Many of you may have missed this story on Marketplace about KOL Foods during your Passover celebrations. You can learn more about ethical kosher meat in general here on JCarrot, and more about our friend Devora Kimelman-Block’s unique partnership with a halal meat producer. Thanks to Ari Daniel Shapiro, an alumnus of Hazon’s New York Ride and an independent radio producer, for sharing this story with us. Check out more of Ari’s stories here.

To hear the Marketplace story “Unlikely duo teams up for kosher, halal” click here.

Back in 2006, Kim Severson wrote an article for the New York Times Dining section about the emergence of cooking shows on satellite radio (think the Food Network but with aural porn replacing the gratuitous visuals). Never a bunch to miss out on the party, the sustainable food community quickly followed suit. Over the last few years, radio programs spouting the gospel of “good food” have spread like sourdough bubbles across the airwaves and Internet. Here are some of the shows worth tuning in to – and this one “goes to 11!”

CHECK OUT THE FULL LIST AT the MOTHER NATURE NETWORK and then share your favorite shows below.

photo credit: Cinoby/iStockphoto

I grew up in a generally middle class neighborhood in the North West Bronx, and all of the bodegas (that’s a corner store, for you non-New Yorkers) accepted food stamps and EBT cards. According to the radio program, for stores, it’s pretty easy to apply. Despite the fact that there must have been enough demand to necessitate our more-ample-than-usual selection of markets to accept all this government scrip, we made free and easy fun of government food hand outs. I remember “government cheese” being synonymous with anything processed, cheap and nasty. It was synonymous with lunch room food, another domain of the USDA’s nutrition programs, and with being poor, a category that many of my elementary school friends were a part of, though at the time it seemed they weren’t aware.

When I started working at the farmer’s market in Union Square, we accepted EBT cards, a kind of ATM card for purchasing food with your SNAP money. I remember being surprised the first time a person came up with their arms full of grass-fed steaks and sausages, lacto-fermented pickles, farm-ground organic whole wheat bread and lots of questions about what would freeze well, then paid for it all with an EBT card. Gone, I suddenly realized, are the days when nutritional assistance meant mandatory government cheese. For a moment I was judgmental, I was thinking, I can barely afford to eat this, and I work here,  then I realized what a good thing it is that this guy was spending his money on high-quality food, both for his health and for mine. He was taking USDA dollars that might have gone to subsidizing soy and corn, either directly or through the purchase of products containing those things, and putting them straight into the coffer of a sustainable farmer.

He’s a success story. FNS (food and nutrition services) has been developing programs like their checks for use at farmers markets and their fresh fruit and vegetable program, (though Grist doesn’t think much of the USDA’s new school lunch czar)  and pushing their core nutritional principles, in an effort to improve the nutrition of its constituents. WIC California is holding a webinar on May 27th to discuss the new variety of foods available as part of the WIC (women, infants and children) program. You can sign on to learn more.

If you listen to the radio program above, you’ll find that the conversation quickly turns away from middle class folks on the dole, and onto how to get benefits if you need them. It discusses the ways in which SNAP both supports and undermines working poor people, and talks about how to find a guide through the red tape in applying.

On the message board, it’s a whole different story. As often happens on the internet, the world pours forth its racists and class snobs to give their unabashed opinions, one particularly New Yorkish commentor complains about having to wait too long in line behind people trying to buy things on their benefit cards. It does take a while – I found that out on the other side of the counter, running EBT cards through the credit card machine, punching in pins and checking balances, having garbled, multilingual, hand gesture conversations regarding how to use the two-dollar checks provided for use only at farmers markets, only for fresh produce, only for whole two dollar amounts. At Hawthorn Valley we had about eight languages between all the staff, and very supportive managers, and it still slowed things down. But who cares? Not our other customers, they came back despite the wait.

Other, saner, commentors considered the efficacy of a nutrition program that can’t police what foods people buy with their EBT (you’re not allowed to buy alchoholic beverages, but you can buy a cart full of chips and donuts). It’s a double bind though. I remember that first pang of resentment that this guy gets to eat steak when I’m on potatoes and onions, but if he’d been buying chocolate covered minidonuts and a gallon of bright blue corn syrup-water punch, I’d have been twice as judgemental. At least the latter judgementalism was born out of wanting to see people spending their money on more deserving companies and buying nourishing foods. The former’s nothing but snobbery, wanting that customer to stay in ‘his place’, which, after years of throwing around government cheese in the schoolyard,  seemed somehow lower than mine. As usual, it took a direct human interaction to see my stupid prejudices clearly, and to see through them.

There’s been an argument over elitism built in to the sustainable foods movement since its inception. Better tasting, more nourishing food, has always been available for a price, but the food movement goes forward on the premise that we want that food available to everyone, including low-income people in urban areas. There has been a constant effort by many members of the movement to keep food accessible. Low income CSA shares exist from Brooklyn to Washington State, and Just Food runs cooking demonstrations at the farmers markets in New York to teach patrons what to do with their veggies. Community Gardens in underserved neighborhoods and food deserts target the nutrition and education of their local communities, just to name a bare minimum of the outgrowth of ideas on how to apply this movement to the health of the whole country.

And as always, there’s a push and shove between the necessity to provide food to everyone, the need to pay farmers a living wage that recompenses and dignifies the work that they do, and the tension between an idea that those with more should pay more and the American “I worked for it, it’s mine” ethic. Judaism has lots to say on tithes and gleaning, but they’re rules for a more direct agricultural system, where consumers can gather straight from the field. Despite a sense that we’ve left those laws behind, we tithe even more than ten percent to taxes. The interviewees on NPR’s radio segment talk about how efficient an economic stimulus the SNAP program really is, despite common perceptions that it’s wasteful. It’s a support for all kinds of people, too, including food activists -one of my friends who grew up in a back-to-the-land community remembers food stamps being a huge support for her family when their non-traditional business and family models didn’t produce the hard cash they needed.

I’m interested in the experiences of our readers with Food and Nutrition Service programs. Are you using them, or have you in the past? Have you assisted folks using them, administered them, sold food to FNS constituents, lobbied for them? Do you have a program with similar goals outside of the federal matrix? What do you think the role of these food programs is in the natural and sustainable foods movement, and how do you think we go about changing public opinion on the FNS programs? Do you agree that the buying power of FNS beneficiaries could conceivably strengthen small farmers, and how would you make that a reality? Like an endless field of GM corn, I’m all ears.

A couple of weeks ago I did a show about Jews, food and ethics, which is now available online at kboo.fm. I interviewed Rabbi Arthur Waskow, one of the main proponents of the eco-kashrut movement, and I also spoke with Rabbi Morris Allen, founder of the Hekhsher Tzedek Initiative, a new ethical certification body that will be evaluating food products with regard to their treatment of workers, animals and the environment. I also spoke with two of Portland’s Jewish organic farmers, including the partner farmer for our chapter of Tuv Ha’Aretz.

Here’s a link to the audio. You can either stream or download it from the site.

Here’s a link to the playlist (all the songs were about food), and more information about my guests, the eco-kashrut movement, and the Heksher Tzedek Initiative.

PS. This past weekend, on April 19, Liz also interviewed Shari Raider, partner farmer, and Hannah Treuhaft, a member of Portland’s Tuv Ha’Aretz planning committee, about Tuv Ha’Aretz generally and the Portland Tuv chapter in particular. The audio for the interview will be on the KBOO site here within a week or so.

Kleiman founded Slow Food Los Angeles and she has interviewed several figures connected to environmental issues and the slow food movement, including of of the movement’s leading lights, Michael Pollan. Good Food has also broadcast several past programs discussing Jewish food issues. Let’s hope there are more soon!

What food programs that discuss Jewish food, local food, and/or environmental issues do you listen to on the radio in your neighborhood? Please tell us below in the comments: we’re especially interested in hearing about programs that are available online for download or to listen to as podcasts, so that our worldwide readership can join in the conversation.

Blogger Jonathan Bloom of wastedfood.com spoke on NPR on Yesterday. He talked about the amount of food American families waste every week, the lack of research in this area, and how to cut down on waste. You can listen to the segment, which aired on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show, below.

One of the comments on the site mentioned saving bones from meaty restaurant meals to make soup stock. I think it’s a great idea. I save every bone and veggie skin for stock at home…why not use my doggy-bags more wisely? The roti shop around the corner, for example, serves curry goat full of deliciously flavored bones, and right about now I’m wishing I’d thought of this myself…I’d have a nice curried goat stock right about now. If anyone out there has other radical ideas for cutting down on waste, put ‘em up!

A farmer, an educator and an activist, Michael Ableman is also a photographer and a writer. His three books include his latest, Fields of Plenty: A farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it, for which Ableman traveled North America chronicling the passion and prowess of the new generation of American farmers. He currently farms in British Columbia with his wife and two sons, and will be joining us as a presenter at the Hazon Food Conference in December, 2008. (Click here to find out more and register for Hazon’s Food Conference.)

I talked to Ableman about his hopes for the sustainable agriculture movement, his many hats, and Judaism’s connection to the cycle of the seasons.

Find the full interview below the jump.

JC: On a recent interview for the radio show “Beyond Organic,” you mentioned that you partly wrote the book, Fields of Plenty, to demonstrate that farming was not, “a form of lowly drudgery but a fine art and a craft and a noble profession.” Do you think that’s something that still needs to be proven to American people?

MA: I do.  I think that a lot has certainly changed in the last few years in terms of people’s awareness around all things food and agriculture, but I think the changes that have occurred are not the kind of changes we need to really structurally shift the system as a whole.

We currently have more cheerleaders than we have participators, and the fundamental problems with the food system are not going to change until we have more than one and a half percent doing the work of farming. So I’m excited to see a movement that I’ve been involved with for so long finally getting some attention, but I’m concerned at the same time.

So people need to be growing food instead of just getting it from their local coop?

Absolutely.  You can’t have a sustainable food system when only one and a half percent of the population is doing the work.  It’s not going to work if everyone’s still sitting behind their computer screens.

Do you consider that to be the goal of the work that you do?

Well it’s my current rant [laughs]. You have to look at this from a lot of different angles and understand that people are awakening at very different levels and we have to support them at whatever level they’re at. First and foremost I grow food and I supply my local community with food, but I also hope that the day will come when individuals will put farmers out of business by growing more for themselves.

You’ve worked in photography and writing and journalism, and you’ve done a lot of educational work. How did so many angles of working in agriculture end up as a part of your life?

My only formal post-high school education was in the visual arts – photography. When I came to agriculture, I discovered something pretty amazing, which was that the instincts of artists, specifically around observation, the observation of one’s world, interpreting it, in a way is very similar to the instincts and some of the fundamental skills required for good farming: observing the world of the farm and knowing how to interpret it, what to do with it.

I’ve been kind of working on a project on the art of farming. It’s really in its very, very, very preliminary stages, but it would include the work of a lot of people, probably from different parts of the world, who are farming but who are also interpreting their world through different art forms, whether it be writing or photography or painting, and the goal is to have a book and probably a traveling exhibition.

So how did you get into farming?

It’s the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing.  I ended up joining an agrarian commune in my late teens in California and within a couple of months I was managing a hundred acre organic pear and apple orchard in the high desert valley for the commune. I had this five-year, incredibly intensive, amazing immersion experience in agriculture that one could never pay for, and I came out of that with a lot of skills. By the end of that experience I was completely turned on by agriculture.

What have been  were some of your most successful educational projects?

Well, I have some favorites of course. We used to run a three day urban agriculture workshop in California. We provided air fare and lodging and tuition for people from all over the country, primarily from lower income urban communities, and we did this wonderful workshop and the success stories out of that have been fantastic.

What were some of the success stories?

There are folks working all over the country doing great work, in Chicago, New York city, amongst native communities in the southwest, using food and farming as the stepping stone for all kinds of social and ecological change.

You know, you start off in your twenties and thirties trying to find out who you are and wanting to make your own mark on the world and then something happens later on and you start to want to see other people succeed. That’s pretty cool to see happening. It isn’t that the ego isn’t still intact and strong, it’s that you’re more willing to share it.

Chipping away at that 98% that doesn’t farm.

Exactly.

Do you have any personal Jewish food traditions that you could tell us about?

I live on an island in British Columbia. I almost would say that the place that I live has a higher population of Jewish people involved with the land than maybe any other place in North America.

I went to a Seder on the island, the first time I’d been to one in years, and it was really fun. We brought products from the farm for the meal and we grow a number of things that are used in the ceremony like parsley and horseradish. There’s a wonderful Hannuka celebration on the island, and the same family has been organizing that every year and they do this vast amount of potato latkes! Apparently they work on it for days.

It’s interesting hearing you talk about it. When I hear you mention potatoes at Hannuka and parsley at Pesach it’s making me think, of course potatoes because they’re in cold storage, and of course parsley in spring.  So what’s it like to celebrate the New Year in September/October as a farmer?

That’s an interesting question because you know I was raised as a Jew but I also was raised in a community where I experienced quite a significant amount of prejudice, and so as a young person I actually learned that it was safer for me to assimilate. I spent a lot of years not referring to myself as Jewish, and interestingly enough, in the last few years I’m doing some interviews like this and some programs that are related to the Jewish tradition, and it’s kind of like coming out of the closet.

I think that all of us are products of so many layers of familial and cultural upbringing. I have the agricultural background; I have the roots in Judaism. I am not a practicing or religious Jew – I am a very spiritual person – but it’s interesting for me to just now be discovering all the different threads and how they connect together.

One of the things I love about the Jewish tradition is the timing of the holidays, that their origins are based on the cycles of the land. I don’t know how many Jews actually realize that, but I certainly am aware of that because my life revolves around those same cycles. See, now I’m getting tons of ideas of what to talk about in December.

Related Posts:
CSA’s say “Cheese Please”
Interview with Ari Hart
Interview with Ella Heeks
Interview with Adam Gollner
Meet Sandorkraut: and Interview with Sandor Katz
Interview with Michael Pollan

Hazon’s friends Devora Kimelman-Block, founder of Kol Foods (a kosher, organic, grass-fed meat company) and Rabbi Morris Allen, Director of Hekhsher Tzedek, joined American University Radio to discuss the situation at Agriprocessors and explore the questions:

“If food meets the strict rules elaborated in religious texts, does it matter how food arrives at our plates? And where do workers’ rights and other ethical considerations factor into kosher food production?”

Listen here.

On the same page, you can also find a segment featuring Jennifer 8 Lee, author of the Fortune Cookie Chronicles which was reviewed on The Jew & The Carrot.

Click on the arrow below to listen – sing along!

“There’s nothing that quite hits the spot so | Your family will like it a lot so. | When they’re set to eat, just give them the treat: Manischewitz, American matzo!

[See post to listen to audio]

Bubbe, of Feed Me Bubbe

In a shining example of nerddom gone right, sweet grandson Avram hosts a brilliant and wholesome series on his bubbe’s cooking. An irregularly published video podcast, the show features the charming and hilarious Bubbe making classic Ashkenazi comfort food: kasha varnishkes, borsht, tzimmes, kugel, and the rest. The recipes are simple to follow. There is also a Yiddish word of the day, spoken in Bubbe’s Boston accent.

“If I can be everybody’s bubbe, that’s wonderful,” says Bubbe.

Whether you grew up eating handmade matzoh balls at your own bubbe’s table or you’ve only heard tales from your Ashkenazi friends, Feed Me Bubbe is a funny, charming, and surprisingly well-made video podcast that might just inspire you to cook your own shabbes meal. Or to at least call your grandma.

Subscribe to Feed Me Bubbe at www.FeedMeBubbe.com or on iTunes.

New Voices magazine is the only independent Jewish student magazine written by and for Jewish college students. Subscribe yourself or your college-aged kinderlach for free by emailing here with as many full names and addresses as you want. And like I said, it’s free.