Trans fats,�an invention of the 20th century, permitted the development of such synthetic�food-like products as margarine and coffee whiteners.� Neither of these products�existed around the time my great-grandparents caught their first sight of the Statue of Liberty.� Nevertheless, as a result of focused, sustained, and wildly successful marketing campaigns to gain their recognition and acceptance,�they became an integral part of what is now considered �traditional� kosher cooking.� In 1912, for example, after Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati launched a nationwide campaign for Crisco, its new vegetable shortening,�it enlisted the support of American orthodox rabbis, notably Rabbi Moshe Zevulun Margolies (the �Ramaz�) of New York, to endorse Crisco as ritually pure.� P&G advertised that �the Hebrew Race had been waiting for 4,000 years� for a solution to its shortening problems.� Mazola worked with the Hebrew Ladies� Aid Society in Fargo, ND, to teach interested parties how to use their product, and made contributions to the local women�s burial society for every unit sold.� Other examples abound.

I went to my local supermarket to check out the ingredients in�pareve margarine and coffee whitener.� Mother�s lists �liquid and partially hydrogenated soybean oil� first. �Fleischmann�s lists partially hydrogenated soybean oil second, after liquid corn oil.��The first three ingredients in original Coffee-Rich are, in order,�water, corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oil.� The first three ingredients in fat-free Coffee-Rich are, curiously, identical.� �Partially hydrogenated� means trans fats.

What’s wrong with trans fats?� The problems are numerous, diverse, and well established.� Trans fats cause heart disease.� They increase insulin resistance, which causes diabetes.� Trans fats decrease good cholesterol and increase bad cholesterol. �They suppress the immune response, interfere with reproduction, and decrease the nutritional quality of milk.� They alter the properties of cell membranes.� They enhance deposition of abdominal fat.� In a famous study of 85,000 women conducted by Harvard University,�individuals with heart disease were found to have eaten significantly higher amounts of trans fats.

Trans fats have been banned in other countries, and in several cities throughout the U.S., but they have yet to be banned across our nation.� What the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has mandated is that food containing less than � gram of trans fat per serving may be advertised as�”trans-fat free.”� That�s not good enough.� In the case of Coffee-Rich, a serving is 1 tablespoon.� This morning I felt like making my�coffee extra light, so I put 4 tablespoons, or � cup, of milk into�the mug.� If I had used Coffee-Rich, that would have added up to almost 2 grams of trans fat.� Just for the first cup.� So it would be easy, on any given day, to consume quite a bit of trans fat solely from trans-fat-free food.� That�s a problem.

What are our alternatives?� First and foremost, skip the coffee whitener.� Drink your coffee black, or choose tea with honey or lemon.� Try coconut, almond, soy, or rice milk if you�d like.� Bake pareve as our foremothers did for a thousand years, with coconut oil, which stays solid below 75 degrees Fahrenheit.� Decline to make�recipes that call for pareve margarine.� Don’t use it in place of butter; make different recipes.� We vote every time a bar code passes over a scanner, so don�t buy margarine or coffee whitener for your home, office, or synagogue.� There is no place for synthetic trans fats in a healthy community.

The affects of our crazy winter weather are not passed us yet. Generally, we think of bad weather as leading to increases in the prices of food.  Examples include, damaged oranges when the temperatures drop below freezing or farmers having to charge more since, they had to remove 3 feet of snow from their potato crops. But this time, the cold winter is going to make your produce cheaper.

Florida’s cold weather caused a delay in the harvest date for Florida’s strawberries. The delay caused Florida and California to strawberries to hit the markets at the same time. Last week, 80 million pounds of strawberries were picked – a new record for this time of year. In 2009, a pound of strawberries cost $3.49, while this year strawberries will go for $1.25 per pound.

I don’t have any go to strawberry recipes, but since the high is over 90 degrees in Washington, D.C. today, I have been researching frozen fruit cup recipes. I think I am going to make this one from Cooks Recipes.

1 (6-ounce) can frozen concentrated lemonade
1 (6-ounce) can frozen concentrated orange juice
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup granulated sugar
8 ounces fresh or frozen strawberries
3 bananas, peeled and sliced
1 (8-ounce) can pineapple chunks

Combine lemonade, orange juice, water and sugar in a large bowl. Add strawberries, bananas and pineapple.
Spoon into individual serving dishes.
Freeze for at least 1 hour before serving.

Check out this great article in the L.A. Times about the Progressive Jewish Alliance organizing a tour of food deserts in Los Angeles. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Jewish community groups aim to broaden the growing local and national campaigns to attract more supermarkets to poor neighborhoods, where limited access to healthful food has been linked to obesity, diabetes and other diseases. Programs are sprouting up in Louisiana, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

Read more here.

This blog is not the right place for it, but still, Roger Cohen has really gotten on my nerves over the last year or so.  His ranting about how wonderful Iran is and how great it is for the Jews there made me question my devotion to the New York Times.  His  piece “Advantage France,” in Sunday’s paper, about some of the differences between the French diet and the American diet, may have me beginning to change my mind.  I’ve only spent a few days in France, and only in Paris, but I’m guessing he’s exaggerating somewhat.  Nevertheless, the idea of Americans adopting any diet (or lifestyle, really) that required not only combining the ingredients and cooking them, but processing them to begin with (filleting the fish, making the pasta, etc) does sound beautiful and absurd.  The idea of connecting to food on a “gut” level and a geographic one far predates the terroir of which Cohen writes, at least in Jewish tradition.We learn from the early medieval tractate Avot de-Rabbi Natan (Version A, ch. 30, appears as ch. 31 in Vilna Shas edition) that “Rabbi Ahai ben Yoshaya says ‘One who gets grain from the market: to whom can he be compared?  To an orphaned child who is taken around to all the different wet-nurses but is never satisfied.  One who gets bread from the market: to whom can he be compared?  To one who digs his own grave and buries himself in it.  One who eats of his own [stuff, work, field?] is like a child who grows at the breast of his mother.’”

רבי אחאי בן יאשיה אומר הלוקח תבואה מן השוק למה הוא דומה לתינוק שמתה אמו ומחזירין אותו על פתחי מיניקות אחרות ואינו שבע. הלוקח פת מן השוק למה הוא דומה כאלו חפור וקבור. האוכל משלו דומה לתינוק המתגדל על שדי אמו

The standard commentary, Binyan Yehoshua by R. Yehoshua Falk,  indicates (in addition to the above-mentioned question of to which chapter the teaching belongs) that the problem with buying grain, at least, from the shuk is that it may not have been properly tithed, etc.  He reads R. Ahai’s words ritualistically, probably because he did not want the insult applying to his own community, which likely didn’t always farm, mill and bake all for itself and to which the laws of tithing no longer applied.  But let’s re-read it ourselves.

Unlike Roger Cohen, Rabbi Ahai makes no real comment about health in his aphorism.  Today we concern ourselves mainly with what our food will and won’t do to our bodies.  Rabbi Ahai’s concern seems instead to be about what our food will and won’t do to our souls, to our identities, to our selves.  Similarly, today we are concerned mainly with what the food will do to us after we eat it.  In contrast, Rabbi Ahai makes comparisons based on how people are already eating.

Let’s review the comment in reverse order.   The one who eats of his own land, work, stuff… this guy’s supposed to be the ideal, but the one to whom he is likened (one who grows at his mother’s breast) is mundane, even common.  The second part is super creepy.  Rabbi Ahai, and I guess Roger Cohen would agree, links this aspect of lifestyle to health.  We often hear people say things like ‘smokers are digging their own graves,’ etc.  But buying bread?  This seems exaggerated, to say the least.  Finally, the first clause has what would be regarded, especially after Camus, as a Sisyphean quality.  No matter where the orphan goes, his thirst cannot be sated.

I think Roger Cohen is being extreme and a little bit silly.  I also think he’s being unfair–it’s easy to wax nostalgic about France when you have a job that gives you the money and the time to go to France and have the kind of experiences he describes.  But I also think he has a point.  Disconnection from the sources of our food, according to Tradition, leads, in the best-case scenario to disconnection from our (or any other) land.  Many of the spiritual and communal goals we seek will likely go unfulfilled, no matter how hard we try to achieve them.  Scarier still is Tradition’s (and, l’havdil, Cohen’s) implication that not only what we eat, but even how we get it, may lead to poorer health and premature death.  And the silver lining doesn’t sound so great: it just means we get to be “normal.”

I don’t think we should all be farmers and I don’t even know if Rabbi Ahai was one. But still, I ask Roger Cohen, I ask Rabbi Ahai and I ask you:  how do those of us who don’t grow wheat, who don’t have access to a mill, who live in the city and who live in the diaspora (where it seems that, to Jews, there is a clear disconnect from the land and its bounty) save ourselves?

Mostly I keep returning to that Myth of Sisyphus.  (What can I say?  I buy my grain at the market… er, co-op.)  At least with regard to disconnect from our food, from getting dirty, from engaging with what keeps us alive, Camus is right.  Our lives have become absurd.  Although he was French and, according to Cohen, shouldn’t have to worry about such things, Camus says the only ways out are revolt or acceptance.  Those sound extreme.  I am about to walk to the co-op.  Tuv Ha’Aretz offers another way to get more connected to the source of food.  Education like that offered in posts here helps, too.  Hey Roger, on my way back from the co-op, I may have a baguette sticking artfully out of my bag.  No beret though.

The other night I had eggs for dinner. Two of them fried over easy, slipped onto a slice of toast and plopped next to some sautéed zucchini with garlic. My total cooking time clocked in somewhere around 12 minutes — about as much energy as I had on a muggy summer evening after a day spent prostrating myself in front of a laptop. There was nothing gourmet about what I ate, except perhaps the pinch of za’atar that I sprinkled over the eggs en route to the table. But according to a recent New York Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan (author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), my dinner practically qualified for a James Beard award, the food world’s most prestigious prize.

Why? Because, as unfussy as my meal was, I cooked it. From scratch.

According to Pollan’s article, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” the average American today spends very little time preparing food — just shy of half an hour a day. When we do find ourselves in the kitchen, he says, chances are it is to heat up a can of soup or microwave a few frozen burritos rather than to assemble a dish from raw ingredients. The country’s collective shift toward convenience foods and processed snacks comes with some unfortunate consequences. Pollan writes:

A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists… found that the rise of food preparation outside of the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America…. As the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed: Since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.

My first reaction to the article was one of satisfied smugness. I figured that Jews must be an exception to this trend. As a people, we are practically hardwired to crave a good homemade meal. The dinner table plays a sacred part of Sabbath observance (as the symbolic representation of the sacrificial altar), and food is an integral aspect of nearly every holiday celebration. It is almost as if Jewish tradition specifically developed reinforcements to remind us that, as Pollan writes, “cooking is a defining” — and by extension, important — “human activity.”

And yet, in that same moment of personal and communal congratulations, I realized that the Jewish community has found ways to subvert its own food ideals. For every nourishing, wholesome Sabbath meal I have prepared or attended, there are many others that rely on greasy, store-bought kugels and chicken cutlets with packaged seasoning, followed by a tub of a synthetic ice cream substitute. Meanwhile, the rise in kosher-certified convenience products — from frozen blintzes to fish sticks — now ensures that Jews’ weekday “cooking” can mirror that of the rest of society. Ultimately, it seems that despite the special reverence we hold for bubbe’s cooking, the Jewish diet is not immune to the faux-food slump. “We have it in us — we know how to enjoy food,” Chana Rubin, who is a registered dietitian and the author of “Food for the Soul: Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating” (Geffen, 2008), told me. “Something just gets lost in translation.”

Pollan points to familiar culprits to explain Americans’ stove avoidance: busy schedules, food marketers’ ongoing attempts to seduce our consumption impulses and, most important, a simple lack of comfort and skill in the kitchen. Ironically, he says, the televised food shows on which Americans have become increasingly hooked (think Bravo’s “Top Chef,” or “Chopped” and “Iron Chef” on the Food Network) do more to intimidate and obfuscate than to encourage or instruct. How much can one really learn, he asks, from watching a “blur of flashing knives, frantic pantry raids and more sheer fire than you would ever want to see in your own kitchen?” Even the “dump-and-stir” shows, which are geared toward home cooking (for example, Rachael Ray’s “30 Minute Meals,” and Sandra Lee’s “Semi-Homemade”) “stress quick results, shortcuts and superconvenience” over true technique or the creative satisfaction that comes with pulling a successful dish from the oven.

It is on this last point that I depart from Pollan’s critique. The Food Network may not arouse culinary greatness from the average couch potato, but it has undoubtedly inspired many of its viewers to take that first, crucial step toward the stovetop. This same logic applies to Susie Fishbein of the wildly popular “Kosher by Design” cookbook series. I used to dismiss Fishbein’s recipes for relying so heavily on prepackaged ingredients (for example, frozen challah roll dough as the base for chocolate babka). Yet her books also include many simple, fresh-ingredient dishes that have motivated kosher cooks to think beyond the kugel pan. And if the ultimate goal is as Pollan writes, to “rebuild a culture of everyday cooking,” then it should not matter whether a recipe has three steps or 20, or whether it results in a soufflé or just plain old eggs.

Still, it has become clear that Americans (both Jewish and otherwise) need a serious dose of culinary literacy — an “Our Bodies, Ourselves”-style reintroduction to the kitchen and its many beautiful parts. Because while schedules will always be too busy, we make time for the things that we love. So start with the Sabbath or with a random weeknight. Sign up for a cooking class, dig out (or go purchase) a copy of “Joy of Cooking” or offer to play sous chef for a friend and learn through osmosis. And if you maintain an obsession with the Food Network, go ahead and enjoy it. Just make sure to turn off “Chopped” from time to time and get chopping.

photo credit: Digest This

Now that my Tuv Ha’Aretz (Hazon CSA) has started this year, I’m starting to get into a pleasant routine of planning meals around my weekly bounty (and my boyfriend’s kitchen).  The last two weeks we have seen beautiful fresh spring greens perfect for fun and interesting salads that I’ve dressed with (in various combinations) grated raw beets, honey and almond oil, crushed raw cashews, whole grain mustard and balsamic vinegar.

We’ve enjoyed the meals, and fortuitously there always seems to be enough salad left over for a hearty lunch the next day.  Each time I carefully put the salad in a container to take to work with me – and each time I promptly leave it on the kitchen counter.  A practice that leaves me both without a lunch that day and a wilted salad back at my boyfriend’s place.

Getting beyond my feelings of guilt that I’ve wasted otherwise very good food, it did get me thinking.  Is it more economical to buy a salad out than packing my own?

So pretend that I’m your average run of the mill consumer.  If I wanted to pack a salad to take to work with me for lunch, I’d have to go to a grocery store, and pick up some sort of lettuce, maybe tomatoes, cucumbers and maybe even some canned chickpeas.  I have olive oil and vinegars, but even so this isn’t a very interesting salad.  And because I’m buying for one, the quantities that I’m purchasing these items in would probably allow me to have this (rather dull) salad for 3-4 days.  Of course there are the days I am not eating lunch at my desk, or I’ve forgotten it at home – but basically that is providing me lunch for the week.

The retail cost of that home salad no doubt would come to a total less than picking up a $6.50 deli salad every day.  But for that price I could get far more variety, possibly fresher vegetables (my home salad is far more perky at the start of the week than the end) and the luxury of not forgetting it as I’m running out the door in the morning.  But is it more economical, on the grand scale, to buy my salad retail after the deli has purchased its vegetables in bulk?  What if I went to a deli that only sold organic vegetables?  Would my individual buying power influence other delis to provide organic options?

Of course nothing really compares to my CSA salad for freshness and sustainability (if I could only remember it the next morning).  But is there an argument for bulk purchasing?  Because I chose to (generally) eat local and sustainable when I can, is there an argument to be made in supporting my sometimes deli salad habit?

You know it’s spring in the northeast when you can find fresh rhubarb at your local farmers’ markets, food co-ops, and green grocers. This bitterly pungent, stringy plant, that is actually a relative of buckwheat, can be eaten cooked or raw. However, its leaves contain a poison, making just those lovely stalks edible for consumption. Because it has such a high oxalic acid content, eat rhubarb in moderation. Rhubarb is high in vitamins C and A, and in potassium. When buying rhubarb, many people tend towards the redder stalks, but you can choose any shade of color. Smaller stalks have a more tender flavor.

With such a bitter taste, rhubarb recipes contain lots of sugar: rhubarb pie, rhubarb butterscotch sauce, rhubarb cakes and crisps, even strawberry-rhubarb blintzes. Before rhubarb season ends this year, try an old or new recipe! What rhubarb creations have you made? (I have some rhubarb in my fridge now, and would love to make something I haven’t tried before.)

This optimistic article points to an issue felt acutely in “inner cities” around the country: a lack of fresh produce being sold at market.  This problem was controversially or famously addressed in my city by the New York City Green Cart initiative but this certainly hasn’t solved it and plenty of other cities have the same issues (NYC isn’t even mentioned in the article, though LA, Newark and Detroit are, and the article is mainly about Chicago.)  Could it be that looking to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s as examples, however, are more detrimental than good?  As big a supporter of organics as I am, I think encouraging people to eat “conventional” produce would be a big boon over Mickey-D’s and would be a lot cheaper and easier than the “greenest” route.  Even frozen produce makes a nice, healthy, easy and inexpensive meal most of the time.The article makes no qualms about the featured woman’s claim that the oranges in the market near her house have “brown spots” on them.  She and I may envision different things when we say “brown spots on oranges” but I think part of the goal of programs like New York’s should be to re-educate people.  A spot on an orange is perfectly natural and not such a big deal.  Those of us who have eaten manufactured foods most of our lives have come to expect blemish-free food that is identical to yesterday’s edition in color, shape and size, but readers of this blog know this is not how natural food looks–or tastes.  In trying to bring together organics and a beautiful shopping experience, I imagine Whole Foods must throw away a ridiculous amount of produce.  Some would flame me for saying this, but I don’t have the language to better state it:  Produce is simply not always gorgeous and organics all the more-so.

[There is a practice of saying a blessing upon seeing an "unusual-looking" person (to say ugly insults the Creator--see Talmud Bavli, Ta'anit 20a-b or refer to Lenny Bruce's supposed "if anything about the human body disgusts you, complain to the Manufacturer.")  We say, "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who makes all creatures different."  ברוך אתה ה' אלקנו מלך העולם משנה הבריות  Perhaps we should institute a new Berakha of sorts to be said upon seeing "different-looking" produce, too.]

I don’t know if or how well the Green Carts are working; all I know is that one is permanently positioned on my old corner which, though not very well-maintained, is a piece of litter’s throw from a real (by urban standards) supermarket with a formidable produce area and a very large independent market with produce, flowers and even a sushi-making area.  What’s more, it’s only a few blocks from the Park Slope Food Coop and the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market (nebukh, on Shabbes.)  There doesn’t seem to be any lack of produce available in the area.  I imagine the vendor located his cart there because the same market forces that make produce an un-lucrative option in poorer neighborhoods make his business prospects bad there, too.  But it means that the communities the program was designed to benefit aren’t getting any new options.  Not from that guy, at least.

Kosher‘s interface is cleanly designed. Essentially, it’s a front-end viewer for a database hosted on Shamash.org, which has listings of restaurants, groceries, butchers, kosher food stores and even caterers. The database also contains reviews that visitors to these establishments have submitted. But the app also has a host of iPhone specific features and goodies that make it a compelling purchase for any iPhone user who keeps kosher or has friends who do.

What makes this better than a printed list culled from a website?
The iPhone specific features are excellent. (Note that the app also works on the iPod Touch, but without the GPS features.) The app allows you to use the GPS feature of the iPhone to find local restaurants, ranked in descending order of distance. You can also browse a global list of restaurants, and you can search for a specific place using various filters to narrow down the results (meal, cuisine, price, etc). Once you’ve found somewhere to eat, you can hit the map button to find the location using Google Maps and even get directions from your current location.

This makes Kosher app perfect for travellers visiting an unfamiliar city. In Cape Town, Tokyo, Moscow, Budapest or Rio de Janeiro? You’ll be able to find a comprehensive list of kosher establishments or places selling kosher products (groceries, butchers, restaurants, cafes, bakeries and so on). Here’s an example of the location of an Indian restaurant we visited in Paris:

There’s also a phone button that allows you to call the restaurants directly to make a reservation or to ask questions. Not wanting to pay for an unnecessary international call, though, I didn’t manage to test whether clicking on a foreign restaurant’s phone number works: all the telephone numbers seem to be formatted for local dialling from their respective countries, which might cause problems for direct dialling using the iPhone from abroad before your trip. The London phone number of this restaurant, for example, is formatted for dialing from within the UK, not from abroad:

What are the best reasons to get the application?
It’s really great to be able to search such a comprehensive database from your phone: it’s a helpful resource for tourists, travellers, and for those who prefer to eat only in restaurants certified by a particular rabbi or hashgacha, or who want to avoid a hashgacha they consider untrustworthy, since they can restrict their search to a specific kashrut certification.

You can save a list of favorites to your phone, which makes it easy to access the phone numbers and locations of places you visit often, or places you’ve been abroad and would like to recommend to friends, but don’t want in your main iPhone phonebook.

The app is also a great resource for religious eaters: it has the full text of Hebrew blessings before and after meals in several different traditions (Ashkenazi, Sepharad, Sephardic and  Chabad).

If you prefer to buy only certified food, or need to do so for a friend who keeps a stricter standard of kashrut than you do, the list of hechshers is a wonderful resource to have while you’re in the supermarket, since it lets you compare a symbol on a packet with an easy to read, comprehensive list.

You can submit your own review of a restaurant to the Shamash database, which is a nice feature. Here are the existing reviews of a fantastic place in Los Angeles:

Kosher app also links to the website of a restaurant (if available) and lets you email a listing to a friend.

Any caveats?

• Information on kashrut certifications is sometimes visible on the page of a specific restaurant, but doesn’t appear in a search for symbols on products: for example, the Sephardi Kashrut Authority in London appears in restaurant lists, but strangely, not in list of hechshers under “England” although, as far as I know, they certify packaged products under their own hechsher as well.
• When choosing a filter before searching for a restaurant, the bottom row of filter buttons is too close to the bottom icon bar of application options. This makes it easy to click “Near Me” by mistake when in fact you wanted to limit your search to Sephardic restaurants. The organization of the options in the “Filter” box could be clearer: it’d be better to have separate lists for cuisine, meals, and type of establishment. That way, you could choose “cafe/deli” or “caterer” from one list,  ”breakfast” as opposed to “dinner” from another, and “Sephardic” as opposed to “Mexican” from a third.
• One minor correction: the Sephardi blessing over wine ends with “hagefen” not “hagafen”.

What improvements would we suggest?

• It’d be really nice to rotate the iPhone and be able to view Birkat haMazon in landscape view, since the Hebrew text is quite small.
• What about being able to browse restaurant menus inside Kosher app without having to open the Safari browser? This would probably entail adding a feature to the Shamash database, but it could be as compelling a proposition for restaurant owners as for their customers: imagine easily being able to plan what you’d like to eat before a trip abroad to a culinarily-diverse location like Paris, where there are numerous kosher restaurants.
• What about being able to view photos of food from the restaurant, or photos of the restaurant interior itself?

The Shamash database really needs cleaning up. Kosher app itself is excellent, but sometimes its iPhone specific features don’t work perfectly because the entries in the Shamash database feed it erroneous data. Since the restaurant database can be edited by users and consists largely of submissions from people who’ve visited the restaurants in question, rather than professional reviewers, one should probably expect this sort of inconsistency. Nonetheless, perhaps RustyBrick can convince Shamash.org to spend some time checking the phone numbers and addresses for accuracy. Because of these database inaccuracies:

• Locations are classified somewhat inconsistently: sometimes under city name and sometimes by city name and zipcode. This is a merely cosmetic problem, but makes the listings appear slightly sloppy and makes it less easy to see restaurants in a particular neighborhood grouped under one heading, at a glance. (For example, after Zurich in the list of cities, there’s a load of incorrectly alphabetized cities. I’m not sure why they are there and not in the main list.)
• More seriously, when a restaurant is not correctly listed (such as one in Casablanca Morocco, which had the Massachusetts state abbreviation MA at the end of the address) the Maps application can’t show it correctly on screen. Viewing a location using Maps only works if the address from the Shamash database is perfectly formatted. Searching for a restaurant we visited in Paris (shown above) first brought up nothing. Since this was a test to find a place whose location I already knew, I was able to correct the address by deleting an extraneous street name and the bracketed name of the restaurant after the actual address which I knew to be correct. Only then did the map appear correctly, but this would have stumped a casual tourist trying to find an as yet unknown location.

But all in all, these are minor gripes: Kosher is an excellent and well-designed program. In our view, it’s well worth the $5 price. You’ll find all sorts of kosher restaurants and stores you might never have known about, you’ll be able to get directions and phone numbers for your favorite haunts in seconds from your phone and you’ll be able to upload a review of your meal as you sit digesting dessert and waiting for the bill to arrive.

You know how it is in late August, when your vines are loaded down with ripe fruit, but you’ve got a deadline in the morning, or a pile of sweaty summer laundry, or a kid with a dentist appointment, or all three. You’re thinking, I’ve got four burners, two three-gallon pots, a couple of dozen quart jars and not a minute to spare. You feel guilty letting all that good produce go to waste, but you know it’s nothing to how you’re going to feel in January when you’re pouring off another can of pureed tomatoes trucked three thousand miles from California, thinking, I could be eating my own right now.

That’s the situation Peter Pehrson of Schoharie, NY was in last season, with more tomatoes than time. “I said to myself, there must be others in my situation. Turns out there are, and they range from home gardeners to commercial apple producers” he said.

Out of that realization comes the Schoharie Community Cannery, where local growers of any size, from backyard gardeners to commercial farms, will be able to use communal canning equipment to process their vegetables, fruits and perhaps eventually their poultry products as well.

Pehrson hopes to build a community cannery to process all natural or organic produce from local growers. The cannery would probably be built as a non-profit division of a for-profit, cooperative corporation, a business model that allows for both commercial bank loans and private investments as well as foundation and philanthropic funding. Pehrson and his co-consipirators are working out the details with the help of their upstate community, and are holding an open meeting to discuss the project  this Saturday from 9:30 to noon (see more info here). Everyone who eats is invited, and Pehrson promises to send us a rundown of the meeting for those New York State readers who won’t be able to attend on Shabbat.

Community canneries sprang up during world war two to accompany the victory garden movement. American households growing food in their backyards used shared equipment to store their home-grown veggies for the winter. Since then, many canneries have closed, for a litany of reasons we’re all pretty used to by now, including the cheap availability of canned vegetables: why pay fifty cents per can to do the work yourself when you can buy your vegetables at the supermarket for almost as little? I’m sure our readers can name plenty of good reasons, including the lower cost to the environment and the fact that your own garden produce is probably organic and tastier, but the fact remains– community canneries are no longer producing in most states.

These days, southern states, including Virginia, Georgia and Florida, have the most community canneries currently operational (according to the database currently being compiled at pickyourown.org). Ohio also has a few, but there are none in New York, California, Vermont, or any of the other places you might expect to find ample support for a venture like this one, which not only creates jobs to run three shifts of canning during the height of the season, but also creates important infrastructure for food security in local communities.

Pehrson hopes farmers will be able to find a new market through canned vegetables produced in a USDA-certified community kitchen. In this post, for example, local farmer Bob Comis in Stonybrook, NY ponders all the ways he plans to put the Schoharie Community Cannery to good use. Comis is a livestock farmer, so canned goods would allow him to turn his farm into a more closed system–with the animals fertilizing the vegetables–without the intense pressure of finding a market for fifty new pounds of zucchini every day, all summer long.

Comis dreams of growing five acres of dry beans to can and sell at his farmer’s market stand. At the food conference in December, Michael Ableman mentioned that one of the issues facing sustainable agriculture is the need to produce more sustainable staple crops, so that consumers can get their flour and protein locally too. Community canneries, which make it possible to pressure-can things like dry beans for use without soaking and hours of cooking, might assist in building this necessary infrastructure.

Given the possibility that they’ll be processing chicken in the next few years, I’m going to take a leap and figure that the Schoharie Community Cannery won’t be kosher, particularly since kashrut rules for canning vegetables  and fruits include strictures not just for meat and milk, but also for some produce, such as potatoes and cabbage. So why should Jew and the Carrot readers out in other states be interested in this little upstate startup?

Perhaps because your own community needs a cannery, maybe even a kosher one. Pehrson suggests that the model he and his colleagues are currently planning to institute will require less than $400,000 over its first three years in operation, but USDA-standard community kitchens can cost much less, depending on the cost of space and the equipment they purchase.

“In terms of community support, it’s been a positive tidal wave” said Pehrson, who also hopes that the cannery will provide jobs and a reason for young people to stay in the area. “Everyone benefits” he says, “Local jobs worked by local people is the best situation for an employer.” Switch eater for employer and food for jobs and you’ve got the local foods manifesto in a sentence.

To rsvp for Saturday’s meeting, visit the Schoharie Community Cannery web page at schohariecannery.org.