food comes from, how it’s grown and how healthy it is,” he said. “We think this is a beginning of a new Jewish food movement.”

As if he needed more evidence, the Conservative movement last week announced that a commission is working to create a tzedek hechsher, a certification for food produced in a socially just way – particularly with regard to safe and fair working conditions – which would be used in addition to traditional kosher certification.

Such news would be welcome to Naftali Hanau, who after spending a summer in Adamah, a program at Isabella Freedman in which 20-somethings live off the land, grow organic vegetables, collect eggs from free-range chickens and milk goats, had a real dilemma when he returned to Manhattan to finish college.

At New York University’s kosher cafeteria, he said, “The meat is kosher, but it’s not sustainably raised or ethically treated, so I can’t eat it.”

In addition, many of the foods served there are overly processed and, since they’re not organic, Hanau cannot be sure they weren’t grown without pesticides.

“I spend a huge amount of time each day thinking about how to feed myself,” he said.

I decided to cook it after a friend of mine, Chana Citron, taught me that it is an ideal kid food. Provides all essential amino acids, and packs an enormous amount of protein (12-18%). First rule, which I learned the hard way: you must rinse it. Boxed brands supposedly are pre-rinsed, but I don’t trust them. Unfortunately, I didn’t rinse my first batch. The kids dutifully tasted a bit and immediately, unanimously rejected it. Ruined by saponins, the bitter coating that prevents birds from devouring the entire crop.

It is amazing how many recipes neglect the rinsing part. The grains are small, but I happen to have a strainer fetish, so with a fine-meshed strainer it is a snap to rinse under cold running water in the sink.

The other part that kids have to overcome is the firm little spiral (the germ) that separates from the seed once you cook it enough. It can be a bit intimidating, visually speaking. Kids can be merciless food critics, visually and texturally. Quinoa has a great mouth feel once you rinse it and cook it enough, but that spiral thing takes some getting used to.

I tried adding one part short grain brown rice (sweet, so kids like it) to two parts quinoa, and that was pretty great. I use what all recipes suggest, which is 1 part quinoa to 2 parts water, although I have been sauteing finely diced onion in olive oil, then adding the grains, and finally adding the water. It tends to make for a richer side dish, like a pilaf.

I am plotting my next introduction of quinoa to the kids. I will have to lose the curry I’ve been adding to my own preparation, and just keep it simple: olive oil, sel de mer, and perhaps another brown rice combo.

This is all part of my bigger plan to eat more like a vegan, and secretly bring my family along with me. This was inspired by meeting a young vegan friend, Daniel Bowman Simon, at Hazon’s food conference. He wants to plant green roofs on all of Manhattan, boosting O2, diminishing CO2, and all that great stuff. I was inspired by his wiry frame, and his evolutionary spin on eating a vegan diet (“cow’s milk is made to make little cows grow big.”)

Curious to hear of anyone’s successful quinoa recipes, especially if kids will eat it.

It took some sleuthing to figure out the recipe. First I cornered the very busy chef of Isabella Freedman, insisting on seeing the machine he used to grate the potatoes so finely. He showed me his industrial-sized Robot Coupe, and I realized the grater holes were about 3 mm wide rather than the usual 5 or 6 mm wide in a standard Cuisinart. That was my first problem. How to grate my potatoes so finely?

Next, I figured out who had actually made the latkes. Peter Berley, the chef. He graciously shared his tips. Preferably high starch potatoes, like idaho. Eggs, no flour or matzoh meal. The green bits were finely chopped chives, but he also added fresh rosemary. Rosemary in latkes! What an inspired concept.

Fast forward to the mezzanine at Zabar’s, the next week. I’ve got 20 people coming to a Chanukah party dinner in 2 days, and I want to replicate Peter Berley’s latke recipe. A Cuisinart expert informs me I can special order the blade with fine holes, but I don’t have time. There is no way I am going to grate the 30 or 40 potatoes I need by hand. Discouraged, I continue down Broadway, and enter a very busy Williams Sonoma in the Time Warner Center. To my utter surprise, they had a Robot Coupe made for home use, with the exact diameter grater I was looking for — 3 mm.

It was a splurge, but I had been limping my old Cuisinart along for years. I upgraded, and gave my Cuisinart to my beloved Israeli nanny, who very happily took it home to Brooklyn.

The end of the story is I grated a massive number of potatoes with the unbelievably fast, sharp and quiet Robot Coupe, and threw in the chives and a little fresh rosemary. I squeezed and drained the potatoes, which released a ton of liquid. Then added eggs, salt and pepper, and that was it. No flour, no matzoh meal, just like Peter said.

We started frying in a small amount of Canola oil about an hour before guests arrived, in two pans on two burners. My kids and husband were eating them before they even hit the table. They were incredible.

In the afternoon before the party, my kids wouldn’t nap, and I was quite behind. In a panic I realized I hadn’t made the apple sauce. So we all pitched in peeling apples, and I cut them into a 12-qt stock pot with just a little water in the bottom, and 2 cinnamon sticks. I used about 16 organic apples, a mix of granny smith, Fuji and macintosh I think. I boiled the apples until mushy, then used a potato masher and mashed them right in the stock pot, letting the kids lick the cinnamon sticks (making sure the 2-year-old didn’t eat it). The apple sauce was a big success. Wonderful without sugar — more tang, more flavor.

Peter Berley was an absolute mensch for sharing his recipe with me. My Robot Coupe will always remind me of him, and his miraculously delicious latke’s served for 150 people at Hazon’s first food conference.

I do it all the time — I ‘treat’ myself. If I’m feeling sad, or stressed, or I woke up late, or even if I just happen to be biking past the bakery that gives a 50% discount on all its pastries if you arrive by bicycle (how do you turn that down!?)–I buy something yummy to get me through the day. But when I stop to tally up the week– the ‘treat’ hot chocolate, muffin, pastry, carrot cake… I’ve eaten something like that nearly every day.

It’s not really a treat any more. And if someone is coming in to visit — we go out for a meal. Or I’m excited to see my partner, and we make plans to go out. Or I simply don’t feel like cooking, so it’s buckets of chinese food from the corner restaurant, bliss of chopsticks and garlic sauce. More often than not, I’m eating something ‘special’.

What then do you eat on a really special occasion? I’m thinking about Shabbat. I like celebrating Shabbat with food. I love the Fridays when I leave work, with no other task to think about other than going to the Farmer’s Market to buy food, going home to cook it, and spending the evening eating, talking and singing with friends. A big meal with lots of people means you can make many different dishes, your plate overflows with salad and sauces–and whether you revel in mixing all your foods together as I do, or you keep your courses neatly separate, it is delightful to eat a lot, to eat well, to celebrate good food and good company.

But how much the more so if we didn’t eat like this all the time! How much more would I appreciate the chocolate cake if I wasn’t eating a brownie three days a week? I am resistant to diets and rules and restricting myself, but I’m realizing that by setting boundaries, I am actually freeing myself up to enjoy celebrations much more than if I have no rules, and eat whatever I want, whenever I want to. Healthy is not just what you eat, it’s how, and how much, and to what end. So I offer another way to think about setting Shabbat apart from the rest of the week: in this case, it’s not what we do ON Shabbat that makes it special, but what we DON’T do on the other days of the week that can help us eat – and live – more healthily. I think I might give it a go.

Shabbat Shalom.

Organic, sustainable and compost were the buzzwords, with most participants saying they wouldn’t eat chicken soup unless it was made with ethically-raised, free-range chickens. And brisket? Only if the cows were grass-fed, leaving kosher consumers with few options.

Hazon convened this group of 150 people, chefs and farmers, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members, educators and food enthusiasts to talk about how the every-day decision of what to eat is loaded with numerous consequences, and how eating organically is not only the health-conscious choice, but the environmentally-sound one as well.

Hazon first made a name for itself with its environmental bike rides, both in the United States and Israel. While the rides have grown in scope, it is now changing the way Jews think about food. With Tuv Ha’aretz, it’s CSA program, it has numerous synagogues in cities across the country supporting CSAs, where synagogue members buy shares in a farm, and receive a box of organic produce each week, with the synagogue as the pick-up point.

Tuv Ha’Aretz is expanding to include more cities next year, and this conference was at first meant to be a leadership retreat for those involved. But interest quickly grew beyond that.

The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn. was the setting, where a group of 20-somethings live off the land in community each summer, growing their own organic vegetables, collecting eggs, and milking goats. The Adamah-niks, as they are called, were a significant presence, offering fermentation tips and drumming whenever given the chance.

At one workshop a child obesity expert offered startling statistics about this epidemic, while at another, people practiced eating as a meditation, noticing the texture of a carrot slice, the crunch of a potato chip, the juiciness of a grape. A panel of Jewish farmers spoke about how they are bringing the Torah to life every day, as the Bible is a largely agricultural story, and a chef and cookbook author spoke about how disposable chopsticks are depleting the rainforests, telling participants that the simple act of refusing them at restaurants is one small way to make a difference.

Rabbi Natan Margalit made the point that a Jews’ notion of kashrut should be expanded to consider the entire journey the food on one’s plate has made. If one cannot feel good about the way in which it was raised, and grown, then what does it mean to bless it?

Children and parents at the cob-fed oven at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.

More to follow!

I went for a walk with Marco and Talia (aged 3) to find the goats and the hens. The goats are just roaming around, doing hen-like things, and looking pretty happy. The difference between how they live and the pictures one sees of hens in cages is pretty dramatic. Last year some of the Adamahniks gave me eggs from here – they were like eggs I’d never eaten before; kind of like the eggs that Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore’s Dilemma — dark and rich and strong. The eggs of happy hens.

So then we wanted to find the goats; and en route bumped into Eitan, Freedman‘s very own Jewish goat herd. Standing there with a big shovel, a load of old food, and four big bins of compost. Here’s the conversation, roughly:

Marco (who’s a Wall St guy — and an interesting one): You’re composting that?

Eitan: yeah. I let the hens eat the leftover food from Freedman for about a day, but then I compost it, because you don’t wanna let mold grow on it, or too much bacteria — the hen feces is good for compost, but not good for the hens to eat.

Marco: Yeah. And great compost.

Eitan: Yeah — do you compost?

Marco: Yeah — we have a place at the beach and we compost and grow stuff — asparagus, tomatoes, cucumbers.

Eitan: What kind of cucumbers?

Marco: The Amira ones, the little Israeli ones.

Eitan: Oh yeah, Persian, they’re really great.What do you use for mulch?

Marco: We harvest seaweed, at the seashore…

Eitan: That’s really cool

Marco: …And we have great raised beds; a few years ago this guy from the circus gave us some tiger feces, it was really good

Eitan: Wow, that’s really cool — carnivore feces just has totally different bacteria. Great compost…

And I’m stood there and I’m thinking: I’m an urban Jew. I’ve never grown a cucumber. I don’t know what an amira cucumber is — and maybe I’ve eaten one, and maybe not. And I’ve never composted. And tiger feces — and it’s relative merits in composting — who knew??

And how cool for Talia and her sisters to grow up like this.

And then a different question: Eitan makes goat cheese. It’s great cheese – I’ve eaten it. But it’s not being served at this conference. How come — because it’s not hechshered.

Has to have a hechsher, otherwise we can’t serve it. So it’s not kosher, right?
Wrong! Ridiculously wrong!!

Eitan’s cheese is the most kosher cheese you could meet in the whole world.
The goat is called Zilpah! She’s milked by a Jewish guy — called Eitan. He makes cheese, very simply. Kosher rennet — hechshered kosher rennet. And gives it to me, who eats it. I know the goat, and the guy who made the cheese, and what went in it – how often is that true of the cheese you eat?

And then I went to a great session Arlin Wasserman did — “What’s In A Symbol?” – all about this stuff. The kosher market in the US is now $140 billion a year — hot dogs alone, $30bn. People choose it, according to his data, 35% on taste, 16% because they like the guidelines, 5% because it’s safe or healthier, 8% because they’re observant, 4% because they can’t get halal, and 8% because they’re veggie or for other reasons.

Well: I want the market to be $140,000,001,000 — because I think we should buy $1,000 of Eitan’s cheese this year — at least — and I want someone to be able to certify in a really simple way that it’s kosher…

– The Jew