(x-posted at Lilith)
I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. In comparison to the stereotypical “I use my oven as an extra shoe closet” New Yorker, I’ve always cooked a lot for this city. But since I started freelance writing two days a week last summer, and especially since the New Year when I renewed my commitment to preparing my own meals, I’ve found myself spending much more time in the kitchen.
I’ve also discovered that there’s lots of time to think when one cooks - even if NPR is playing in the background. As I’ve tinkered with various types of cookies and tried out new recipes from my favorite Chanukah present, Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
(thanks Mom!), I’ve started to wonder, “what makes food feel Jewish?”
Yes, there are the old standbys - Chicken soup with matzah balls, fresh challah, pastrami on rye. And then there are the mysterious, and often severely unappetizing foods that you find in the “kosher food” section at the supermarket - gefilte fish, pickles, Manischewitz, and Tam Tam crackers. Honestly, I can only imagine what folks who aren’t familiar with Jewish eating must think when they see a supermarket shelf of glass jars filled with gelatinous objects suspended in a bunch of different colored murky liquids.
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I’d like to put in a good word for the DIY folks. DIY (do-it-yourself) might simply conjure images of people who turn sweaters into skirts, make t-shirts, pave their patio with mosaics from old china, or make their own candy bars. But in fact, these people approach the world with the attitude that if the thing in question can be cooked, grown, built, or otherwise pulled off by themselves or a few of their friends, then it’s something they out to be involved in. I’m not sure whether Judaism is inherently DIY—but I do think there’s room for it.
The prevailing philosophy seems to be one of narrowing. Specialize in your field. Corner the market. Find the best possible place to grow blueberries then plant eight thousand acres of them. But actually that attitude is disempowering, because it implies there are so many thing that others can do better than me, I shouldn’t even bother (and, by extension, if there isn’t something I can do better than anyone else, what am I?)
So instead I’d like to suggest a philosophy of dabbling. Read more »
We’re all familiar with the saying, “you are what you eat.” But two recent articles got me thinking that perhaps this old adage would be better stated, “you are what you think you eat.”
The first is a unnecessarily hateful article called “Extreme Eating” by Joel Stein in this week’s Time magazine. Stein decides to stick it to the “luddite” locavores, by making a meal strictly with ingredients grown 3,000 miles from his Los Angeles home and purchased at Whole Foods. (He must mistakenly believe that locavores revere Whole Foods as some sort of local food Mecca.) Stein writes:
“I want the world to come to me, to see it shrink so small it fits on my plate. I want Maine lobster in broth flavored with Spanish saffron. I want Alaskan salmon, truffles from Europe, a bottle of Beaujolais, a damn pineapple. And I want them much more than I want that carrot you grew in your garden. Because I know you’re going to talk to me for 20 minutes about your carrot.”
I’m not about to fight to the death for locavores or stop supplementing my CSA share with the occasional avocado or grapefruit. And as I’ve said before, there’s bound to be some backlash against sustainable food this year. But Stein’s “distavore” meal is little more than a petulant and obvious attack on a movement that has caused a lot of people to consider more carefully the impact of their food choices.
In his article, Stein likens his meal to one fit for a “European king.” Well, he’s right. European kings were known for cutting off people’s heads to get what they wanted, and in a sense, that’s exactly what his meal (ahem, publicity stunt) accomplished. Read more »
Throw it all off. Flee the restrictions. Leave it all behind — bacon is tasty. Or so says the pseudonym “Sarah” in Time Out New York’s article No religion, who purports to be an Orthodox-raised day school teacher in Manhattan.
So one Saturday morning, I went to the Botanical Gardens with my sister who doesn’t keep Shabbes. It was a beautiful day in May. And I remember thinking, Wow, Saturday is another whole day! You don’t only have to go to shul or sleep late and stay at home—you can do other stuff! And that was a huge epiphany. I went to California that summer. And that summer, I had a nonkosher steak taco on the side of the highway.
That was different—I was very nervous, and I ordered very nervously. And I sat at this picnic table on the side of the highway, and the guy to my right was eating a steak taco, and the guy to my left was eating the same thing, and I thought, I am a person. I am a regular human being. I am no longer a “Jew.” And it was so liberating.
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I still remember the first time my suburban food-bubble was burst, when I realized the implications of fruit sold according to season. I was in Israel, and became completely dumbfounded when I couldn’t find the strawberries…”whaddya mean you don’t sell them in the winter?!?”
Of course, as my sister recently reminded me, even junk food lovers know the comforting seasonal rhythms of Cadbury Creme eggs in late winter (they’re only sold from Jan 1-Easter Sunday), Peeps in the spring, and, of course, Mallomars in the late fall.
Ah, Mallomars…If Proust had grown up in New York, he would have traded in his madeleine for a Mallomar. Respectable journalists have sung its praises to the heavens, this perfect confection, only available during the dark, baseball-less months of November through March, so delicate is its thin outer layer of chocolate, that it can’t survive the trip from factory to store in the heat of spring or summer. And what could be more Jewish than a cookie that comes eighteen to a box, 70% of which are consumed by New Yorkers?
The only cookie that comes close is its Israeli cousin, the Krembo. Similar in construction and seasonal availability, writers also wax rhapsodic about krembo season. Plus, according to its wikipedia entry: Read more »
*Thanks to Michael Croland of Heeb N’ Vegan for this guest post.
In 2007, we witnessed the very beginnings of a revolution in the way farmed animals are treated. Thanks to a series of major announcements this year, the cruel confinement typical of factory-farming is, in several cases, on its way out.
In January, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pig-meat producer, announced that it is phasing out gestation crates—which prevent pregnant sows from turning around—within 10 years. The announcement has already had a ripple effect in the pork industry, as Maple Leaf Foods (Canada’s leading pork producer) announced shortly afterward that it would phase out gestation crates and Cargill Foods said that it has stopped using gestation crates in half of its pig factory farms.
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This morning, The Jewish Vegetarians of North America put out a press release that condemns the goat schecting at Hazon’s food conference. As a Jew and a vegetarian, I support this statement. Or rather, I support the legitimate concern for animal welfare and environmental integrity at the foundation of the statement. Still, I think that unless the JVNA plans to condemn ALL the simchas, events, and conferences in the Jewish community that serve meat - then perhaps Hazon’s Food Conference is the one meat-serving conference they should endorse.
Like the majority of Jewish events, The Hazon Food Conference will not promote mindless or wasteful meat consumption, nor will it violate tsa’ar ba’alei chaim by promoting animal mistreatment. On the contrary, the schecting and consumption of the goats at the Food Conference will encourage participants to take responsibility for their food choices.
More importantly, the schecting will not happen in a vaccuum. It will be one of several sessions throughout the weekend that get participants thinking about meat consumption (ethical, kosher, industrial, abstinence from and otherwise). Regardless of whether or not participants attend the schecting or eat the goat meat, they will be surrounded by thoughtful conversations about JVNA’s central question, ”Should Jews be Vegetarians?” For some participants the answer will be no - but if JVNA is serious about the question, they ought to support the Food Conference’s serious engagement with it.
I’ve been a committed Jewish vegetarian for 8 years, but I realized a long while ago that the day I once hoped for (the one where all Jews renounce meat forever) was simply never going to come. And in the meantime, there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the Jews who do decide to eat meat are doing it in a way that respects the land, the animal, and themselves.
Read the JVNA’s full Press Release below the jump.
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Organic. Pancakes. In a can.
End of civilization? Or dawn of a new era of enlightened convenience foods?
Discuss.
The recent controversy regarding the custom of Kapparot (see article in the Forward) made me realize that Kapparot is virtually the only remaining ritual that uses an animal sacrifice as an atonement for human sin. In Temple times, any inadvertent sin had a corresponding animal sacrifice that was intended to cause the sinner to contemplate the nature of sin and how this animal is now losing its life instead of the sinner. pretty powerful stuff, if your environment is agrarian and animals are preciously traded commodities. Today however, things are much different. Read more »
Last week, The Jew and the Carrot blogger, Eric Schulmiller, posted his response to James McWilliams’ recent NY Times op-ed that stated some startling news for sustainably-minded foodies to ponder:
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… Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s fertile pastures and shipped by boat to the U.K. consumed 688 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per ton. By contrast, stock produced within the U.K.’s poorly adapted pastures consumed 2,849 kilograms per ton. In other words, it is four times more energy efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. ”
Touche, anti-localvores, touche.
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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:
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This shabbat is called “Shabbat Nachamu” (Shabbat of Comfort), named after this week’s haftarah which offers consolation following the devastating events of Tisha B’Av, commemorated last week.
Since my first visit to Jerusalem, prior to beginning cantorial school, I’ve been torn about the purpose and method for observing Tisha B’Av. On the one hand, I have no desire to see us return to a patriarchal system of priestly castes, with animal sacrifice as the primary form of Jewish spiritual expression, and on the other hand, we Jews can now rejoice in Jerusalem rebuilt in our own time. Read more »
On this day, we ask a lot of questions. Not like Passover, when we sit and eat, laugh and make jokes, and drink our wine. On Tisha B’av we mourn our loss, as Jews, and Humans, and as Pieces of an Ecosystem. This Holiday is not meant to prod us to ask questions, but yet, when we mourn we can do almost nothing but ask, “why?” I won’t try to answer any”why?” questions, but the next question that I heard today moved me. We were discussing what it means to be mourning for the human loss, and not just the loss, and asking what we can do. What can we do, to give our lamentation meaning that lasts beyond the day of official, enforced mourning.
To the question of “what can we do?”, the only answer that I can think of is to empower ourselves, and to empower those around us. Every day, we make choices in our live that impact our world, both close to home and far away. The things we do as we attempt to feed and clothes those dear to us have ramifications that go beyond the spiritual work of mourning and have the power to uplift lives everywhere. In our workplace, we can recognize the links that we play in a global or local chain of goods and services and seek to purchase true “economic goods.” I’m not talking about a washing machine that lasts for ten years, I’m talking about a washing machine that is good for me because it uses less water to wash my clothes, it’s good for the manufacturer because she uses recycled parts, it’s good for my brother in Bangladesh because it uses a fraction of the electricity that most machines use and doesn’t raise the sea level outside his field.
On a day when I choose not to eat (freeing up about 3 hours), I have time to reflect on the deep impact of my food choices on the world around me. Buy the tomato that’s really “good”. Food doesn’t have to be a commodity. Buy a tomato from a farmer who cares; it’s not just better for you, it really makes a difference.
