An article in the New York Times this morning reported that a truce has been made between factory farmers and animal rights activists in Ohio.  Much of the discussion is focused on caging methods for chickens.

According to the article:

Hoping to avoid a divisive November referendum that some farmers feared they would lose, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio urged farm leaders to negotiate with opponents, led by the Humane Society of the United States. After secret negotiations, the sides agreed to bar new construction of egg farms that pack birds in cages, and to phase out the tight caging of pregnant sows within 15 years and of veal calves by 2017.

While the agreement does not require existing egg farms to change their caging methods – one farm packs six or seven hens in cages about the size of an open newspaper – it does provide some measure of hope for proponents of cage-free egg production.

What seemed most striking from the article, though, is that the agreement was made primarily because the Governor of Ohio leaned on farmers out of fear that a public referendum on the issue would backfire.  That means that consumers are getting the attention of politicians on the issue of factory farming (at least in states like California and Ohio that have referendums).

Of course, the issue now will be whether consumers will be willing to pay for the increase in cost per egg at the grocery store that is likely to come from these kinds of state-by-state changes in the way eggs are harvested.  If not, they may want to look into getting their own chicken coop.

“I know it’s your day, but it’s not all about you…Why have a wedding if you’re going to be like that [serve only vegetarian options]?  Just print a bumper sticker.”

Did this article that concluded with this choice comment in today’s NY Times Sunday Styles section annoy others as much as it annoyed me?  Of course weddings should reflect one’s values, so if you’re kosher, or vegan, or vegetarian, why wouldn’t you serve kosher, vegan, or vegetarian food?  As the vegan Kathleen Mink quoted in the article said, it was  a “no brainer” to have a vegan menu at her and her husband’s wedding.  But another vegan pastry chef served meat at her wedding because she was afraid celebrity chefs like Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud would think she and her husband “were crazy” if they didn’t serve meat.  Yes, it’s important that the couple be good hosts and make their guests feel welcome, and it’s hard for a guest to feel that way if there’s nothing they can eat at the wedding banquet. Vegetarian guests or those with others with dietary restrictions certainly appreciate their hosts’ thoughtfulness in offering them options they can eat. But since when is it a hardship for omnivores not to have everything they can and will eat on the wedding menu!?

There’s an underlying assumption here that somehow vegetarian, vegan, and I would extend this also to kosher food cannot be prepared deliciously for discriminating palates.  If vegan, vegetarian, or kosher food is not appealing to non-vegans, non-vegetarians, or non-kosher folks, it’s the failure of imagination and skill of the chefs, not that these foods can’t be tasty.  These cuisines have come a long way from the bad old days of “rabbit food,”  as the readers and contributors of the Jew and the Carrot know well.  In Jewish tradition, the wedding banquet is a se’udat mitzvah, a meal celebrating the performance of a mitzvah, which has a moral connotation. As does veganism and vegetarianism for many of their practitioners. But there doesn’t need to be a divide between morality and aesthetics.  In Judaism, we have the concept of hiddur mitzvah – the “beautification of a mitzvah”.  Good food at a wedding can, indeed should reflect both our moral and aesthetic values.

But that point is made only to the extent that indeed our guests enjoy themselves. That’s the proof of the pudding (as it were)!  Indeed, I know from my own experience that weddings are a chance to prove to our family and friends that keeping kosher can be no less fulfilling than eating lobster and pork belly, even as vegetarians “see their weddings as a chance to prove that they are eating more than tree bark and lettuce.”

Ever since I read the New York Times article about the proliferation of food blogs, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about them. How did the number of foodies explode in what seems like all of a sudden?

I think back to when I was in college in the late nineties, a time when people weren’t yet using digital cameras or blogs, there was no social networking, and people were just starting to get into going online. So certainly people probably weren’t photographing every meal to post to the world; just food photographers would have done such a thing.

My own start as a foodie probably began back in college, when I was experimenting with vegetarianism and veganism, but I got into it for animal rights reasons, not necessarily for the love of food. As I learned more about where food comes from, I wanted to go straight to the source, and spent the summer after my�junior year of college working on an�organic farm. Not only did I love transplanting, weeding, working at�the farmers’ market, and harvesting (I was known as the fastest strawberry picker on the farm), but I loved eating meals with the farm owners. They always had fresh foods on the table -�hearty salads, berries, homemade pickles. Yes, this is where my “foodie-ism” probably began. The idea that one could eat year-round the fruits of one’s labor had a romantic and old-fashioned tone.

Then I read books – wonderful books – by the Nearings. If you don’t know who they were, check out some of my recommended reading. Maybe one day I’ll go into a full post about this homesteading couple who spent the latter parts of their lives living off their land.

And I taught kids about where their foods comes from, at Hawthorne Valley Farm, an organic and biodynamic�farm in Upstate New York.�I cooked with kids, taught them how to compost and garden, taught them to bake bread and churn butter. Another romantic and “back to the earth” kind of experience.

I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything, and I feel like it was just the right process. Going from student and learner to teacher…once I gained the knowledge of growing food and healthy eating I was able to teach others how to do so. As long as foodies don’t become obsessed with food, I don’t have a problem with it. Actually, if it means the expansion of organics and local foods in America, then it’s for the better. It’s about time Americans wake up and realize they should be spending more money on good food for their health, the environment, their communities, and their livelihood.

What do you think: What’s with all the foodies?

And if you’re a foodie, when and how did you become one?

Soda.  Pop.  Coke.  S.S.B. (sugar-sweetened beverage).  Whatever you wanna call it, it’s bad for you.  Or so argues Mark Bittman, the New York Times‘ “Minimalist” columnist and prominent foodie in this Sunday’s New York Times.  This phenomenal article poses the question of whether soda may be the next tobacco.  He interviews proponents calling for a special excise tax on soda to fund obesity prevention programs, as well as other measures to curb the intake of these empty calories in a can (or bottle).  The article comes after Michelle Obama’s appointment to lead a national campaign against childhood obesity, which some believe is linked to an excessive consumption of soda and candy.

Though I am no longer a child and do not suffer from obesity, I am embarrassed to admit that I am a near-daily consumer of soda – specifically, Dr. Pepper (ahhh…).  Therefore, this article was of personal interest to me.  Would an extra tax on soda, or the appearance of a cigarette-esque warning label on soda, deter me from feeding my addiction (and I do believe it is an addiction) to the stuff?

I am envious of friends that are naturally repulsed by soda, and who are likely healthier due to their avoidance of it.  It is a vice that I would gladly live without, though as with any addiction, it is not easy to quit.  Of course, my addiction is not helped by the ubiquity of soda advertisements in our society.  Indeed, the soda marketing people usually are successful at targeting those receptors in my brain that displace the long-term goal of being healthy and avoiding diabetes with the short-term goal of chemically-induced instant gratification.

Perhaps, though, I have found a happy medium that will wean me off of soda for good.  A friend and fellow soda “junkie” turned me onto a sodium- and calorie-free drink sold at Target and CostCo.  It is called “LaCroix Water,” and is essentially carbonated water with several fruit-flavor options.  Furthermore, they sell it in a 12-oz. can, which provides the same gratification as holding a cold 12-oz. can of Dr. Pepper…but leads to a healthier result.

Although human beings are conscious individuals with the ability to make informed decisions on what to consume, we also have areas of weakness (even Superman could be brought down by Kryptonite).  Unfortunately, Big Food – as Bittman calls the soda and snack food industry – knows this, and they depend on it for their revenue.  If the government can help empower individuals (especially children and their parents) to make healthier decisions and avoid these unhealthy chemical substances, then I will be grateful.

Indeed, if I hadn’t been introduced to Soda as a child, my affair with the dark sugary liquid would not have lasted as long as it has.

If you didn’t catch Jonathan Safran Foer’s wonderful piece “Against Meat” in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine Food Issue, it’s well worth reading. He writes how his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s “obsession with food”  formed his own vegetarianism, and how his Jewish values and experiences informed his and his wife’s decision to raise their children vegetarian.  But Safran Foer also points out his way to vegetarianism was not a straight path. He very nicely captures the ambivalence of those of us who lean towards vegetarianism, but still eat meat, as well as what appears to be a kind of ethical inconsistency in our enjoyment of the taste of meat.  As he bluntly puts it,

Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

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,

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

“He saved your life.”

“I didn’t eat it.”

“You didn’t eat it?”

“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

“Of course.”

“But not even to save your life?”

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

When Job reflected upon the wisdom of God’s creation “Truly the ear tests words as the palate tastes food” (12:11), could he have been alluding to the remarkable evolutionary development of the bones in our middle ear?  According to Natalie Angier in her article in the Science Times section of the New York Times today,

“Imagine what a dinner conversation would be like if you had decent table manners, but the ears of a lizard.  Not only would you have to stop eating whenever you wanted to speak, but, because parts of your ears are now attached to your jaw, you’d have to stop eating whenever you wanted to hear anybody else….Sometimes its the little things in life that make all the difference – in this case, the three littlest bones in the human body.  Tucked in our auditory canal, just on the inner side of the eardrum, are the musically named malleus, incus, and stapes, each minibone, each ossicle, about the size of a small freshwater pearl  and jointly the basis of one of evolution’s greatest inventions, the mammalian middle ear.  The middle ear gives us our sound bite, our capacity to masticate without being forced to turn a momentary deaf ear to the world, as most vertebrates are.   Who can say whether we humans would have become so voraciously verbal if not for the practice our ancestors had of jawboning around the wildebeest spit.”

Without this development, we’d have no Passover or Tu Bishvat seders, no motzi or kiddush, no singing or word games with friends over dessert in the sukkah.  The convivial conversations that turn mere eating into the pleasures of dining, the “words of torah over the table” (m.Avot 3:3) that make Jewish meals Jewish meals would be impossible.  In this fall season, surrounded by the beauty of the changing leaves, the bounty of the harvest on our tables, and the words to describe them and share with good company, I feel such gratitude.  “Blessed are you God, ruler of the world, oseh ma’aseh bereshit -who crafts the work of creation.”

After 70 years of publication, Conde Nast is ceasing publication of Gourmet magazine, while maintaining its support of Bon Appetit magazine.  As with many (most?) corporate decisions, it was a precipitous one, announced to its staff on Monday just as the November issue was off the presses.

As an immigrant to this country, I learned about the cultural rituals of my new country through the Girls Scouts manual– obtained from my small, neighborhood library, another American treasure– and later on, the pages of the food magazines.  The National Geographic was too arcane for me, but Bon Appetit broadened my cultural horizons past my family’s tenement apartment in New York’s Chinatown.  It showed me what people really do eat in their own homes and how to prepare their dishes.  It gave me a cultural passport, even before I could afford to travel on my own salary.

The New York Times reported on Gourmet’s demise in its Wednesday’s Food section—my favorite section of the whole week!—and noted that now-prominent chefs and food writers were weaned on the pages and recipes of Gourmet and how it provided a “home for literate, thoughtful food writing.  Its stable of contributors included James Beard, Laurie Colwin, and M.F.K. Fisher…”  It even quoted Alice Waters saying that a “review in Gourmet used to mean everything. ‘Yes, you could be in The New York Times, but that was sort of fleeting.  Gourmet was just a bigger cultural picture.’”

Well, if you’re not a subscriber (who may be getting the good-bye letter by now), you’re out of luck.  The newsstands and bookstores did not get any additional copies and they’re most likely sold out by now.  You could check with your local library.   Me, I’m relishing my September issue of Gourmet, which was billed as the “The Ultimate Harvest Cookbook” with recipes for everything in season from A (apples) to Z (zucchini).

A Federal Court ruled yesterday that the Bush USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) “RoundUp Ready” sugar beets was unlawful. The Court ordered the USDA to conduct a rigorous assessment of the environmental and economic impacts of the crop on farmers and the environment.

The federal district court for the Northern District of California ruled that the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (“APHIS”) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) when it failed to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”) before deregulating sugar beets that have been genetically engineered (“GE”) to be resistant to glyphosate herbicide, marketed by Monsanto as Roundup.

This court decision is a wakeup call for the Obama USDA that they will not be allowed to ignore the biological pollution and economic impacts of GE crops … The Courts have made it clear that USDA’s job is to protect America’s farmers and consumers, not the interests of Monsanto.

Additionally, over 100 companies have joined the Non-GM Beet Sugar Registry opposing the introduction of GE sugar beets, and pledging to seek wherever possible to avoid using GM beet sugar in their products: www.seedsofdeception.com/includes/services/nongm_sugar_beet_registry_display.cfm. Check out the registry, and pass it on to food producers who want to stand in solidarity to reject this GE crop.

Sugar beet seed is grown primarily in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, which is also an important seed growing area for crops closely related to sugar beets, such as organic chard and table beets. GE sugar beets are wind pollinated and will inevitably cross-pollinate the related crops being grown in the same area. Such biological contamination would be devastating to organic farmers, who face debilitating losses when their crops are contaminated by a GE variety. Contamination also reduces the ability of conventional farmers to decide what to grow, and limits consumer choice of the foods they can eat. In his September 21, 2009 order requiring APHIS to prepare an EIS, Judge Jeffrey S. White emphasized that “the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer’s choice to eat non-genetically engineered food, is an action that potentially eliminates or reduces the availability of a particular plant has a significant effect on the human environment.”

The Court found that the USDA failed to analyze the impacts of biological contamination on the related crops of red table beets and Swiss chard. Because organic seed is the foundation of organic farming and organic food integrity, and “organic” rules explicitly exclude GMOs, this GE crop threatened all organic chard and beets in the U.S. This victory is another step in protecting non-GE seeds along with the rights of organic farmers to be protected from negative economic impact from GE crops, and consumers rights’ to choose to eat food free of GE components.

“Roundup Ready” crops allow farmers to douse their fields with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide without killing the crop. Constant application of the herbicide has resulted in weeds becoming resistant to it. There are now millions of acres across the U.S. of such “superweeds,” including marestail, ragweed, and waterhemp, and farmers are using greater applications of Roundup or other, even more toxic chemicals. According to an independent analysis of USDA data by former Board of Agriculture Chair of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Charles Benbrook, GE crops increased herbicide use in the U.S. by 138 million pounds – a huge increase of these herbicides attributed to GE crops.

There is also mounting evidence that Roundup itself is very harmful. A 2008 scientific study revealed that Roundup formulations and metabolic products cause the death of human embryonic, placental, and umbilical cells in vitro even at low concentrations. Other recent studies suggest Roundup is an endocrine disrupter, and that some amphibians and other organisms may be at risk from glyphosate.

Now that Judge White ruled in our favor, we now take Monsanto into the courtroom to move for a permanent injunction to halt the sale and planting of GE sugar beet seed, just like we did in the GE Alfalfa case…

For you lawyers out there, the case is Center for Food Safety v. Vilsack, No. C 08-00484 JSW (N.D. Cal. 2009). The decision follows on the heels of a June 2009 decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the illegality of the APHIS’ approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered alfalfa, which Monsanto says they will now Petition the U.S. Supreme Court for review…

Stay tuned!

For press coverage, check out:
SF Chronicle:

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/23/BACP19QTF7.DTL

NY Times:

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/business/23beet.html?_r=1&sq=sugar%20beets&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1253728815-Ut3l69B7bPr/u2PoX9llrg

This blog is not the right place for it, but still, Roger Cohen has really gotten on my nerves over the last year or so.  His ranting about how wonderful Iran is and how great it is for the Jews there made me question my devotion to the New York Times.  His  piece “Advantage France,” in Sunday’s paper, about some of the differences between the French diet and the American diet, may have me beginning to change my mind.  I’ve only spent a few days in France, and only in Paris, but I’m guessing he’s exaggerating somewhat.  Nevertheless, the idea of Americans adopting any diet (or lifestyle, really) that required not only combining the ingredients and cooking them, but processing them to begin with (filleting the fish, making the pasta, etc) does sound beautiful and absurd.  The idea of connecting to food on a “gut” level and a geographic one far predates the terroir of which Cohen writes, at least in Jewish tradition.We learn from the early medieval tractate Avot de-Rabbi Natan (Version A, ch. 30, appears as ch. 31 in Vilna Shas edition) that “Rabbi Ahai ben Yoshaya says ‘One who gets grain from the market: to whom can he be compared?  To an orphaned child who is taken around to all the different wet-nurses but is never satisfied.  One who gets bread from the market: to whom can he be compared?  To one who digs his own grave and buries himself in it.  One who eats of his own [stuff, work, field?] is like a child who grows at the breast of his mother.’”

רבי אחאי בן יאשיה אומר הלוקח תבואה מן השוק למה הוא דומה לתינוק שמתה אמו ומחזירין אותו על פתחי מיניקות אחרות ואינו שבע. הלוקח פת מן השוק למה הוא דומה כאלו חפור וקבור. האוכל משלו דומה לתינוק המתגדל על שדי אמו

The standard commentary, Binyan Yehoshua by R. Yehoshua Falk,  indicates (in addition to the above-mentioned question of to which chapter the teaching belongs) that the problem with buying grain, at least, from the shuk is that it may not have been properly tithed, etc.  He reads R. Ahai’s words ritualistically, probably because he did not want the insult applying to his own community, which likely didn’t always farm, mill and bake all for itself and to which the laws of tithing no longer applied.  But let’s re-read it ourselves.

Unlike Roger Cohen, Rabbi Ahai makes no real comment about health in his aphorism.  Today we concern ourselves mainly with what our food will and won’t do to our bodies.  Rabbi Ahai’s concern seems instead to be about what our food will and won’t do to our souls, to our identities, to our selves.  Similarly, today we are concerned mainly with what the food will do to us after we eat it.  In contrast, Rabbi Ahai makes comparisons based on how people are already eating.

Let’s review the comment in reverse order.   The one who eats of his own land, work, stuff… this guy’s supposed to be the ideal, but the one to whom he is likened (one who grows at his mother’s breast) is mundane, even common.  The second part is super creepy.  Rabbi Ahai, and I guess Roger Cohen would agree, links this aspect of lifestyle to health.  We often hear people say things like ‘smokers are digging their own graves,’ etc.  But buying bread?  This seems exaggerated, to say the least.  Finally, the first clause has what would be regarded, especially after Camus, as a Sisyphean quality.  No matter where the orphan goes, his thirst cannot be sated.

I think Roger Cohen is being extreme and a little bit silly.  I also think he’s being unfair–it’s easy to wax nostalgic about France when you have a job that gives you the money and the time to go to France and have the kind of experiences he describes.  But I also think he has a point.  Disconnection from the sources of our food, according to Tradition, leads, in the best-case scenario to disconnection from our (or any other) land.  Many of the spiritual and communal goals we seek will likely go unfulfilled, no matter how hard we try to achieve them.  Scarier still is Tradition’s (and, l’havdil, Cohen’s) implication that not only what we eat, but even how we get it, may lead to poorer health and premature death.  And the silver lining doesn’t sound so great: it just means we get to be “normal.”

I don’t think we should all be farmers and I don’t even know if Rabbi Ahai was one. But still, I ask Roger Cohen, I ask Rabbi Ahai and I ask you:  how do those of us who don’t grow wheat, who don’t have access to a mill, who live in the city and who live in the diaspora (where it seems that, to Jews, there is a clear disconnect from the land and its bounty) save ourselves?

Mostly I keep returning to that Myth of Sisyphus.  (What can I say?  I buy my grain at the market… er, co-op.)  At least with regard to disconnect from our food, from getting dirty, from engaging with what keeps us alive, Camus is right.  Our lives have become absurd.  Although he was French and, according to Cohen, shouldn’t have to worry about such things, Camus says the only ways out are revolt or acceptance.  Those sound extreme.  I am about to walk to the co-op.  Tuv Ha’Aretz offers another way to get more connected to the source of food.  Education like that offered in posts here helps, too.  Hey Roger, on my way back from the co-op, I may have a baguette sticking artfully out of my bag.  No beret though.