The Green Zionist Alliance (GZA) is seeking volunteers to help write a food-justice resolution for the World Zionist Congress, scheduled to be held this coming June in Jerusalem. The Congress has jurisdiction over the spending and policies of the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (KKL-JNF). If you’d like to participate this year in writing a food-justice resolution, please contact David Krantz – chairperson [at] greenzionism [dot] org.

For information on the GZA’s work in Israel through the World Zionist Congress, click here.

For information on the resolutions that the GZA successfully passed at the last Congress, click here.

Edible wild plants have been an essential part of the local diet here in the Galilee going back to the stone age hunters and gatherers.  I have learned from neighbors in the nearby Bedouin villages which plants are good to eat, where to find them, and how to prepare them.  One of the staples, which is considered a seasonal delicacy, is wild chicory – known in Arabic as elet, and in Hebrew as olesh.  It can be found around the edges of fields – a low-growing starburst of scalloped leaves.  And it is considered to be extremely healthy – good for “cleaning the blood”, as my Bedouin friends have explained.

Going out and gathering is not as commonly practiced in the traditional Arab cultures of the Galilee as it once was – yet the taste for elet remains.  Now enterprising farmers have started to cultivate elet and other edible wild plants, and sell them in the local Arab green grocers.

I’m stuffed. Not from my Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family in the US – although everything on the table was delicious – but from five days of intellectual, spiritual, and gastronomical nourishment while participating in Hazon and Heschel’s first Israel Sustainable Food Tour. From November 15th though 19th, twenty-seven foodies and I explored Israel from the perspective of sustainable food. We met with farmers, chefs, community gardeners, a permaculture expert, a food scientist, volunteers at an innovative soup kitchen, the founder of a food co-op, an expert on food insecurity in Israel, and many other passionate people who shared their experiences working on sustainable food issues throughout the country.

Do you love your CSA (or Tuv Ha’Haretz) but also want sustainable products that are not found locally where you live?  Things like olive oil and dates are local to the Mediterranean Sea – not New England.  But for folks in the greater New York area committed to sustainable agriculture, some of our CSAs have recently partnered with a new company that supports small-scale farming and economic development in the Negev Region of Israel.

Negev Nectars, a new business that launched last week, will be bringing gourmet, sustainably produced foods to CSAs (and Tuv Ha’Haretz) to the United States.  Negev Nectars members will be sent olive oil, jams, chutneys, honey, dried herbs and other unique products (check them out here) three times a year just before Hanukkah, Passover and Rosh Hashanah.  Negev Nectars can be shipped all over the U.S., although your share can be picked up at participating sites.  Currently Negev Nectars can be picked up at the Tuv Ha’Haretz in White Plains, NY and Forest Hills, NY with additional sites coming soon in New York and New Jersey.

I took an excursion this week to the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem to get a taste of the space days before a major Jewish holiday. Below you will find a sampling of pictures from this trip.  Perhaps for some of you it will be something of a trip down memory lane. For those who have never been there, these pictures do not do it justice.

Shana Tova,

Cecily

Cross-posted from the Green Prophet

Recent laboratory tests have discovered that consumers in Israel are eating Genetically Modified Organisms – whether they like it or not.

Tests by Milouda Quality Control Laboratories, which analyzes food destined for sale in the European Union, discovered GM soya in popular foods sold in stores across Israel, reports Haaretz. Food contaminated with GM included baked goods, packaged schnitzel and meat substitutes. Israeli favorites like falafel could also potentially contain GM if they are fried in soya oil.

Biotechnology research may be big business in Israel but, as far as I am aware, no GM crops are grown commercially in the country. However, it is clearly being imported and is entering the human food chain via processed foods or animal feed. In addition to denying consumer choice – and putting public health at risk – GM contamination could precipitate an economic disaster for the Israeli food industry.

Date Honey from the Galilee

Here in the Galilee, a modest but auspicious ease in the heat is rousing us out of our summer torpor.  That and the impending preparations for Rosh Hashana – with the questions that are on everyone’s lips: who is eating where and preparing what?

Our holiday table, like most, will be graced with a plate of sliced apples, and a bowl of honey to dip them in – to remind our tongues and the pleasure centers of our brains how sweet life can and hopefully will be in the coming year. This year, however, the honey we’ll be dipping into will have a darker hue and more complex flavor than usual.

The research I’ve been doing on the origins and history of the seven species of the Land of Israel (wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olives and honey) has changed the way I understand this last and sweetest of the seven.

Nogah Reuveni, one of the pioneering scholars of Israel’s biblical agricultural landscape, astutely observed that, of all the seven species, there is only one which is not a plant or plant product (guess which).  While today, we think of honey as what comes out of a beehive, in ancient times, it referred to any sweet syrup made out of boiled-down fruit.

(Story excerpted from Tablet Magazine)

On the occasional Friday afternoon, a makeshift farmers market appears inside the popular soup shop Marakiya in Jerusalem’s city center. Israelis peruse the goods: dried figs, almonds, creamy labaneh, bottles of grape honey, and briny stuffed olives. It’s a familiar scene in a country known for its fresh produce and sumptuous food markets. But this souk aims to produce more than a good meal.

Behind one of the tables, Yahav Zohar, a 29-year-old tour guide and translator, chats with a customer about a bottle of organic olive oil. While his deep tan and scruffy beard might suggest otherwise, Zohar is not a farmer. Rather, he is something of an altruistic middleman—traveling once a week to the West Bank in search of growers and small-scale food producers whose products he buys and resells at a small markup. “The other day, I bought 500 eggs from a farmer at a shekel apiece,” he said. “In some cases, our purchases end up being a big share of a family’s income.”

It’s one of those things I thought I had sworn never to do again: prepare food for an event. But when a young couple on the kibbutz decided to get married and wanted a “kibbutz wedding,” I somehow found myself in charge of the hors d’oeuvres, (along with my sister, who “volunteered” me.)  

In the old days, a wedding meant that half the kibbutz spent the day in preparation. Our young couple was wedding in a different era: They had to pay for everything themselves; most members work in jobs outside the kibbutz (where taking a day off to work on a wedding is, for some reason, not a given); and there’s no central kitchen with all the necessary equipment, permanent staff and person in charge of procurement.

The last time I went to Melo Hatene to stock up on tahina, I ran into my friend and fellow kibbutz member, David Leishman. David was there for tahina, too: He occasionally makes tahina ice cream for Melo Hatene’s restaurant in exchange for raw tahina and other yummy things from the shop.

Intrigued by the idea of tahina ice cream, I asked David for his recipe. (David has been making wonderful homemade ice cream since before he came to Kibbutz Gezer, over 30 years ago.) What I got from David was not really a recipe, but vague amounts for a restaurant quantity. 

Exhibit on the History and Evolution of Wheat at growseed.org

The Heritage Wheat Conservancy is restoring the almost lost heritage wheats of the Old World and colonial New England.  After years of collecting rare wheats with traditional farmers in remote European and Middle Eastern villages, Eli Rogosa hosted a field day for researchers, flour companies and organic farmers last Thursday in Massachusetts.  96 varieties of delicious rare world wheat on the verge of extinction are thriving at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Organic Research Farm.World heritage wheats, once the staple food of the western world, are on the verge of extinction. Modern wheats are bred for uniformity, and dwarfed so they don’t fall over under the intensive agrochemicals of industrial farms and for convenient harvest height.  However, modern wheats are lower in nutrition and flavor, and are not well suited to organic soils due to their stubby roots and short stalks.

According to Eli Rogosa, Founder of the Conservancy, “The best way to preserve the delicious ancient wheats are to market them to today’s discerning artisan bakers and gourmet chefs who seek the highest quality, nutrient-rich foods.”

My family are not big jam eaters. We’ve got assorted jars of various home-made kumquat and quince jams that friends have given us over the past year or so in the back of the fridge. Still, when the fruit on our little old apple tree is showing the first blush of red – before it turns mealy and gets attacked by bugs – I can’t resist cooking up a batch of apple butter and handing it out. Just the smell of simmering apples and spices sends me back to my early childhood in Minnesota and the giant apple tree in our backyard that had seven different varieties grafted on to it. My Mom would spend hours each fall stirring big pots of applesauce and apple butter to put up for the winter.

It seems my earlier pessimism about the threatened value added tax (VAT) on fruits and vegetables was premature. For now, fruit and vegetables will remain tax-free commodities in Israel.

 Was it concern for our health or the state of Israeli agriculture that prompted this turn-around? Not exactly. The Byzantine ins and outs of coalition politics are what saved the day. The Shas religious party, a member of the governing coalition, decided to press the issue, and they refused to accept the offered compromise in which the tax would start low and gradually increase over several years. 

Israeli sellers laugh, not scream to sell produce

The opening of a new open- air food market is far from headline news in Israel. Nearly every city in the country has a daily or weekly market, where shouting crowds and whistles are heard from miles away. “But this isn’t an ordinary market” affirms co-founder Michal Ansky, “this is Israel’s first real farmer’s market.”

Having just celebrated its one year anniversary, the farmer’s market, located in Tel Aviv’s new port, is officially recognized as an Earth Market-only the third of its kind in the world. Established by two female journalists and culinary experts- Shir Halpern and Michal Ansky- this market enables the public to bypass the ‘middleman’, and directly purchase food from producers. As a result of this direct interaction, the public can associate names, faces, and stories with their fresh food (a bit more interesting than bar codes and price tags, not to mention tastier). According to Slow Food, the market’s sponsor, this special relationship enables the public to become somewhat actively involved in the food production process, transforming them from merely anonymous consumers to ‘co-producers’.