I am lucky enough to live in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve got it pretty good here – great weather, great outdoors, great Jewish community, great abundance of local organic food. But Chinese food? Not so much here in Eugene.

As a Bay Area transplant, I crave Chinese food. I often feel like I literally NEED it. After months searching for something that would quench my Chinese food tastebuds – and realizing that to keep my version of kosher (which is eco-kosher: less about what is and what is not treyf and more about eating only meat that is ideally organic and pasture-raised – and if not, is absolutely free-range, never given hormones or antibiotics, and was humanely slaughtered) – I came to the conclusion that I’d have to make it myself. For both taste and my personal kashrut reasons. Which is some kind of a life lesson right there, I’m sure.

I stumbled upon a recipe for Cashew Chicken from the inimitable Martha Stewart and decided to give it a whirl – and my own flair. And to tell the truth, it is delicious and happily graces our Friday night Shabbat table pretty often.

I’ve heard a lot of us Hazon-niks refer to Michael Pollan as Reb Pollan. Yet, as far as I know, he’s never spoken publicly in a Jewish context.
Until Tuesday night, that is. Pollan appeared on a panel in Berkeley, just blocks from his home. He was invited not only for the food guru that he is, but as a regular customer of Saul’s Deli, the only Jewish deli in Berkeley.
Saul’s is perhaps the only Jewish deli in the country to serve grass-fed meat (at least according to its owners Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt.) Adelman and Levitt talked about how hard it can be to please the old-timers who don’t necessarily care about where their meat comes from, and trying to change with the times. This being the Bay Area, kashrut hardly figured into the conversation, not surprising, since Saul’s isn’t kosher.
The event was going to be held at the deli itself, but had to be moved to the JCC to accomodate the overflow crowd. You can read more about the conversation here.

Thanks so much to Emunah Hauser for this heads up.  Emunah is a host at Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, which has been organizing the Referendum on the Deli Menu, which will be held on Tuesday in Berkeley, CA.  Check out Saul’s blog Sustainability Adventures of a 100+ seat Diner.

Can the Jewish Deli be sustainable? Can a retro cuisine be part of the avant- garde?

Local, organic VS. the externalized costs of cheap, industrial food and . . . collective memory and food traditions?

Deli is at a crossroads. In New York, only a handful delis remain from hundreds. Across the country, beloved Delis continue to disappear. Popular expectations of “real” Deli conflict with today’s economic realities. And these expectations conflict with environmental sustainability.

Andrew Udell is a 16 year old student at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York City. Andrew is a co-founder, together with his friends Lizzie Davis and Skyler Siegel, of Veguary. I asked him a few questions about his plan to help save the world one month at a time.

What is Veguary and how did it start?

One day at shul, my Rabbi posed a question to our smaller minyan about our effect on the world.  One thought led to the next, and I just started thinking about how eating meat affects the world.  I decided to do some more research about vegetarianism, and I came across some really daunting facts that were difficult to handle, yet important to know. I wanted to try out being a vegetarian for a little while. I started doing some more thinking, one thing led to the next, and with the help of a few friends, we founded Veguary and built the site in a few months. Veguary refers to the second month of the year, in which those enthusiastic about fighting global warming, improving their health, or making a positive difference in the world commit to reducing or eliminating their meat intake by pledging on our website at www.veguary.org.

Why February? Was it for the name?

I never give a one-word response if someone asks whether I keep kosher. After saying “yes,” I usually add qualifiers, such as “I’m vegan, so I keep kosher by default.” Although I do keep kosher in my own way, the extent of my kashrut might not meet the expectations of the person asking the question. I grew up eating meatball pizza, shrimp cocktail, and pork fried rice, so keeping kosher was never a claim I could make early in life. In recent years as I’ve seriously explored the connections between Judaism and veganism, it has been a claim I like to make.

As I’ve noted before, being vegetarian makes it easier to keep kosher:

You don’t have to worry about whether you’re eating meat that’s certified kosher (and whether that certification meets Jewish ideals) if you’re not eating meat. You don’t have to worry about mixing meat and dairy products if you’re avoiding one or both of those categories altogether. As one vegetarian rabbi explained in a 2005 Jewish Ledger article, “We have one set of dishes (plus Passover dishes) and never have to worry about the status of leftovers in the fridge or whether a guest will mix the utensils or food items. … By not eating meat, I am much more certain to never violate, even accidentally, the Biblical and rabbinic prohibitions concerning non-kosher meat.”

Thanks so much to Lailah Robertson for this great guest post about her experience and the Hazon Food Conference. Lailah is a San Francisco freelance writer who writes the blog In My Box about her CSA box and all the delicious vegetarian, gluten-free things she makes with it. This post is NOT intended to endorse any particular diet or agenda, e.g. to say that being vegan (abstaining from all animal products) is the only way to live, or that vegetarians are hypocrites. It merely hopes to be an exploration of one of the least considered aspects of our food chain.

Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, asked us two questions during his keynote speech last night at the Hazon Food Conference. It felt like the beginning of one of those Jewish parables, the ones where the wise rabbi asks or tells us something that means more than it seems on the surface, where you ponder on the teaching and the world opens up in a new way.

“Stand up if you eat meat, but you wouldn’t if you had to kill it yourself,” Nigel called out. A number of people in the packed hall rose from their seats. I applauded them for their self-awareness and honesty, while of course maintaining a certain degree of vegetarian smugness.

Then he asked us another question. “Stand up if you are vegetarian, but would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” This time fewer people stood up, but it was still a significant number.

Then Nigel told us the story of the goat.

I love cooking big dinners especially when they come with interesting dishes or new culinary challenges.  Thanksgiving has been a favorite of mine for a long time, since I have in part not been celebrating the Jewish food holidays for all that long.   Even when I was college I was whipping up elaborate meals despite limitations to space (one year it was a dormitory kitchen in the basement of the building) or even supplies (I forgot to buy aluminum foil so I improvised by covering my chicken, not a turkey, in applesauce, which by the way kept the meat moist and gave it a slightly sweet flavor).

Living in New York City poses its own set of advantages and challenges.  I mean in New York, you can get anything and usually get it delivered (at least in Manhattan).  I’ve found that mostly to be true – that was until I tried to serve venison for Thanksgiving.

On Friday, Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of an Iowa kosher slaughterhouse, was convicted of 86 out of 91 fraud charges.  It has been over a year since the the Pottsville, Iowa slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors was raided by federal authorities arresting hundreds of workers.  Since the raid, vigorous debate has ensued regarding the treatment of the workers, the animals and even what it means to eat kosher meat.  The Jew and the Carrot hopes to continue this important debate.

Click here for the Jew and the Carrot’s coverage of the story including interviews, commentary and even a terrific video on the lives of the slaughterhouse workers.

In his Shabbat morning sermon to 3500+ members of Reform congregations at the  URJ’s 70th Biennial Convention in Toronto, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), launched the Green Table, Just Table - Shulhan Yarok, Schulhan Tzedek initiative calling for a commitment to ethical, ecological eating including consuming 20% less red meat, encouraging more communal eating and a discourse on a Reform kashrut–a Reform approach to Jewish dietary practice. It was a moment I eagerly welcomed after first sitting down with Rabbi Yoffie over six months ago to share with him the growing resources and diverse ways to connect to what Hazon has coined the new Jewish food movement, and to discuss the interplay between contemporary issues and ancient traditions–how our food choices impact not only our health, but the health of our planet.

Recently, acclaimed bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer appeared on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show to talk about his upcoming book, Eating Animals. As Julie Steinberg details in her post below, Foer, being both Jewish and a vegetarian, explores issues of food choices and eating meat in a personal narrative that helps shape a larger argument about vegetarianism.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is not for the faint of heart. His recent article in the New York Times (excerpted from the first chapter) includes stories of his grand-mother, a holocaust survivor, which he uses to define himself as well as frame his book. The Jew and The Carrot’s Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus wrote a nice post about it, including:

“But I what I found most moving was the way he connected his own ethical commitment to vegetarianism to his grandmother’s commitment to kashrut, even under the most extreme circumstances. She gets the last word in the dialogue he recalls,

Much is new over at KOL Foods, the country’s largest provider of kosher, sustainably raised meat. Founder Devora Kimmelman-Block has started a blog, which covers both news from the company and issues in sustainable meat production, written with a Jewish twist. KOL Foods has also started online ordering, to allow people from a wider range of locations to order ethical kosher meat. While there has been some criticism of this move, on the argument that this undermines KOL’s commitment to local meat, a counter-argument is that there are some areas of the country where local, ethical kosher meat simply isn’t possible: for example, Florida may have many Jews calling it home but no kosher slaughterhouse. KOL has also expanded its offering to include pastured poultry, the first time this has been available on a wide level (there have been smaller efforts in New York, Boston, and Ohio). From now until November 3rd, you can order a pastured turkey for Thanksgiving. All orders will be entered in a raffle to win a free turkey.You can read all about the turkey farmer and his birds on the KOL Foods website.

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.