In February and March I worked on an industrial pig farm in Israel, which was mentioned on Jcarrot back in February. In a way my time there was a bizarre, self-inflicted, extended identity crisis - but it was also a fascinating and challenging experience for me as both a kosher Jew and a believer in non-factory farmed meat.

I spent time on the “other” side and just recently wrote an article in The Forward, called “On Israel’s Only Jewish-Run Pig Farm, It’s the Swine That Bring Home the Bacon,” which expresses and reflects my own experiences on the farm, the many contradictions of this particular kibbutz, as well as the contradictions within myself.

You can read the full article here.

We *love* the song “Pesach Dub” by Ori Salzberg. Mixing audio from old school Manischewitz ads for matzos and gefilte fish (in jars!) with new school beats, it’s the best thing to happen to matzos since matzos pizza.

Click on the arrow below to listen - sing along!

“There’s nothing that quite hits the spot so | Your family will like it a lot so. | When they’re set to eat, just give them the treat: Manischewitz, American matzo!

After two months working on the pig farm and a few weeks of recuperation, I’m back to the The Jew & The Carrot blogging world, while living, cooking, eating, composting and blogging in Tel Aviv. Good to be back.

There’s an incredible magazine that I’ve been meaning to post about. It’s called Meatpaper and as its cover states, it is “your journal of meat culture.” And it really is. Meatpaper is a beautiful graphic art print magazine that documents the recent fleischgeist. It features incredible pictures and photo essays in addition to interesting, bizarre, and funny interviews and articles. Some of the issues the magazine covers are similar to ones discussed here on The Jew & The Carrot (debates about the moral consumption of meat) and others are certainly not (the importance of eating bull penis, and whether or not one should eat their spouse if deserted on an island together.)

In issue 3, there is an article on eating testicles in Tunisia, a meditation on why meat is so photogenic (and whether or not clown noses or tube socks, dressed similarly, could look as good), a photo series called “Acquaintances Holding My Plate of Meat,” and one great article called “Pork in the Promised Land,” that I may or may not have written. It’s a fun magazine and is a conversation starter and stopper. The print magazine and issue three is only available in stores, not on their website. It’s well worth it, if only for the sausage glamour shots.

On Monday, Chef Gil Marks offered us a delicious array of recipes to fill your shalach manot basket with freshly-baked treats (hamentaschen, of course, but also baklava, almond horns, pecan tassies and even fortune cookies!) Now, he’s back with even more ways to surprise your friends on Purim with creative, DIY shalach manot.

Chef Marks is the author of The James Beard Award-winning, Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World, and the upcoming Encyclopedia of Jewish Food - Next week, Chef Marks will be back with a menu for a Purim Persian Feast!

Themed Gifts:
Besides giving baked goods and confections, theme baskets provide an outlet for your ingenuity.

Try an Italian motif with an assortment of pastas, homemade tomato sauce, pesto, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, salami, Italian bread or focaccia, biscotti, and a bottle of Italian wine.

For a sushi basket (most of these items can be found in health food stores) include some homemade sushi, short-grain rice, nori (seaweed sheets), rice vinegar, tamari, mirin (sweet rice wine), homemade pickled ginger, wasabi (Japanese horseradish), salmon caviar, dashi (soup stock), sake, and Japanese tea and enclose instructions on how to use everything.

For an English effect use scones, an assortment of marmalades or jams, Cheddar cheese, rice pudding, pound cake, shortbread cookies, English ales and beers, and an array of teas.

After you have gone to the trouble of making and/or purchasing special items for shalachmones, it seems only appropriate to put them into something special…

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No, it’s not a bundt cake - it’s a GIANT FALAFEL!

See how this chickpea wonder was created, over at Flickr.

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.

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The Jew & The Carrot blogger, Jeff Yoskowitz, has been on hiatus from the blog for a little while - but he has a darn good excuse.  He is currently living on a kibbutz in Israel.  On the one hand, like many kibbutzim, internet access is spotty so posting frequently is a challenge.  But Jeff’s situation is a little different.  Jeff is currently researching the (painfully ironic) pork industry in Israel.  His kibbutz happens to house an industrial pork feed-lot, which means he’s spending most of his time hanging out with animals he’d never personally eat.

The little bit of time Jeff’s not researching pigs, he’s logging in his experience at his personal blog The Wet Sprocket.  And while we understand his need to prioritize his web time, his stories are just too interesting not to share.  To find out more about Jeff’s extraordinary daily experiences check out his blog, and read a few key (and quite graphic) excerpts below: 

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Last summer, the British rock band Radiohead made waves by selling their new album, In Rainbows, on a pay what you can basis.

Now, a vegetarian restauranteur is taking this model to the food world, selling meat-free, globally-inspired cuisine to customers - for whatever they think is “fair” - at his non-profit eatery, Lentil as Anything, and a local college cafe.

Some customers are completely thrown by the concept, and continue to ask for prices at the counter, but others see it as a chance to give back to their community. Owner Shanaka Fernando said the most a customer ever paid for a lentil burger was $50. “There must have been something in it that I didn’t see,” he said.

What do you think - is this an inspired idea, or totally nuts? I’m not sure yet, but I do already have a name in mind for the potential kosher, vegetarian spinoff: Abraham’s Tent.

Read the full article about the restaurant and school eatery here.

As I enjoy my last week of vacation before I return to New York City for school, my mind starts to wander towards all sorts of issues that didn’t really apply to me in the last year, when I was living in the woods and farming at a Jewish retreat center. The biggest one is paying rent, which I didn’t have to think about in my prime forest real estate (granted, I don’t yet have an apartment to pay rent on, anyone looking for a live-in farmer?).

Another is teaching; in the last year I’ve found that I really enjoy explaining things that I care about, but for the next two years, instead of having a relatively captive audience of Adamanicks to work with and teach, I’ll be a captive audience myself, paying very close attention to my teachers…

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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?

Following the lead of such projects as Yale Sustainable Food Project and inspired in no small measure by the popularity of such books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sustainable food has become an increasingly hot topic at college campuses around the country. Over this past summer and semester I have been involved in a collaborative project with two biology professors, Betsey Dyer and Deborah Cato, and over 30 First Year Seminar students to educate ourselves and the broader Wheaton College community about food and sustainability.

We concluded our semester earlier this month with a sustainable banquet using food which we ourselves harvested, got from local farmers’ markets, supplemented with Wise kosher organic chickens, and cooked - inspired by the “perfect meal” at the end of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was the required summer reading for all first year Wheaton students. The students from my seminar, “The Rituals of Dinner,” having studied dinner rituals ranging from Plato’s Symposium to the Passover Seder, the meals in Genesis, Leviticus, and the Gospel of Luke to Babette’s Feast and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, designed the ceremony for our sustainable harvest banquet. For me personally, it was a way in which my Jewish foodie and environmentalist commitments moved me into increasingly broader circles of connection with other people and with nature. The whole project was an intensely Jewish experience for me, even though I was doing it primarily in a non-Jewish context. The project itself was featured in the Winter 2008 edition of our alumnae/i magazine, the Wheaton Quarterly and you can read the full text of the article after the jump here: Read more »

On the eve of Thanksgiving, The Jewish Daily Forward (which just this week ran the controversial “Kosher Food Safety Alert” ad) published an article I’m truly grateful for: Kosher Activists Strive To Slaughter With a Conscience. Below is the article in full, which gives shoutouts to Hazon, The Jew & The Carrot, Kosher Conscience, and Heeb n’ Vegan and - more importantly - is one more, very public indicator that the demand for ethical, kosher products is on the rise.

Kosher Activists Strive To Slaughter With a Conscience
Nathaniel Popper
November 21, 2007
The Jewish Daily Forward

After 18 months of planning, New York’s new kosher meat cooperative slaughtered its first animals this week, just in time for Thanksgiving.

It took the founder of Kosher Conscience, Simon Feil, many months to find a shochet, or Jewish ritual slaughterer, who could do the job, and then Feil needed to find a flock of free-range heirloom breed turkeys. But he was not content to deal only with the logistics. When the first turkey went under the knife, Feil was there to cradle it in his arms — feeling the “solemn experience,” as he put it, of life leaving a body.

“It was an emotional day, and I’m still trying to process all the reactions I had to it,” Feil said a few hours after the first turkeys were slaughtered. “You really watch something that is a living creature turn into meat.”

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My friend (and The Jew & The Carrot contributor) Simon spent his day pulling feathers out of turkeys.  While I clicked away at a keyboard in my office, he plucked - getting these just-slaughtered birds ready for their Thanksgiving debut.

Simon is the founder of Kosher Conscience, an ethical kosher meat coop in NYC.  Don’t let the word ethical fool you.  A self described “vigorous carnivore,” he is about the farthest thing from a. a vegetarian or b. a hippie as one can possibly get.  He also has a seriously learned Jewish background on which he bases his ethical grounding - which is more than can be said for many Jews out there who wax zealous about ”eco-kashrut,” (ahem, myself included). 

Kosher Conscience has no intention of surreptitiously convincing Jews to eat less meat - you can leave that to PETA.  Instead, it answers the question: how do you enjoy the simcha of meat” without being soulless about it? 

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Rabbi Deborah Prinz is up to something sweet - exploring the Jewish connection to chocolate.  She writes:

“There are some surprising Jewish connections with chocolate, including Jews in the early chocolate trade and early Jewish chocolate makers.  Because the discovery of chocolate and the Spanish Inquisition, along with the Expulsion of Jews from Spain and later Portugal coincided, the Jewish connection to chocolate in the early days was primarily through Conversos in Portugal, France, Holland, the Caribbean and North America.”

Rabbi Prinz and her husband, Rabbi Mark Hurvitz, are planning group trips to explore The Chocolate Trail, and several speaking engagements including an upcoming lecture in Berkeley on December 6.

Find out more about this interesting project here.