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.
X-posted from Jewschool, Josh Frankel covers the growing Uri L’tzedek social justice beit midrash in Washington Heights. This week, the beit midrash covered food issues, including Agriprocessors:
Avi Lyon, director of the Jewish Labor Committee, told stories from his visit to Rubashkin’s meat’s AgriProcessors plant, in Iowa, and poor working conditions there, from intimidating workers not to speak to outsiders, to charging workers for their smocks and not paying them for the time required to get into and out of their safety equipment, to the high injury toll. Mike Schultz led a group brainstorm of any and all problems of workers’ rights or being an ethical kosher consumer that were really bothering the people in the room, and people had a lot to say, with a lot of fervor. Steven Exler outlined the cycle of community organizing, presented more facts on Agriprocessors, and asked people what they would be willing to do about it. Shmuly closed out the night by offering multiple opportunities for “homework,” ways to start acting on what we had talked about. 10 people signed up to table for workers’ rights at this weekend’s convention of kosher food producers, KosherFest. Others are planning to start working on pressuring local food providers to carry other meat options. Several people wanted to work on generating more of a halachic discourse on tzedek questions among the poskim.
The batei midrash will continue every 3 or 4 weeks, open and accessible to all, and now Uri L’Tzedek is starting to move into providing support and partnership for those who are ready to take the lead and get it done in the community. Started by three YCT students, Aaron Finkelstein, Mike Schultz, and Shmuly Yanklowitz along with the generous support of a Herbert Lieberman Award. For more information, contact Aaron Finkelstein.
Margaret Hathaway’s new book, The Year of the Goat
, tells the story of the 40,000 miles she and her partner (now husband), Karl Schatz, traveled in search of the perfect goat cheese - and a new way of life.
Before embarking on their year-long journey, Hathaway was a freelance writer who managed Magnolia Bakery in New York City, and Schatz worked as a photo editor for Time Magazine’s website. Together, they lived in Brooklyn, shopped at the Greenmarkets, and generally enjoyed city life - but they craved something more than the five boroughs could offer. So, they set off on a year-long journey to discover if farming - and particularly working with goats - held the secrets of the next chapter of their lives.
Along the way, Hathaway and Schatz met what they call, a “vivid cast of characters,” including a myriad of goat cheese and meat enthusiasts, a Texas-born Muslim living in Maine and helping the local Somali community in Lewiston acquire fitting goats for their religious festivals, and a Messianic Jew who keeps Shabbat as well as a herd of goats.
I spoke with Margaret and Karl last week about goats (naturally), their adventures in homesteading, the connection between farming and Jewish tradition, and their upcoming event in NYC, the Goatstravaganza (Nov. 8).
Interview continues below the jump…
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This past Shabbat, my boyfriend and I walked from Park Slope to Red Hook, Brooklyn (an hour each way - no, not uphill) to the Red Hook Harvest Festival. He’d heard me yammer on for a while about the ”real life FARM” in the middle of Brooklyn, but as we passed the many corner stores and high rises that typify the borough, I think he started to doubt that such a place could really exist. Until we arrived.
In the middle of a once dilapidated asphalt playground, 2.75 acres of earth and plants now thrive. Brooklyn has a rich farming history - as late as the 19th century, Brooklyn was the second most productive agricultural county in the United States, second only to Queens. But today, growing anything more than what fits in a window box or on a stoop seems nothing short of a miracle.
The Red Hook farm was started by Ian Marvey, founder of an organization called Added Value, which empowers neighborhood kids and teens to learn farming and business skills (through farmer’s markets and sales to local restaurants), while strengthening the local community. According to Added-Value’s website:
“Twice in the past three years Red Hook’s only full-service grocery store closed, forcing residents to walk three miles and cross an eight lane road or take a $10 cab if they want to shop there. Red Hook was a textbook example of a broken food system and its effects on a community. Now, we are becoming a model of how residents, businesses, social service agencies and religious institutions can begin to rebuild a food system that promotes social interaction and economic activity while nurturing our health and improving the environment.”
Folks in the neighborhood know the farm. Lost in an unfamiliar part of town, I asked a passing teenager if he knew where the corner of Columbia and Sigourney street was (unlike most rural farms, this one has an intersection). He didn’t know.
“Um, do you know where the, uh, farm is?” I asked sheepishly.
“Oh yeah - the farm’s that way” he said, pointing us on.
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Today is the kick off of the Globesity Festival in NYC - a week long series of performances that confront the “beastly grind” of over-consumption. Each of the participating artists engaged in a juice-fast before the festival, during which they “conceived a theatrical performance in response to consumerism,” that will be showcased at the festival.
Journalists, writers, and documentary film makers serve an obvious purpose in the food movement - researching our society’s eating patterns and reflecting them back in an accessible (ahem, digestible) format. But what about the performance artist, the dancer, the sculpter? Find out by checking out the performances at Globesity Fest, here.
Just one short day after Blog Action Day, is World Food Day, an annual celebration of The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The theme this year (and shouldn’t it really be every year?) is The Right to Food.
I was struck by how the FAO’s framing of The Right to Food feels so akin to the Jewish obligation of tzedakah, which is often translated incompletely as “charity,” but actually comes from the root meaning “justice:”
“The Right to Food is the right of every person to have regular access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable food for an active, healthy life. It is the right to feed oneself in dignity, rather than the right to be fed. With more than 850 million people still deprived of enough food, the Right to Food is not just economically, morally and politically imperative - it is also a legal obligation.”
In celebration of World Food Day, here are four resources for you to check out - an inspiring article by food activists, Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, and three Jewish organizations that are working towards food justice.
Last month, I had a great time at the Alternative Energy Festival run by the Beacon Sloop Club, an affiliate of the Clearwater organization. The club has done wonders in rehabilitating the waterfront area, and bringing environmental education and progressive culture to the city.
Pete Seeger himself has been a hard-working member of the club from the beginning, and his commitment to the Hudson river has been remarkable and unwavering over many years, and it is always a delight to see him there. I came to sing, and to demonstrate the ‘Veggie Voyager’, my vegetable oil-powered van.
After my concert, I wandered around the well organized, dockside Beacon Farmer’s Market (with lots of sustainably grown food) that runs there every Sunday.
There I met Seth Aaron, a student from the Newburgh Free Academy, and part of the winning team in the 12th annual Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge, a national competition. They drove from Texas to NY in July, and tied for first place with a team from Missouri. That qualifies them to go on to the world championship in Australia. The car itself, dubbed the ‘Sol Machine’, is actually made of Kevlar, a welded titanium frame and solar panels that charge the battery. It can go up to 50 mph. The car’s parts total more than $50,000.
In my next post, I’ll be talking with Seth about his culinary experience on the trip.
Days after Yom Kippur and it is already happening again: another pork establishment in Israel was set on fire. Ynet reported the news, though they have yet to report for sure whether or not the arsonist was an ultra-Orthodox Jew; nevertheless, this is just one of many recent related attacks and one more part of the ongoing battle over pork in Israel (see Ben Murane’s post on such battles in Netanya).
I just arrived in Israel one day before Yom Kippur and will be here for the year exclusively researching pork in Israel. I am specifically analyzing the tension between religious and secular Israelis, and am interested in how certain Israelis raise and eat pork as a form of political and cultural protest. It is still illegal to raise pigs on Jewish land, though through a series of loopholes, a few kibbutzim have emerged as major producers of Israel-raised pork products. I’ve been following this topic very closely and when attacks like this most recent one occur, I take notice . . . and feel surprisingly conflicted. Read more »
