On UJC’s podcasts web page, Nigel moderates a panel discussion about the new jewish food movement featuring Simon Feil, Leah Koenig, Linda Lantos, and Lisa Kleinman. Download it here!

Leonard Felson, you’re our hero.  Thank you for writing such a beautiful, thorough article about Hazon’s food work for The Jerusalem Report. 

Print the full text here.

The Jerusalem Report
October 15, 2007
By: Leonard Felson

Tuv Ha’Aretz brings together 3,000 years of kashrut, food tradition and the environment.

Winter squash, broccoli, fall lettuce, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage - all the fall crops are being harvested or about to be these days at Garden of Eve, an organic farm at the eastern end of Long Island. The farm is also part of a new movement that links synagogues and Jewish community centers with a growing number of organic farms across the country.

In what’s believed to be the first project of its kind, Hazon, a New York-based Jewish environmental group, has shepherded the creation of 10 such partnerships in the United States and Israel this year, with plans for up to 18 next year and more in the years ahead Community Supported Agriculture partnerships, or CSAs, have been around for decades to encourage consumers to support local farms. Members or “shareholders” pay a fee at the start of a growing season to meet a farm’s operating expenses; in return, members receive a portion of the farm’s produce each week, throughout the season.

Hazon sponsors annual bike rides from Jerusalem to Eilat each May in order to publicize its mission: to build and create a healthy, sustainable Jewish community by sponsoring cutting-edge educational initiatives, according to Hazon officials. Three years ago, it broached the idea of sponsoring a Jewish CSA as another way of achieving this.

Read more »

Today’s JTA published “On the Green Scene: Magazines, Chickens, and one Sinful Goat” - with a shoutout to Hazon’s Food Conference.

Meanwhile, also at the JTA: a Jewish Businessman in Russia is giving Starbucks a run for its money (while Starbucks threatens to sue)

Chow reports that Jerry Seinfeld’s wife’s new book: Deceptively Delicious shares her tricks for getting veggie-hating kids to eat more green.  (Great idea, but will they really fall for spinach puree in the brownies?)

In the aptly titled, “O My God,” Ethicurean offers another example of the organic movement being taken over by big business: organic bottled water.  (wtf?!)

Members of Berkeley’s Tuv Ha’Aretz learned a hard lesson in CSA farming last week. I had two Israeli cousins in tow — they were staying with me for a few days as they took their two teenaged kids on a jaunt through parts of the U.S., and incidentally, just as they looked at me in astonishment when I told them I lit candles and said kiddush every Friday night, they were equally incredulous when I told them that I picked up a box of organic veggies every Wednesday from my synagogue — as soon as I took my box, I felt it was much lighter than usual. I didn’t stop to find out why; I was in a rush to get my cousins to the car rental place.

If we were disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t be getting our gorgeous tomatoes last week, it was heartbreaking to read what is happening on our farm. A vacationer returned from Hawaii to the Dixon area (where our farm is located, right outside Davis, CA) with the dreaded Meditteranean Fruitfly. The whole area of Dixon has been quarantined, and no produce that the fruitfly likes can leave any farm. Read more »

The Jewish Week published an article this week that examines: The Yom Kippur tradition of kaporot, the Jewish ethical food movement. Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot both get significant shout-outs. Read the full article here (or below).

Swinging No More
Kaporos and the new eco-kosher movement.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer

Growing up out of town, in a non-Orthodox household, I never knew from kaporos.

It’s a post-Talmudic, pre-Yom Kippur custom in some traditional circles that involves swinging a live chicken three times over your head, reciting some verses that symbolically transfer your sins to the fowl — a rooster for a man, a hen for a woman — then leaving it behind to be slaughtered, in a kosher manner of course, and given to a needy family.

Kaporos is Hebrew for “atonements.” The custom is supposed to teach sensitivity for God’s creatures and awareness of one’s own transgressions. Orthodox, but a rationalist, I wasn’t interested. Then Tami called.

“Do you want to do kaporos with me?” she asked.

Read more »

Although I am no fan of flying, I do find that one of its perks is having uninterrupted reading time. I was already looking forward to my husband and I celebrating our one-year anniversary with four days in Oregon. But when the New Yorker arrived last week, and I saw it was a double issue dedicated to food, it made me even more excited — what better airplane reading could there be?

It didn’t disappoint. Read more »

One thing I hate about living in California is having to wait until Wednesday to get The New Yorker. When I lived in New York, receiving both that and New York on Mondays made the beginning of the week a little bit brighter. My friend Deborah used to refer to it as “Magazine Monday.”

I admit it, I’m a total New Yorker junkie, and it hasn’t abated since I left. (Did anyone catch Roz Chast’s full-page cartoon recently of ‘The Museum of One’s Kitchen?’ It’s up on my fridge right now, and absolutely everyone who has seen it has chortled in recognition of their own ‘Cabinet of Too Many Teas…’) Well, given that it only came yesterday, I haven’t had time to read it yet. But I noticed that in the double issue which is entirely dedicated to food, readers of this blog will find several articles of interest; most notably, there is a Jane Kramer profile of Claudia Roden, author of one of my favorites, “The Book of Jewish Food,” and an exploration of eating from the five boroughs by Adam Gopnik. If you are not a subscriber, I’d go get a copy, it looks to make for some excellent holiday-weekend reading.

Since Tuv Ha’Aretz started here in Berkeley, I’ve gotten to know Adam Edell quite well. We sit and chat while waiting for members to pick up their boxes of produce. We talk, we schmooze, we inspect the zucchini and tomatoes. I’ve even met his dad. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen him “grinning grubbily.”

That’s how Adam was described in this article called “Sustainable Synagogue,” published this week one of the area’s free weeklies, the East Bay Express.

I’m sorry, I’m a journalist too, so I know how tempting it can be to put in that perfect alliterative phrase, even when it doesn’t fully apply. I’m not even sure what a grubbily-looking grin looks like. But after reading this otherwise very complimentary article about us, I couldn’t help but fixate on that one line. Then again, maybe it’s only natural to grin grubbily when talking about composting.

Today’s New York Times included a great article by Joan Nathan: Of Church and Steak: Farming for the Soul.  Joan writes about the work being done across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths to encourage sustainable agriculture, CSAs, responsible meat consumption and stewardship of the land within these faith communities. 

The article is a who’s who of the faith and farming world and includes a shout out to Hazon for the Tuv Ha’Aretz Community-Supported Agriculture program and also The Jew & The Carrot as the front page of the emerging Jewish food movement.  She writes:

“Environment-minded Jews are asking the leaders of Conservative Judaism to rewrite their kosher certification rules to incorporate ethical concerns about workers, animals and the land. Hazon, the Jewish environmental organization, has set up community-supported agriculture programs, or C.S.A.’s, in which customers purchase shares of a farm’s harvest….”

and later

Read more »

By the numbers, from Time Magazine:

• 1.1 billion - people around the world that the U.N. estimates that lack safe drinking water, a number that could reach 5 billion by 2025
• 8.25 billion - gallons of bottled water Americans drank in 2006, a 9.5% increase from the year before.
• $10.8 billion - water sales last year — all for something you can get virtually free.
• 4,000 - tons of CO2 generated each year — the equivalent of the emissions of 700 cars — by importing bottled water from Fiji, France and Italy, three of the biggest suppliers to the U.S.
• Less than 25% - percent of water bottles recycled, leaving 2 billion lbs. a year to clog landfills.

Read more »

Thanks to Julie Weiner who wrote an amazing article about Tuv Ha’Aretz, faith and farming for the Associated Press.  It’s copied below, but if you want to read the full thing,  click here.

By JULIE WIENER
For The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
 

Faith meets farming and fuels community supported agriculture movement

On Wednesday evenings, faith and produce mingle at Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel synagogue.

As parents gather to collect their children from Hebrew school or attend lectures, many also pass through the social hall, where they collect boxes of tomatoes, peaches, spinach and other organic produce.

It’s a blending of physical and spiritual sustenance that Rabbi Hillel Norry calls the best of Jewish values in action, and it’s just one of a growing number of faith-based community supported agriculture (or CSA) programs nationwide.

“We’re taking Jewish ideals of justice, economics, health, ecology, well-being and responsibility and putting them to work in the real world in a way that makes our lives and the life of the farmer better,” Norry says.

Read more »

So a Reuters reporter emailed me last week. She had seen my Jew & the Carrot post “Could I play for the other team?” in which I mused about whether I could go back to eating meat after almost 20 years of being a pescatarian. She asked whether she could interview me for a story she was writing about “Compassionate Carnivores,” and vegetarians who are thinking about eating meat once again because of the more humane methods now being used in farming.

She interviewed Mollie Katzen, of Moosewood cookbook and restaurant fame. She interviewed Isa Chandra Moskowitz, TV personality, vegan punk rock spokeswoman and cookbook author. And she interviewed me. What’s more, I’m the first to be quoted in the article, and she gave me equal time with these two food world luminaries.

Katzen and Moskowitz are food personalities. While those who know me certainly would say I have a personality too – and even a strong one at that – I am not even a blip on the foodie radar screen. I certainly don’t have a cookbook or TV show to my name. I am just a journalist-turned natural foods chef who is still trying to get my business up and running. I am truly honored to be in such great company.

Read more »

Yesterday, in the New York Times, was an op-ed by journalist and author James McWilliams, about the true impact of the local food movement on the global environment. In the article, McWilliams, himself an enthusiastic member of a CSA, reports that,

“Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, no doubt responding to Europe’s push for “food miles labeling,” recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption. Other scientific studies have undertaken similar investigations. According to this peer-reviewed research, compelling evidence suggests that there is more — or less — to food miles than meets the eye.”

These studies, McWilliams writes, actually prove that once factors other than “food miles” are entered into the equation (such as a farm’s water, energy and fertilizer/pesticide use; packaging, etc) the total carbon footprint of food purchased from half way across the world is often actually lower than that purchased from locally-grown sources. Quoting a noted New Zealand environental researcher, McWilliams notes that locally grown food, “is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle than during transport.” McWilliams goes on to urge fellow local-food supporters to view these findings not as a threat, but as a challenge to look at the food system in a new way, as both environmentalists and pragmatists.

There is certainly a large challenge present in this article. For one, it could generate unfavorable press for the local food movement when certain elements of McWilliams’ presentation are taken out of context, or are manipulated for political purposes. For some of us, this information might force us to reconsider whether the other values of local foods (taste, freshness, supporting local farmers, community development, worker’s rights, to name but a few) would still compel us to choose the low-spray apples we buy from the local farm, or, as John Mackey of Whole Foods would claim, we’d be better off buying certified organic ones from across the country.

It’s a discussion worth beginning, even if our answers lead to more questions.

FYI, here is McWilliams’ original article from the Texas Observer, on which the NYT piece was based.

And here are some other perspectives on this issue.

Rabbi Morris Allen has served Congregation Beth Jacob outside of St. Paul, Minnesota for 22 years. In his “spare time,” he is also the founder of Hechsher Tzedek – a proposed certification put forward by the Conservative movement last December that would endorse foods that are traditionally kosher and also produced in a socially just and sustainable way.

Hecsher Tzedek has received significant acclaim, and also sharp criticism since the idea was piloted eight months ago. I spoke with Rabbi Allen recently to find out the latest news.

“Kashrut is not simply a statement about what we can and cannot eat,” Rabbi Allen told me. “There are so many people who worry about whether a cow’s lung is smooth [glatt] or not, but have no worry about whether someone’s hand was mutilated in the process.”

After my goose bumps subsided, I asked him what this vision looked like in practice. He identified six criteria that will be the “meat and potatoes” of Hechsher Tzedek as it develops:

Read more »