Michael Pollan is at it again, and that’s a good thing. 

After a brief hiatus following his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan is nearly ready to release his next work titled, 
In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating.

Pollan says that the work grew out of questions he received about The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  In a recent interview with Grist’s Tom Philpott, he said: once I’ve ”looked into the heart of the food system and been into the belly of the beast” what should I eat, and what should I buy, and if I’m concerned about health, what should I be eating?  The short answer?  “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  To get the more nuanced response, you’ll have to pick up the book which will be out in January, 2008.

We know what’s up on Pollan’s plate - what’s next for you?
- Preorder your copy of In Defense of Food here. 
- Read Philpott’s full interview (highly recommended) here.
- Read The Jew & The Carrot’s interview with Pollan here.

The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has posted several compelling narratives of Jewish leaders, including JCPA and JCRC leaders, Rabbi David Saperstein of the RAC, and Congressmen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who’ve been participating in its Food Stamp Challenge on its new blog.

In the latest post, JCPA Director Steve Gutow says “To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity” of his experience spending only $21/day or $1/meal on food this week, to replicate the real lives of many food stamp recipients around the country.

“Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.”

An earlier post by a participant in CA alludes to one of the reasons why the obesity epidemic has taken root so strongly among low-income households: “I found calories to be affordable. I did not find the wide array of food that I had expected to find when I prepared my shopping list.”

Gutow has also posted a copy of the transcript from the press conference JCPA held in Washington yesterday.

Wednesday’s Washington Times included an op-ed blasting the Food Stamp Challenge as a useless publicity ploy–a gross overgeneralization that does highlight a genuine problem with the Challenge. 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 »

There’s no question - the 2007 Farm Bill, which will be voted on by the Senate at the end of September - is serious stuff that will impact farmers and consumers alike. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be funny video about it where a do-gooding apple chases an mischevious snack cake around the city, right? Right?

Click here to watch the video.

In other weird news, PETA - the veggie sensationalists of the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign - is at it again.  The New York Times reports in “Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change:

PETA is outfitting a Hummer with a driver in a chicken suit and a vinyl banner proclaiming meat as the top cause of global warming. It will send the vehicle to the start of the climate forum the White House is sponsoring in Washington on Sept. 27, “and to headquarters of environmental groups, if they don’t start shaping up,” Mr. Prescott warned.

I don’t really have the words for this - but something tells me this stunt won’t bring much credibility to PETA’s cause…

Read the article here.

Leadership of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) will be participating in the now-famous Food Stamp Challenge during the Days of Awe period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Sept. 14th-21st).

Executive Director Rabbi Steve Gutow and JCPA Chair Lois Frank will stick to the $1 per meal or $21/week budget of an average food stamp recipient, as part of the organization’s new Anti-Poverty Campaign, to highlight the connections between Jewish teachings surrounding poverty and the current Food Stamp reauthorization component of the Farm Bill.

JCRC leadership and Jewish communities around the country are being encouraged to also ”Take the Challenge,” coinciding with the Locavores’ September Local Food Challenge. Do any of us dare to take the double challenge? I think this would result in nearly an 11-day long Yom Kippur fast, or perhaps subsistance only on apples, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and the remains of nectarines and melon.

Ideally, an organized Jewish participation in the Food Stamp Challenge, including Rabbis and other national Jewish leaders, could have an impact on federal legislation, if it is publicized appropriately for advocacy. Hopefully, continued action surrounding Food Stamps will have an impact on the Farm Bill, which has yet to pass out of the Senate Agriculture Committee (expected in mid-October).

Dan Barber - my own personal food hero, and one of the featured presenters at Hazon’s 2007 Food Conference - was recently interviewed over at Salon.com.   The topic: agriculture, oil, and the 2007 Farm Bill.  Barber said:

In this country alone, food - from growing to processing, transportation and fertilizer — accounts for about 17 percent of all oil we use, a little less than automobiles. Not only is there an ecological cost to transporting food, because of fossil fuels, but there is a huge ecological impact from the way we grow our food - whether it travels 10 feet or 10,000 miles.  

And…

The typical American cow is just an oil barrel. It’s [fed] corn. And that corn is fed fertilizer and pesticides, meaning oil. It is trucked from a cornfield in Iowa to a feedlot in Colorado, or wherever, again oil. And then that hamburger meat is processed … in oil. And then that hamburger meat is shipped to all the fast-food restaurants — more oil. [The process is] a gas guzzler.

Read more »

On the Friday night of last year’s Hazon Food Conference I said, “put your hands up if you eat meat - but would not do so if you had to kill it yourself.” And a good number of hands went up.

Then I said: “put your hands up if you’re vegetarian - but you would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” And a different group of hands went up. And after a brief pause, everyone laughed.

They laughed because the two responses revealed what a self-selected group we were - and how fascinating our different distinctions. The first group were essentially saying, “I do like eating meat - but I know the process of killing it is awful - it’s actually so awful that if I had to kill it myself, I just wouldn’t eat meat.”

The second group were essentially saying “I’m vegetarian because I hate everything about how animals are raised and killed in our industrial food economy. But if I actually took responsibility for killing an animal myself, I would feel I was acting with integrity, and in accordance with my beliefs - and therefore, in that instance, I potentially would eat meat.”

And my response, when the laughter died down, was to say “Great: next year we’re going to shecht (slaughter according to kosher law) an animal here at the Food Conference..”

And people went: “Oooohhhhhh..”

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.

Read more »

The secret to the feminist revolution is in a vegan cupcake.

Brooklyn born, Isa Moskowitz, is the founder and co-host of the Post Punk Kitchen, a public access cooking show that features recipes like sushi, coconut cream pie, and matzoh ball soup, all sans meat, dairy, eggs, honey, and other animal products.”

Despite its niche focus, PPK became a hit, and Moskowitz has enjoyed the attention of animal-welfare magazines like Satya, as well as slightly more, ahem, mainstream publications (e.g. The Washington Post and The New York Times). Building on PPK’s success, Moskowitz and her co-host Terry Hope Romero launched a website with a recipe archive and an almost unbelievably active forum that connects ostracized pink-haired teenagers and vegan feminists from around the globe. The website claims: “All we believe in is punk rock and tofu.” Cute, but I have to wonder what Ms. Moskowitz thinks of all the food miles her heavily-processed tofu products have traveled….

Read the full post over at Lilith Magazine’s blog where I write about women and food.

Photo of the pistachio rosewater cupcake originally from the: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World Blog

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 »

A friend once told me that she thinks our generation is missing mega-heroes. “Of course, of course,” she agreed to the point that there are countless men and women doing world-changing work. Still, she insited that we are lacking that charismatic, almost mythic leader - Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela - who can unite and energize a movement towards a common goal.

Well, chef Dan Barber (left) and environmental and food writer Dan Imhoff (right) might not yet be household names, but after a mere hour in their presence last week, I felt a renewed fire to change the world.

Barber and Imhoff were the featured speakers last Wednesday on an NYU-sponsored panel called, “Sustainable Agriculture vs. Industrial Food. ” Despite the 4:00pm weekday start time and lackluster title, the room was packed to capacity - testament both to the mushrooming interest in all things food (and the impending Farm Bill vote), and also to Barber and Imhoff’s growing star power. Here’s what these, if I may, budding heroes had to say:

Read more »

Watch the Farm Bill now on CSPAN or at:http://www.cspan.org/watch/cs_cspan_wm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS

The Democratic Leadership seems to have made enough deals and bought off enough interests to think they have the votes to pass this bill; nobody thought this was possible as late as yesterday. As Chairman Peterson is saying as I type, “There’s something in this bill for everyone to like. There’s probably also something in this bill for everyone not to like.” Although we haven’t seen the reform needed to create a better food system, we have seen the advancement of good proposals pushed by many disparate groups: mandatory Country of Origin Labeling, needed changes to food stamps (though not for immigrants), Pigford claims redress, new money for organics and obesity research and many others; but no reform for our corn, soy, cotton, peanut and sugar addictions.

As a newbie to the Capitol Hill bubble, I sort of feel like this moment is like the High Holidays of farm policy… Peterson put on his good pin-striped suit, everyone’s gathered round (ok, so only a few rows are full), they’ll be stuck in a room together for hours….

If so, then who’s G-d? Nancy Pelosi? If it actually passes, maybe we’ll find out if the Senate gets a bill to their chamber in September… around the time of Yom Kippur, if they ever hope to make it out of conference by the end of FY ‘07.

And then there’s always the veto threat…

Borrowing a page from Jewschool’s “Motzash Mishegaas,” I’m starting a new weekly post “rounding-up” relevant news from the past week called “Ready for a Roundup?” because the world is NOT ready for any more Roundup Ready crops.

This week’s version focuses on the confluence of religion, sustainable agriculture projects and farm policy.

• Last Wednesday, an “interfaith” group released a letter to Speaker Pelosi demanding Farm Bill reform. Noticeably absent: all non-Christian/Catholic faiths, with the exception of Sojourners which is truly interfaith.

With Jspot’s recent post on Jews and the environmental movement and recent efforts by large Jewish institutions and demoninations to begin working on the environmental issue, can we do more than hope that the good work of Hazon, Mazon and others is finally recognized within the larger Jewish community?

• While doing some research at work, I recently came across this Eco-Halal Project organized by a group called Faith in Place in Chicago. While the concept of Eco-Halal now seems completely obvious, it had never occurred to me as a parallel movement to eco-Kashrut, proabably partially because the number of certified Halal products  is far fewer than those that are Kosher.

Thanks so much to The Jew and the Carrot blogger Tzimmes-Maker for her in depth and ongoing coverage of the Farm Bill throughout the summer.  I recently wrote a post for Lilith Magazine’s blog that talks about the most recent high profile case of industrial food poisoning (from a can of chili sauce), (read the full thing here).  The post also talks about a disturbing provision in the Farm Bill which, if it passed, would wipe out state and local authority to protect food safety.  Since I wrote the  post, the provision has been removed from the Farm Bill (things change fast around here!), but there are still many aspects of the bill that support agribusiness and leave the majority of small family farms behind.

Today is the Day to Take Action
The House of Reps is voting on the Farm Bill this week.  Meanwhile, The Fairness in Farm and Food Policy Amendment offerred by Reps. Ron Kind and Jeff Flake is being offered in the House.  The amendment offers reform that will benefit small farmers, struggling rural communities, hungry people in America, and farmers in developing countries. 

Please call your representative by NOON, Thursday (tomorrow) to ensure your voice is counted in this critical vote.

For an easy-to-read summary of the amendment, and steps on how to call your representative go to Seeds of Change.