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 »

As a card-carrying Jewish professional, I have the maddening responsibility of thinking two holidays ahead at all times. So while I am trying to put the finishing touches on our second annual (Fair Trade) Chocolate-Covered Tu Bishvat Seder, I’m also looking for a more sustainable vendor for the hot dogs for our Purim carnival. I can’t believe that after several years of serious progress (especially on the krunchy-kosher koasts), no one is selling a kosher organic hot dog yet. Even with some serious google-fu, this is the best I could come up with. Kosher organic chicken dogs. Blech. Maybe we’ll just go with these.

Any thoughts?

When it comes to “sustainable eating,” I’m starting to worry that perhaps the Brits take the (organic carrot) cake.

Maybe my sources are skewed from having a Manchester-bred boss who sends all-staff emails everytime the British foodies do something interesting.  (e.g. when England’s Walmart-equivalent, Tesco, commits to making their products’ ”food miles” transparent, or long-time organic farming supporter, Prince Charles makes a cookie.)

As if the Prince of England wasn’t enough proof of England’s foodie superiority, now I find out that Jamie Oliver - the British hearthrob and “Naked Chef” -has a new book and TV show called Jamie at Home that features food grown in his backyard and cooked in his kitchen.  Jamie says:

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I grew up in a non-kosher home. My Bronx-born father was strongly Jewish, but an atheist, and my mom was raised Catholic from ages 2 to 6; her life was saved by her gentile nanny in Poland during the Holocaust, who raised her as her own daughter. Her favorite food during that period: bacon. And even when she reverted back to Judaism, she never lost her love of all things pork.

My grandparents on both sides didn’t keep kosher either. Nor did any of the Jewish families we knew, except maybe one or two. I grew up eating ham and cheese sandwiches, and thinking nothing of it. Except for one great aunt in New York who kept a strictly kosher home, but ate pork and shrimp every time we went out to dinner with her, I had very little exposure to it.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change that. I was one of two Jews in my high school, always feeling very much “the other.” If I would have had to decline eating at a friend’s house because of kashrut, I don’t know how I would have managed. It just would have been another reminder that I am more “other” than I like to think.

But despite the fact that kashrut is pretty much still a non-issue for me, the fact that I care so much about where my food comes from is making me feel more and more kosher all the time.

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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 »

Warning, a shameless plug follows: Some of you at the food conference might have met a brother-sister pair Lisa Schachter-Brooks and Stephen Brooks. For the very first time, their company, Costa Rican Adventures, is offering a tour specifically for people who are interested to know where their food comes from. It begins in late February.

While Lisa lives here in the Bay Area (and helped coordinate our local Tuv Ha’Aretz chapter), Stephen has been mostly based in Costa Rica since he graduated from college (now, quite some time ago). He lives on an organic farm called Punta Mona, where he plays host to the numerous high schoolers they bring down, as well as other travelers.

To read more about their edible Costa Rica tour, click here.

This is the first of a series of updates from the Hazon Food Conference today through Sunday.

I spent much of tonight shivering.

Part of that has to do with being up in the Connecticut Berkshires, in December where 17 degrees is a normal morning temperature. But the shivering started in earnest when I walked into a conference session called, “Lifting the Cellophane Veil: Shecting a Goat.” The session was mandatory for anyone who is thinking about attending tomorrow morning’s schecting.

The Food Conference is, of course, not simply about the goat - we have four days crammed with sessions and a collection of 240 amazing people here at Isabella Freedman. But the schecting tomorrow will be - for me, and many participants - a once-in-a-lifetime and emotionally-charged event. The hope for tonight’s session was that, by introducing the key players (the goat farmer and caretaker, organizer, shochet,-ritual slaughterer, mashgiach-kashrut supervisor, and lead educator), the participants would be able to enter the space tomorrow morning aware of the process and feeling prepared (as much as possible anway).

I think the session served it’s purpose. The educator, Dr. Shamu Sadeh, and goat farmer, Aitan Mizrahi started off the conversation explaining the importance of getting a closer to our food choices - particularly where meat comes from, giving a history of the goats and explaining logistics. By the end of the night, about 70 of the 100-ish people in the room raised their hand to indicate they would wake up early tomorrow, get on a shuttle van, and weather the cold to witness the schecting.

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The San Francisco Chronicle’s dining section has been doing an occasional series called “Food Conscious” that has addressed many of the same issues found here on “The Jew and the Carrot.”

Today’s installment is about the numerous studies that are beginning to prove what proponents of organics have hoped for (or known)  all along, that the food is often more nutritious. Read the article here.

Jewish Grandmas are known for their special gift for feeding - and over feeding - their loved ones.  But for Jill Ginsberg (second from right), her Grandma Rose not only filled her belly with chicken soup, rugelach, and blintzes - she also sparked Jill’s entrepreneurial spirit. 

In 2005, Ginsberg founded Thou Shall Snack - a line of kosher snacks products that recreate traditional Jewish recipes, while giving them a decidedly contemporary twist (they’re kosher as well as baked, free of trans fats and genetically modified ingredients, and made with 70% organic ingredients).  Read an interview with Jill below and answer this question for a chance to win a special gift basket from Thou Shall Snack: What is your all-time favorite Jewish comfort food?  The gift basket contains an assortment of Latke Crisps and Babka Bites from Thou Shall Snack, a custom apron and/or T-shirt, and a beautiful latke serving platter.

LK: How did you come up with the original idea for Thou Shall Snack?

JG: The first time I got the idea for Latke Crisps was after I heard of my friend’s Jewish beer company, HeBrew Beer.  I thought, someone better make some latke crisps to go with that beer!  It was really more of a lark in the moment, but it ended up becoming our first product.

[I also realized] there were a lot of other ethnic-inspired snack foods out there, which got me thinking about the Jewish foods I grew up eating.  I began to wonder why no one had done something like this before.

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Our local Tuv Ha’Aretz ended recently, and we were faced with the decision: do we want to sign up directly with the farm to keep getting its boxes of produce?

It was a no-brainer of a decision. On our “meet-the-farmer” night way back in April, Nigel, our farmer, told us that some of his subscribers had threatened bloody mutiny if he ever stopped producing — or, well, his chickens, to be exact – eggs. At the time, it sounded kind of humorous, but after six months of eating them practically daily, my husband would no doubt be one of those people.

But the eggs weren’t the only reason. After spending a Sukkot Shabbaton on the farm, and standing by it during its recent Medfly crisis, we realized we couldn’t just quit. It was more than the eggs, and more than the produce. It was the people who were bringing us our food, and the fact that we were helping to support them. We had a relationship with Eatwell, and we couldn’t just break it off now. Read more »

Last Sunday, I attended Kosher Fest, the yearly gathering of kosher food and beverage purveyors and other food professionals (held in New York City, naturally). Kosher Fest is no informal synagogue social – it’s a two-day mega event that features the newest, best, and flashiest in kosher food. Page 11 of the 84-page Kosher Fest program guide displays some “impressive facts” including the dollar value of kosher produced goods in the US - $10,500,000,000. In other words, if you make kosher food you’re either at Kosher Fest, or you’re missing out.

Precisely because it’s the “see and be seen” event of the Jewish food year, Kosher Fest serves as an annual barometer of the kosher industry – its health, its growth, and its trends. More interestingly, as I ambled down the aisles of shiny displays, I began to notice how the state of kosher food uncannily mirrors the state of today’s Jewish community.

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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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Local or organic? Farmer’s Market or Supermarket? And what about the GMOs? There’s a lot of talk — and a lot of confusion — these days, about our food. Around the world, people are starting to grapple with the negative impact that large scale, industrial Agribusiness has had over the past half century. As its legacy of soil erosion, polluted groundwater, and chemically-laden fruits and vegetables becomes clear, more and more people are choosing to support organic and local farmers. Emily Freed is one of those farmers. As the Assistant Field Production Manager of Jacobs Farm in Northern California, she’s responsible for over 250-acres of organic farmland. She’s also a Jewish activist who was recently named as one of the Heeb 100 in the category of Food. Despite it being her busy season (she was in the midst of moving about 6,000 lbs of herbs out of the farms each day when we caught up with her), she found the time to discuss the organic movement, the future of food, the connection between agriculture and the environment, and how it’s all related to Judaism.

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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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