What would you say if someone offered you a box of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables delivered to your home every week? Ella Heeks is willing to wager you might be interested.

Heeks is the Managing Director of Abel & Cole, an Organic Delivery Service in England. Through Abel & Cole, customers order a weekly bounty of pesticide-free produce and schedule its delivery to fit into their busy lives. It’s convenience and ethical eating, waiting patiently on the porch.

While you can find Organic Delivery Services in most American cities, Brits have taken a particular liking to their weekly veg box - and also to ODS pioneer Abel & Cole. 30-year old Heeks spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about working with an idealistic company, soaking up farmer wisdom, and Able & Cole’s response to some customer’s requests that they boycott Israeli-grown produce. Read more »

One of the biggest criticisms of the organic, locavore, sustainable food etc. lifestyle is that it costs too damn much to be realistic. In other words, I may know that an organic red pepper is better for me and the world, but at $8/lb (versus $2/lb for the conventional pepper), I can’t always justify spending the extra money.

The problem is, the epicure in me gets a little twitchy if I don’t have a fairly regular influx of artisanal cheese or fresh, organic greens in the house. And these days my weekly feeding schedule includes Shabbat dinner and lunch, which, by way of being festive meals, deserve better-than-average food. So how do I satisfy my need for good food without breaking the bank?

Family lore tells me that my grandma Martha was able to stretch one chicken into a nourishing meal for six people, with leftovers. I unfortunately did not inherit this gift, but I have picked up some tricks for eating well on a budget without resorting to dumpster diving (don’t worry Mom, I’m over that phase), or existing on the starving artist fare of rice and beans, or - gasp - bologna and Wonder Bread.

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Many people complain that it’s difficult to find a synagogue to join in New York City. There are just so many options, that none of them feel exactly right - you might call it The Shul-Goers Dilemma. These days, however, I’m feeling pretty good at Temple Bet Pollan.

Michael Pollan gets his fair share of love on this blog, and his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto has already joined its predecessor, The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a New York Times Best Seller. Pollan is in the middle of his second whirlwind book tour in two years (I guess he sleeps on the plane) – and I hear the same account every where he goes. Huge venue, sold out show, knockout performance.

Like any effective leader - Martin Luther King included - he’s charismatic and big on the big ideas that change the way we think - or in this case how we eat. But as I devoured (pun intented) Pollan’s new book on my subway commute, I wondered what, if anything, does his worldview offer to the Jewish community? And, perhaps more interestingly, what wisdom does the tribe have to offer back to him?

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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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As the saying goes: “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  Well, in the case of one synagogue in Memphis, Tennesee, when life gave them BBQ, they made kosher BBQ.

Memphis is home to the annual World Champion Barbeque Cooking Contest, attracting over 100,000 attendees each year.  But with categories like “Patio Porkers” and “Whole Hog,” and more than 30 tons of pork cooked throughout the celebration, the event is far from kosher friendly.  Nearly two decades ago, the members of the Anshei Sphard – Beth El Emeth Congregation, asked the contest organizers if they might start a kosher barbeque section, and extend the festival one extra day, so Jewish BBQ aficionados could compete on Sunday instead of Saturday.

Undeterred when their request was rejected, they started their own BBQ contest in the shul parking lot, featuring kosher beef instead of pork.  This Sunday, they’ll celebrate the 19th annual Asbee/Kroger Kosher BBQ & Festival.

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Since early spring, the foodie and business worlds have been all a-twitter about Whole Food’s proposed takeover of natural foods competitor, Wild Oats. The story just got even more interesting when the note Whole Foods was passing in class got intercepted by the teacher (aka, The AP). The New York Times reports:

“The Federal Trade Commission documents revealed that Whole Foods planned to close 30 or more Wild Oats stores, a move that the company believes would nearly double revenue for some Whole Foods stores…

Many of the details in the documents, which F.T.C. lawyers filed electronically, were not meant to be released publicly, but words intended to be inaccessible were actually just electronically shaded black. The words could be searched, copied, pasted and read in versions downloaded from court computer servers. Court officials realized the mistake and replaced the filing with a version using scanned pages of the edited documents. The Associated Press downloaded the document from the public server before it was replaced by an edited version.”

According to the document, Whole Foods set rules barring food suppliers from direct sales with Wal-Mart. Additionally, documents labled “Project Goldmine” predicted that the buy-out will send 80-90 percent of Wild Oats shoppers to Whole Foods. Shoppers will then be at the mercy of Whole Foods who, without competition, can drive up prices even more than they already have.

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Over the last few years I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon about going away on vacation - as soon as I get back, it feels like I never left.  No matter how relaxing the trip was, or how far out of my normal context I travelled, my life seems all too ready to greet me at baggage claim and fill me in on all the things I missed while I was away. Sometimes, though - if I’m lucky, the storm of emails and to do lists subsides long enough for me to briefly recall a memory of my former self, happy and on vacation. 

This most recent trip to San Francisco and Portland was especially lovely, filled with old friends, and new discoveries (especially the Shanghai Tunnels which, despite living in Oregon for two years, were a complete surprise).

One highlight, which came near the end of our trip, was a soggy hike up Lateral Falls just outside of Portland.  Actually, the highlight was not the falls themselves (there were two and they were both gorgeous), but the native flora that lined and dotted our path.  Everywhere I turned, I saw - food!  Redwood trunks split open to reveal crumbly, red velvet cake insides.  Intertwining vines formed a delicate lattice pie crust.  Water-smoothed birch branches twisted into the shank of a Pesach lamb bone. 

“You’re clearly in the right profession,” my friend Tyson said after about my tenth food reference on the trail.

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As reported by KosherToday and Ynet, the city council of Netanya, Israel, has banned the sale of pork, despite the likelihood that the law will be overturned by the High Court of Justice as against Israel’s equivelent of the Bill of Rights. Allegedly, 70 stores support 2,000 families with non-kosher products including pig products.

Fifty-percent of the city council are religious or traditional, although only 3 of 25 council members opposed the bill. Reports Ynet, “Up until now, the residents remained silent on the subject, but the opening of a new pork-selling supermarket in the city center [see photo] sparked protests by haredim, who chained themselves to the supermarket’s doors on Sunday.” [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Netanya Mayor Miriam Fierberg is urging the Knesset to pass a bill to prohibit the sale of pork products in Israel.

(X-posted to Jewschool.)

Since I seem to be cultivating a Whole Foods beat–

In the wake of the Mackey online pseudonym scandal, one fellow Cantabrigian advocates a boycott of the health food giant:

A big Whole Foods investor said it was sticking by Mackey and, as of midafternoon, the Whole Foods board hadn’t met to discuss the matter. Well, as the Whole Foods board sits in la-la land thinking that their shiitakes don’t stink, I offer myself as the first consequence. I am staging a one-man boycott. I will spend the rest of the summer procuring my vegetables from places other than Whole Foods, most preferably my local farmers market or co-op…

With Mackey mouthing off, there is no better time to strengthen local connections and sever our ties with Whole Foods until we hear that Mackey is disciplined or fired. He might be close to a monopoly on the freshest commercial grown food. It will never be as sweet as the strawberry from a farmer’s market.

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NYPost reports on a dispute over the authenticity of the new Bowery Whole Foods’ Guss’ Pickles supplier:

July 5, 2007 — It’s a case of the big pickle versus the little gherkin. A pickle peddler says she’s soured on trendy Whole Foods, claiming the chain of supermarkets has been buying legendary Guss’ Pickles from a Bronx rival she accuses of ripping off the famous name. “Whole Foods is selling the pickles [as if ] they are coming from the Lower East Side’s Guss’ Pickles,” said owner Patricia Fairhurst. “They never came from me. I am Guss’ Pickles.”

The briny brouhaha stems from a legal battle between Fairhurst’s 85-year-old store on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side and another business, United Pickle in The Bronx. Fairhurst insists that United Pickle stop using the Guss’ name synonymous with sours and dills. Both sides are due in Manhattan federal court July 16 to fight over the name - but Fairhurst accuses Whole Foods in the meantime of using the Guss’ Pickles brand to sell a rival’s inferior product in a new Bowery store.

A Whole Foods Market spokesman, however, insisted that United Pickle - run by the Leibowitz family - is the true purveyor of the pickle name.

I guess we’ll see on July 16th who the “real” Guss is…Wikipedia and NYTimes Select have the full scoop:

In 2006, Tim [Baker, former owner of Guss, several owners after Isidor Guss] sold his ownership of Guss’ Pickles and left a legal mess in its wake. A buyer in Woodmere, NY claims to have bought the name Guss’ Pickles from Tim, while the actual store, which moved from its historic location on Essex Street to a storefront within the Lower East Side Tenement Museum was sold to someone else. The two parties are now battling in court for the rights to the name Guss’ Pickles.

One of the hottest questions circling around the sustainable food world (besides, “Is it possible to eat meat sustainably?“) is , “What happens when the organic and local food movements meet big business?” Can large corporations like Walmart in America and Tesco in the UK go green without radically undermining the integrity of foods’ localness?

The answer, according to an article today in The Guardian, doesn’t seem promising.

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