World leaders attending the UN Food Summit in Italy will be met with modest meal choices come lunchtime. Well, sort of.
According British paper, Times Online, officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization are keen on avoiding claims of hypocrisy for serving lobster and foie gras while discussing global starvation. Said one official, “At the last summit in 2002 we did not give enough thought to the menu and were open - unfairly, in our view - to the charge of hypocrisy.”
As someone who has planned many events for a Jewish environmental non-profit, I know how challenging it can be to model an organization’s values at its events. Somehow, even with the most careful planning, there’s always an overlooked detail - disposable cups where there could be real glass, kosher food but not Chalav Yisroel dairy, or garbage cans where there could be a compost bin. So I sympathize with the FAO organizers who probably spent so much time planning the Summit sessions that they forgot how much every meal is a micro-session in itself. Then I looked at the menu.
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When was the last time you ate a banana? This morning, sliced on your cereal? As a quick snack on the way to shul to tide you over until kiddush? According to an article in Plenty Magazine, finding a banana to eat might soon become a lot more difficult:
“Back in 2003, the magazine New Scientist ran a cover story declaring that the banana was on the brink of extinction. The problem, the article explained, was that commercial bananas were genetically bankrupt: sterile, seedless clones with no genetic diversity and no resistance to a new wave of virulent fungal diseases…Scientists say, the outlook is still pretty bleak for the banana. Commercial growers remain wedded to a single variety known as the Cavendish, the bright yellow fruit found on US supermarket shelves; meanwhile, a lethal and fungicide-resistant infection called Panama Disease has decimated plantations across Southeast Asia and is widely expected to spread into plantations in Latin America and Africa.”
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Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. Over the summer, she will spearhead The Jew & The Carrot’s “Unboxed” segment - periodic posts that aim to demystify summer’s most seasonal produce.
A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my cousin who lives year-round in a largely rural, but fast-developing part of Bucks County in southeastern Pennsylvania. Beth is a great cook and friendly with several local farmers. We stopped by Jim and Kathy Lyons’ Blue Moon Acres for organic micro-greens and spent a morning in the lavender fields at Carousel Farm with another organic grower, Niko Christou. At None Such Farm Market, which sells produce grown across the road and on other nearby farms, we acquired asparagus and rhubarb, the true harbingers of harvests-to-come in the Northeast.
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Here are two amazing opportunities for farming and Jewish learning this summer - with The Jewish Farm School:
Hillel Organic Farm Alternative Breaks
The Jewish Farm School, in partnership with Hillel, will provide a total of 60 college students the opportunity to participate in a weeklong farm-immersion experience. During the two programs, students will be volunteering on sustainable farms located on the East and West coasts. No previous experience is necessary. June 11-18 (Kayam Farm, MD) and June 24-July 1 (Oz Farm, CA). Cost $200 - details here.
Program Highlights:
Learn basic skills in sustainable agriculture, food preservation, natural building and herbal remedies.
Discuss issues of food justice, sustainability and Jewish tradition.
Work alongside other college students and enjoy delicious homegrown food.
JFS Seminar on Organic Agriculture and Eductional Gardening
June 2-5
Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, NY
Join us for our 3rd annual seminar in Organic Agriculture and Educational Gardening. Run in partnership with the Teva Learning Center, this program is designed for educators seeking to incorporate gardening or farming into their work. Register here.
Seminar Highlights:
Experience an early morning harvest at an organic farm and learn how small-scale, sustainable agriculture operates - first hand.
Learn the skills to build your own Jewish garden.
Study traditional Jewish texts and contemporary scholarship.
Discuss garden-based curriculum and activities.
The Jewish Farm School is supported by Hazon.
File under the good news heading: According to this article in Crains New York Business (I read it online - as in standing on line for my take out lunch. It beat reading about Jenna Bush’s wedding…),
New York City is one of the largest players in the burgeoning green restaurant industry. According to Boston-based non-profit Green Restaurant Association, 25% of all American restaurants that it has certified as “green” are in NYC! The article also mentions the specific efforts of Tavern on the Green, who are nervous about not being up to sustainable-snuff when ownership of the site reverts to the Parks & Rec dept., and New York’s first certified organic restaurant, Gusto Grilled Organics. Now New Yorkers can have their cake and eat it, too.
Reminder: Tomorrow night’s Food, Faith & Farming panel in New York is a must-attend event for Jewish foodies and food lovers of all stripes. If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet - now is the time!
Join Gastronomica for a panel discussion on the role of faith in farming. Farmers Zaid Kurdieh and Anna Stevenson, and writer Leah Koenig join Gastronomica’s Editor-in-Chief Darra Goldstein to explore the concept of taking care of the land through farming as seen from both the Islamic (tayyib) and Jewish (eco-kosher) perspectives. This panel is part of The Gastronomica Forum - quarterly events featuring important articles from the journal as a platform for engaging in deeper conversations about food and culture.
When: Tuesday, May 13 - 6:30pm
Where: New York City’s Astor Center for Wine and Food Experiences
Cost: $20 - ticket price includes a taste of Middle Eastern foods and farm-fresh products.
Purchase tickets here.
Question of the day: What do you eat to prepare yourself for Bicycle Fetish Day?!
The City Reliquary presents: A Street fair for your bicycle! Show off your ride and revel in the beauty of all types, styles, and genres of specialized, customized, and personalized bicycles.
CONTESTS throughout the day: Best in Show, Best Vintage, Best Hand-made, Best Chopper, Best Small Wheel (includes foldable bikes), Wheelies, BMX tricks, Track bike tricks, Heaviest Bike, Ugliest Bike, and more. Games, Rides, Bike Beautification Station, Merch tables and more! Plus: Live performances, cheap beer, and burgers and hot dogs (both carnivorous and herbivorous).
4th Annual Bicycle Fetish Day - Brooklyn
Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:00noon - 6:00 PM
More info here.
I am beyond mortified. I think I missed out on my chance to join a CSA this year.
For three years, I ran Hazon’s Jewish CSA program, Tuv Ha’Aretz. During that time, CSA-related thoughts (vegetables yes, but also spreadsheets and volunteer coordination, and organizing Shabbat potlucks, and donating leftover produce to soup kitchens, etc.) dominated vast swaths of my brain, crowding out other important information like friends’ birthdays and the need to wash my bath tub.
I would complain regularly - even daily at certain times of the year - about people who could not get their act together in time to register for a CSA. Outwardly I was compassionate, of course, but inside I had no sympathy for those people who would send me frantic emails the night before vegetable pick ups started asking, “Is it too late to sign up?” What did they think this was, Fresh Direct?
After all that experience, you’d think I’d be a pro at signing *myself* up for a CSA. The first gal to send in her check, right?
Ehh..well…no. Read more »
(Photo by Shir Feinstein-Feit)
It seems a long time since I wrote about seeding onions…and indeed, the past two months on the farm have been a bit of a blur. But we planted the onions over chol ha-moed pesach, with much fanfare and mixed emotions (I’ll explain), and so I felt it would be good to give you all an update. (If you missed the last post, I am the Farm Manager at Adamah, a Jewish farming fellowship program in Connecticut. The sadeh is our 3.5 acre field where we grow our vegetables.)
The sadeh looks beautiful. Right now there are beds of onions (cippolini, red, scallions, leeks, walla walla…), with their thin, oniony stalks the size of blades of grass standing pertly up from the soil; beds of beets, red and golden; and several beds of brassicas, the family of hearty green-purple vegetables that includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards and kohlrabi. Only a small percentage of the field has been planted, and the evenly spaced rows of green and red and purple are beautiful against a background of tilled brown earth. The field looks serene, and betrays nothing of the work it took to get it looking that way.
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Last month, right before Passover, David Elcott ripped up his lawn. This White Plains-based author/lecturer was out to prove - to himself as much as others - that you do not need years of experience to grow your own food. All you need is a desire to eat great food and a piece of fertile ground - like your lawn (or nearby community garden for city dwellers). Partnering with the COEJL blog, To Till & To Tend, we’re excited to bring you David’s first hand accounts, frustrations, and victories from the “front lines” of his lawn farm.
Operation Lawn Farm: Part 1
I was going crazy today. Tech problems with my printer took hours. Nothing accomplished. A lousy conference call committee meeting. Exhausted. At five in the evening, I took the world into grip and, like Superman, ripped off my work clothes, put on my dirty sweats and headed out to the farm.
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Yesterday’s Dining Section featured a fascinating article about saving endangered species, by serving them for dinner. The marketplace is a powerful conservation tool, the article argues - if it’s being sold in the market, it’s not extinct.
One of the most interesting parts of the article was the accompanying interactive map that broke the country down into regions, by species (i.e. food). New York City falls into the Clambake Nation (not the Whitefish Nation?). Personally, I bioregionally identify a bit further north and west in the Maple Syrup Nation…
Click here (or on the map above) to find out about your region.
Jewish foodies and food lovers of all stripes - this is a must-attend event.
Join Gastronomica for a panel discussion exploring the concept of taking care of the land through farming as seen from both the Islamic (tayyib) and Jewish (eco-kosher) perspectives. Farmers Zaid Kurdieh and Anna Stevenson, and writer Leah Koenig join Gastronomica’s Editor-in-Chief Darra Goldstein for a discussion on the role of faith in farming as part of the Gastronomica Forum* series.
When: Tuesday, May 13 - 6:30pm
Where: New York City’s Astor Center for Wine and Food Experiences
Cost: $20 - ticket price includes a taste of Middle Eastern foods and farm-fresh products.
Purchase tickets here.
*The Gastronomica Forum, launched by Darra Goldstein, Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Gastronomica, are quarterly events featuring important articles from the journal as a platform for engaging in deeper conversations about food and culture.
Thanks to Yigal Deutscher for this guest post.
We have just begun the Sefirat HaOmer, counting off the direct correlation between Pesach & Shavuot, two celebrations separated by a string 50 days long. These are two moments in time, interwoven, yet at polar opposites. On Day 1, we have left bread behind, as Chametz. On Day 50, we are elevating bread as an offering in the Holy Temple, a sacrifice unique to the day of Shavuot. A serious transformation has just taken place.
The link between our starting point and our destination goal is food, bread in particular. This corridor of time marks the counting of grain ripening…from the start of the barley harvest to the start of the wheat harvest.
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Thanks to Hazon’s own Barbara Lerman-Golomb for her environmental reflections and meditations on Passover!
Passover is a natural time to take an “environmental inventory” of the chametz in our world and to be mindful of the simple lives our ancestors led in the desert in their pursuit of freedom. Chametz is the Hebrew term for any of the five basic biblical grains which traditionally observant Jews remove from their homes. These include wheat, rye, oats, barley, and spelt—that have been mixed with water and allowed to ferment. Eastern European Jews also consider chametz to include a variety of beans, peas, rice, corn, peanuts, and other foods which could be ground and made into flour or bread.
When our ancestors were dwelling in the desert, they had no choice but to live simply. In our day, simplicity has come to mean conservation, not using more than you need, and not being wasteful. Jewish law prohibits wasteful consumption. When we waste resources, we are violating the law of bal tashchit—Do not destroy. (Deuteronomy 20: 19-20).
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