California is  ideal for olive growing, though the potential for making olive oil is not being reached by the community due to the cost and labor involved.  Andy Dale has decided to take matters into his own hands by using Kickstarter.com to raise the money needed to create a community olive oil press.  With olive trees already growing, the idea is that people will be able to put the fruit to use in creating natural, local, fresh olive oil.  Dale has calculated that with the oil press charging either a fee or a percentage of olive oil, it will be able to sustain itself and even grow, eventually becoming a fixture in the Bay Area community.

Dale has found a press for his project at a fraction of the usual cost, though he still needs money to make this dream come true.  His vision for the press as a way to turn a prohibitively labor and fund intensive process into a way for a community to become greener and more sustainable is a great example of a how to use a resource creatively.

Take a look at his project and consider making a donation.  Each donation level has an incentive, for example, $10 will get you a 375ml bottle of fresh pressed olive oil.  If the necessary $2,500 are raised by September 5^th, the project will be backed.  If not, donors will receive their money back and the community press will remain an unfulfilled dream.  Supporting initiatives like these is a great way to promote sustainable food.  Bringing self-sufficient olive oil (and other oils too) would bring the meaning of the word “local” to a new level in Berkeley.

A new film is being produced on Haiti’s crisis, its roots and its future.  Hands That Feed has made a short intro video about their project in order to try to raise the necessary funding for the film’s production.  The film will explore questions about what the real problems facing Haiti are, and from the video it’s clear that the recent earthquake was simply an exacerbation of pre-existing problems.

Haiti’s dependence on food aid seems to be an unnecessary and reparable problem.  The film shows how the organization, Nouvelle Vie, is working to empower young people to take back their nation’s food production.  Through education, this program creates sustainable aid that will allow the participants to learn about agriculture and teach it to others.  By employing active solutions on the ground, Nouvelle Vie seeks to help Haiti both recover and grow.

Watch the video and visit the kickstarter website.  In order to get funding for the entire project, the group needs to raise $15,000 by Monday.  If they do not raise the money, all donations will be returned and the project will remain unfunded.  However, a generous donor has offered to independently match the next $2,000 raised, so go check out the site and consider making a donation.

Haiti’s self-determination has been undermined by food aid.  Hatians have been turned into dependents, relying on rich nations for food, when they have everything they need to take back control.  Help this story be told about a new generation of leaders rising up who will create sustainable change.

Originally published by The Jerusalem Post, written by Ehud Zion Waldoks

Israeli agricultural technology is among the best in the world, and Manuela Zoninsein, 28, would like to help introduce it to China.

Zoninsein was in Ramat Gan last week to attend the fifth annual conference of ROI, which encourages young Jewish entrepreneurs from around the world. She sat down with The Jerusalem Post to explain her idea.

“I am launching a business intelligence newsletter called Agrigate in September, focusing on agricultural technology,” she explained. The newsletter, she said, would survey the Chinese agritech business scene, highlighting deals, technology, developments, innovations and more, with an audience of Israeli and US agritech companies.

The Brazilian-born and US-raised Zoninsein has been living in China for the last three years and working as a foreign correspondent, writing for Newsweek, Engineering News Record and Climate Wire.

Surprisingly, it was her work as the dining editor for Timeout Beijing and her environmental activism that led to Agrigate.

“The foodie culture is focusing more and more on what’s happening at the source. Food also has a huge environmental impact, as agriculture is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases and I think rejiggering food production is easier than rejiggering transportation,” she told the Post.

Zoninsein sees a logical link between Israeli agritech and China.

“China is facing a lot of the same issues that Israel does: desertification [and] scarce clean water supplies,” she said.

“The government has begun investing in biotech to achieve complete food independence.

Right now, China is importing 30 percent of its foodstuffs and has maxed out on arable land.

They’re interested in developing pest- and drought-resistant seeds, where Israel has expertise.”

According to Zoninsein’s market research, Agrigate would be the only English-language newsletter focused on the Chinese agricultural scene.

“I think there’s little understanding of China [in Israel and the US], and the level of Chinese spoken in the US is very low as well,” Zoninsein, who has learned the language, said.

In parallel to the newsletter, she intends to work as a consultant to build up her credentials and credibility as a knowledgeable source. To that end, she met with Israeli players in academia and the private sector during her stay in Israel, and will connect with US players in September at the Ag 2.0 conference in New York.

Turning specifically to ROI, Zoninsein was enthusiastic about its support. The fifth year conference of 120 people was open only to those who had attended a previous conference.

“They give us business training and lots of networking,” the Harvard graduate concluded.

“We met very interesting Israelis and met [representatives from] Israeli cleantech VC funds during the organized events.

“ROI also encourages collaborations.

I met my web designer here last year. I also got to practice pitching my idea. The people were really supportive and no one called me crazy, so it gives me confidence to go beyond this circle to the larger world and test my idea out on another 120 people.”

There’s been a huge rise in Jewish farmers over the past several years, Emily Jane Freed, 34, told The Jerusalem Post last week, on the sidelines of the ROI conference in Ramat Gan.

Freed is the assistant production manager for Jacobs Farm, which has five ranches and three greenhouses in California, where it grows 250 acres of organic culinary herbs.

“If you lined up the farms side by side, it would take about four and a half hours to drive by them – about the distance from Jerusalem to Eilat,” Freed explained.

In addition to her full-time job as a farmer, Freed was also last year’s volunteer coordinator of the Hazon food conference.

Part of the rise in Jewish farming, she said, is “the tank in the US economy. People realize they need to fend for themselves more. The other part is more and more people wanting to know where their food comes from and what’s in it.”

Hazon has become the central organization for the intersection of Judaism and food, according to Freed, and drew 650 people to its food conference last year. It was also asked recently to present the Jewish take on food at a conference on religions and food at the White House organized by First Lady Michelle Obama, Freed said.

While initial reactions usually took the form of “What are we going to talk about? Kugel?” Freed explained the focus of the conference.

“The idea was to talk about what kosher means [in the 21st century], composting, shmita, pork, the Tu B’Shvat Seder and how to connect to the land,” she said.

The conference also helped expand Hazon’s Tu Ba Aretz program, which connects Jewish communities or synagogues with CSAs (community supported agriculture).

“It’s a good deal for both sides – the community connects to its food and the farmer gets 30 to 100 signups at a shot for his deliveries.”

The desire to know the source of one’s food is not restricted to the Jewish community, she noted. Part of Jacobs Farm’s success rests on its organic credentials, while another part is due to the sheer quantity of herbs it can produce.

“November and December are our busiest months,” she said. “We pick 10,000 pounds a day of fresh herbs to ship all over the country to meet the Thanksgiving demand, and then we do it again in December for Christmas.”

The company recently acquired the Safeway supermarket account, which Freed called “a really big deal.” She opined that while often considered food for the elite because of its higher prices, organic would reach the masses when chains like Safeway started carrying it at lower costs.

Freed also offered a fun fact.

“We have a five-acre field just of mint – all of which goes to the Cheesecake Factory bar and restaurant chain for its mojitos,” she said with a smile. “They get their own shipment every Monday and Thursday.”

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.

Ellen Botnick shared the following photos with us from the Cleveland garden. Things are looking beautiful since last we posted. Check out that old story here and click below the jump for some more lovely photos.

You’ll notice the sign “Gan ha’Or”, the Garden of Light, which is the name of our garden. The confirmation students (10th grade) used recycled glass to make the sign, which was designed by Bonnie Cohen. She’s standing on the left, and I’m standing on the right. The garden signs were made by Dick Rossen, who used wood left over from the falling down jungle gym, which we refashioned into a tool shed. He routed the names of all the vegetables, flowers and herbs in the pieces of wood, and Bonnie Cohen wrote the names in Hebrew calligraphy. The Academy students painted the signs with Jewish symbols. We put lattice on the sides of the tool shed, and we’re growing gourds and sunflowers. At the far end of the garden we have two compost bins we built from wooden pallets.

Yasher Koach, Ellen! Congratulations.

]]> http://jcarrot.org/progressinclevelandatganhaor/feed 0 http://jcarrot.org/students-on-the-rise-lets-get-cofed http://jcarrot.org/students-on-the-rise-lets-get-cofed#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 18:34:10 +0000 GuestPost http://jcarrot.org/?p=11842 Yoni Landau inspired by the Hazon Food Conference and as a result is putting together a training in Northern California for students to take their campus food movements to the next level and then implement a sustainable, student-run business model to act as a hub. The organization is called the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed). Thanks, Yoni, for sharing your work and your thoughts with the Hazon family!

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 caf� 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 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!

The recent Joshua Venture Dual Investment Program Applications for 2010 were a wonderful example of Hazon’s impact in the Jewish community. Two of the newly appointed Fellows are directors of the two organizations in which Hazon is a fiscal sponsor:  Nati Passow of the Jewish Farm School and Zelig Golden of Wilderness Torah. A third Fellow is our friend, Eli Winkelman, the founder of Challah for Hunger, which Hazon helped grow when it was part of our food program in 2008-2009.

Other programs have their connections to Hazon as well — Rachel Nussbaum is the Rabbi at the Kavana Cooperative, the host of one of our two Hazon CSAs in Seattle, WA (learn more about it here). And, Rabbi Ari Weiss and Uri L’Tzedek have been integral in the push for ethical Kosher food, including, of course, Kosher meat.

Huge congratulations to all of the new Fellows!

Many of you may have missed this story on Marketplace about KOL Foods during your Passover celebrations. You can learn more about ethical kosher meat in general here on JCarrot, and more about our friend Devora Kimelman-Block’s unique partnership with a halal meat producer. Thanks to Ari Daniel Shapiro, an alumnus of Hazon’s New York Ride and an independent radio producer, for sharing this story with us. Check out more of Ari’s stories here.

To hear the Marketplace story “Unlikely duo teams up for kosher, halal” click here.

Zachary Agopian is a chef in Portland, OR and an intern working with an exciting project called Food-Hub: food-hub.org/. This project promotes the use of local foods by directly connecting local farmers and ranchers with local buyers. Thanks, Zachary, for sharing this project with us!

If you’re like me you’re always on the prowl for the freshest ingredients to nourish your body. Now, this may involve an assortment of ridiculous activities; from a full inspection of your milk aisle for the freshest carton, or the heated family “discussion” over your highly guarded mushroom foraging stash. My personal favorite, over-dosing on peaches until you can’t stand the sight of one until next summer, as to not give-in to the temptation, in the long winter months, of a well traveled piece of fruit.

But Wait, Locavores! We now have technology on our side. No, I am not speaking of bioengineered, modified, high yield, “enhanced” vegetables. (Who really wants all of their food to look and taste exactly the same?) I’m talking about FoodHub.

FoodHub. www.food-hub.org.

A new online directory and marketplace which connects some of the region’s most passionate farmers, ranchers, and food producers with regional buyers. What is so amazing about FoodHub is that it can benefit everyone. If you’re a school district looking to purchase 500 lbs of organic carrots, or a local grocery store wanting to stock your shelves with local products, or just throwing a dinner party and want to find locally raised chickens; FoodHub is your tool!
FoodHub is a not-for-profit, there is a membership fee of $100 per year and is open to food buyers and sellers of all kinds throughout OR, WA, AK, ID, MT, and CA. Members create online profiles that include contact info, products they buy or sell, preferred methods for doing business, and many other useful details. Sophisticated search capabilities allow buyers to instantly discover ready suppliers with a few clicks of their computer keyboard. Conversely, sellers can use FoodHub search features to identify new buyer leads and build targeted customer databases. With over 3,000 items in FoodHub’s pantry, the search options are endless.

My favorite tool on FoodHub is the Marketplace function which is a kind of Craig’s List for food. Buyers and sellers post immediate needs and opportunities in FoodHub’s Marketplace. Consider the following posts recently placed on FoodHub:

• Artisan Cheese Coming out of the Caves: Our newest blue cheese – Caveman Blue will be ready to release from our caves within the next two weeks. Contact us now for information about ordering.
• Local Baker Looking for Rhubarb: We are in search of local rhubarb for pie season. We prefer once a week deliveries to our North Portland Bakery. We need 250 – 350 pounds per week while in season (April – July). Please email through FoodHub to provide us with more information.
• Do Your Products Need a Ride? We deliver ice cream in our freezer truck from Bellingham to Seattle/Eastside, San Juan Islands, Skagit Valley, Port Townsend to Port Angeles. We would be willing to deliver your frozen goods along our regular routes for a nominal trip charge.

Give FoodHub a tour; this is a tool that is going to reshape our nutritional landscape.