Last Sunday, July 25, 15 people gathered at Oregon’s Museum of Science and Industry for Portland Tuv Ha’Aretz’s 2nd annual Jewish edible garden bike tour. Portland is laid out in grids, like Washington, D.C. Last year’s tour covered NE Portland; this year we set off to explore neighborhoods in SE.

Our ride leader, Tuv member Beth Hamon, is an old-school bike geek. Last year she created spoke cards for our ride (when you do something for the first time, it’s an innovation; twice is minhag) So of course she made a new one for this year’s ride. Here’s a picture:

Our route took us through the Sellwood, Mt. Tabor and Hawthorne neighborhoods. We started with a trip down the Springwater Corridor, a 40-mile multi-use trail that runs partway along the Willamette River and goes past some fantastic bird habitats.

We visited four gardens, ranging in size from a single raised bed to an urban micro-farm, complete with bees and a small orchard. All the gardeners talked about what they grew, how long they’d been growing food, and some offered perspectives on how their Judaism informs their gardening. For some, the conection is simply that they are Jewish and enjoy putting their hands in the dirt. Others talked about earth stewardship and one gardener deconstructed the Hebrew word pardes (orchard), as a way of explaining his approach: “Pardes begins with a Peh, which stands for p’shat, a simple explanation for things (what you see is what you get). The next letter, Reish, stands for remez, which means “hidden,” and suggests all that goes into making the plants grow: water, healthy soil, air, sunlight. Daled is drash, a commentary, and the final letter, Samech, stands for sod, which means “secret”, as in ‘The Secret Life of Plants,’ something you have to study and understand over a period of years.”

We ended our 14-mile loop with a picnic lunch at Sewallcrest Park, next to an enormous community garden. It’s worth mentioning that community gardens are very popular here; we have a three-year waiting list, with more than 1,000 people waiting for a plot.

Here’s a link to our Flickr page for more pictures of our ride. One rider used a nifty little GPS device he wore on his wrist like a watch to map our route. Here’s another link that shows where we went.

If you’d like to plan a similar event, please feel free to contact me for information.

Last week, I wrote about how I, dressed as “Chris P. Carrot,” had led the Veggie Pride Parade in New York City under my dual Jew-carrot identity. Now you can vote for a photo of Chris P. Carrot (with his “wife,” Penelo Pea Pod) from the event as the cutest photo in a PETA contest!

A post on PETA’s blog announced, “Calling all connoisseurs of cuteness: We need your help deciding which of the following pics from recent PETA demonstrations is the most aww-inspiring.” (Note: Although PETA owns the costume that I borrowed, the event was not a PETA demonstration.)

The other photos feature a little kid protesting against the cruelty of the dairy industry and someone in an elephant costume educating people about the abuse of elephants in circuses. Kids are formidable opponents in a cuteness competition, but I hope that I can count on The Jew & The Carrot readers to vote for the Jew and the carrot (i.e., me).

Yesterday, I embodied the dual identity of the Jew and the carrot once again to lead the third annual Veggie Pride Parade through the streets of Manhattan. Trailing a police escort and walking in front of hundreds of enthusiastic herbivores, I frequently shouted “Eat Your Veggies, Not Your Friends!” while dressed as Chris P. Carrot.

The event was organized by Pamela Rice, who frequently had control of a megaphone during the parade. While some of the cheers seemed corny (e.g, “Hey, ho, we’re so cool. Being veggie truly rules!”), she and other megaphone users tried to express a wide variety of reasons for embracing vegetarianism, including cruelty to animals, health, the environment, and many more. This should come as no surprise, as Rice is the author of 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian. Her book helped inspire my 2007 “Counting the Omer” blog, which offered a different reason to go vegetarian for each of the 49 days of the sefirot. Considering that tonight marks the 49th day of the omer, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back at Counting the Omer.

Photo by Robyn Lazara

While reading the opening portion of this week’s Parasha, the Rabbi in shul saw me and said, “You can’t be zolel ve’soveh (approx: gluttonous) on Wolfgang Puck cuisine.” This statement promptly blew my mind. Here’s why.

The statement in question comes from the passage in the Torah about the rebellious son, who, if certain conditions are met, is to be seen as completely incorrigible and must be put to death by the community. One of these conditions is that the child must eat and drink copious amounts of food in a gluttonous manner in a public area and this activity must be decried by the community leadership. According to the rabbinic authorities, the money used to purchase the food must have been stolen from his parents and he must commit this act in front of his parents’ home. Not easy to achieve.

All this speaks to the idea that a child that is this rebellious at this early an age, will have no chance of becoming better, and that it is better to nip this in the bud before the child influences others. The commentators and philosophers struggle with this idea that there are people who are beyond the possibility of ever doing teshuvah and that we are permitted to kill someone for his future actions.

Many believe – and I count myself among them – that this halacha is a hypothetical construct designed to make us aware of the importance of raising our youth in the proper manner. To bolster this argument I would point out exactly how difficult it is to actually consider someone to be a rebellious son, and that the hoops that must be jumped through are fairly intricate. To add to the above example, the child must be between thirteen and three months and thirteen and six months and must have exhibited rebellious behavior for a significant time. Nevertheless the relevant point here is that being a glutton at such an early age is not a good thing.

About a year ago I started working for the first Kosher Wolfgang Puck outpost, at the Spertus Institute in Chicago. We have a cafe, but our main business is in high-end catering. I have learned quite a bit under Chef Laura Frankel, and I am learning about how most of our food gets prepared. One of the biggest lessons I am learning first hand is how much of a difference there is between fast food, and food lovingly prepared by people who care about how they feed their friends and clients.

This is where the lesson came home for me. With so many of our youth eating junk foods at a higher rate than ever, does this potentially pose a risk for our communities to be raising rebellious children? Thinking about this gave me the necessary connection between how we feed our society and how it functions. A child who has never been served a meal prepared by people who care for her may never understand how challenging it is to sustain a family with care and dignity. Children pick up on the fact that dinner came from a box, or was paid for with pocket change at a fast food joint. The youth whose parent comes home from a day of work and then gets to making real dinner served on real plates with a whole family together has no chance of ever rebelling in this manner.

I’m feeling sluggish today. It’s rain-ish (not exactly raining, but close) this morning, which doesn’t help – and Yosh and I spent the last week on an engagement party tour – Tuesday and Wednesday in Silver Spring with his family, and Friday-Sunday in Chicago with mine.  There’s really nothing to complain about (both celebrations were great), but I am feeling a little bit “Berenstain Bears and Too Much Birthday” today.

While I pull myself together, I thought I’d share a picture of the amazing cake that Yosh’s sister made – complete with fondant icing carrots (for The Jew & The Carrot, of course) and a treble clef for Yosh.  It was hard to cut into such a masterpiece, but the carrot cake inside was worth it.  Check out another view below the jump.

I just finished watching a promotional video from the OU. Targeted to the food industry, this video demonstrates the process by which a product receives certification. Using a fictional cake made by Drakes (of Seinfeld lore), the OU rabbi shows how, early in the process the ingredient list of the new cake is sent to the OU to ensure that all ingredients are kosher. Some of the ingredients are found to be problematic, the red sprinkles on top and the emulsifiers that in the words of Rabbi Moshe Elefant “make ingredients mix when they normally can’t.”

According to Rebbe Michael Pollan, food is defined as something your grandmother would recognize. I would bet a big bunch of kale that your grandmother didn’t use emulsifiers to make sure her cake was delicious.

Historically, Kosher agencies only began to spring up when food began to be manufactured outside the home. Before then, there was no need for it outside of meat certification and that was mostly done by local, individual rabbis. In the present age, the reason why Kosher is a multimillion dollar industry is precisely because things like mono- and di-glycerides, yellow #5, and carmine exist, and because food is made by scientists rather than chefs (the Drake kitchen in the video looks far removed from the kitchen I work in. In truth it looks rather like my college chemistry lab), in huge factories. According to Rabbi Menachem Genack, when an ingredient isn’t Kosher, the OU helps them find a Kosher substitute from their database of over 100,000 (!!!) ingredients.

What if we stopped eating those foods, as per Rebbe Pollan? Would the big four kosher supervisors be out of work? I am not calling for mass unemployment of mashgichim (kosher supervisors) worldwide. I also do not think that there is a conspiracy to ensure that manufactured food is a mainstay of the kosher diet to ensure that mashgichim are assured a good pension at the end of a large fruitful (fruit-less?) career.

However, looking at what is required to certify an ingredient list definitely brought home for me the fact that eating many foods means eating a chemistry set. Rather than eating a cake with a kosher butter substitute, or Kosher partially hydrogenated oil, I would rather just not eat that product. I can already anticipate an OU response to this line of thinking: “We’re just responding to the demand of the Kosher consumer” or “Our responsibility is to the Halacha (Jewish law), which states nothing about the Kashrut of trans fats”. To this I would say, What are you doing to prepare for the market shifting? Are you prepared to retrain Kosher supervisors to work in another field? Are you ready to face the fact that there is a Biblical requirement to maintain one’s health? If it would be required, would you certify cigarettes? Now that trans fats are banned in many places are you ready to refuse to certify trans fats?

My vision (natch), is perhaps in addition to calling for a decentralized system of produce and meat, we should be calling for local Kashrut organizations certifying local producers, and refusing to use ingredients sourced from China or South America. At the very least if we know where local food is available we should be voting with our stomachs and buying local rather than mass produced.

Watch the Video Here

Hat tip to Chef Laura for inspiration

Laura Frankel is not your typical kosher chef. For those of who have been reading her recent posts, she has little tolerance for fake foods and refuses to kowtow to clients who demand kosher versions of otherwise unkosher food. I recently had the opportunity to sit and chat with her about her thoughts on food and the nature of food in Jewish society.

One of the overarching ideas that govern her style of cooking is that Kosher is a way of life and rather than use kosher substitutes to allow people to enjoy otherwise unkosher dishes, she would prefer to work strictly within the bounds of a natural kosher ingredient palette and creatively work from there.

In her kosher, meat kitchen things such as margarine and soy milk are verboten. If you want to make chocolate chip cookies you better make them with real butter and wait to eat them in a dairy context. She said that it shocks her to know that there are Jews who have never eaten desserts such as cookies and brownies that had real butter in them. In essence she said, “Kosher is like breathing, once you have the rules, it becomes second nature.”

I asked her about her relationship with local farms and produce, and she echoed the sentiment of many chefs trained in post-Alice Waters America. Food that is grown locally, according to her has a “more human connection” and the sensory experiences can be enhanced. She related to me how wonderful it feels to cook with an apple that was picked that day and was still warm from the sun when she held it. In this sense she places herself squarely in the world of food as art rather than food as a global environmental philosophy. This is an important distinction and before all the environmentalists fill up the comments section I would argue that we really do need people who care about both sides of the equation.

Food philosophers like Michael Pollan are needed to bring the issues to light, while the food artists are the ones that create a universal sensory truth so that the individual can experience and understand on a visceral level that which the Philosopher presents. Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of philosophy in her thinking as well. Processed foods do not have much weight in Chef Laura’s world. What we eat should be made by a person and not a machine (well not entirely by a machine at least). According to her, “If it looks like it came from a factory then you should think twice.”

Chef Laura recently joined the team opening up the new Wolfgang Puck at Spertus Cafe as executive chef, bringing years of operating Kosher restaurants to the table. Kosher restaurants are unique in a number of ways and she was more than willing to elaborate on the vagaries of serving food to Kosher-keeping Jews.

Kosher restaurants are often limited by the fact that the protein on your plate is usually fixed and does not change with the seasons; this means that the real talent comes from making the produce and grains surrounding it the true centerpieces of the dish. In essence, what she is saying is that Jews want chicken and steak and her art comes from sneaking in the backdoor and wowing them with a wonderful pairing of an unusual grain and say, baby beets (though she said that no one really liked the baby beets, which is a pity).

This fact likely stems from the Talmudic dictum (echoed centuries later by Brillat-Savarin) that there is only true joy with meat and wine. Perhaps the new rallying cry of the conscious Jewish eater should be, “There is only true joy with seitan and local micro-greens.” As with the above, she refuses to serve steak with bearnaise sauce (inevitably made with non-butter substitutes), and apropos of that she made a truly profound statement: “I don’t care what prime grill does. Some animal died so you can eat it, and you want to slather chemicals all over it?”

Opening a Kosher Wolfgang Puck franchise is not without its own challenges though. Frankel does have room to create her own dishes but people do want to see some of the signature dishes that Puck is famous for.  Still, don’t look for any asiago in the stuffed chicken breast, or some of the more signature desserts. She seems to have enough culinary muscle to make sure that her “no fake food” rule remains true at the new Spertus establishment. If there will be a replacement for the cheese in the chicken it will likely not be a pseudo-dairy that melts like cheese but doest taste like it. Likewise with the desserts where Frankel has become a real Maestra of the Sorbet.

What might be of interest to the foodie trainspotters will be to see how she blends her Mediterranean influences with Puck’s Asian fusion. She hinted at some possibilities, mentioning that at the opening Gala, guests will see a main course flavored with ginger and pomegranate. (I will be sure to post a full report after sampling the finished menu.) The restaurant will be meat based, but Frankel is optimistic about this. She feels that the no-butter-milk-cheese, constraints of working in a meat kitchen force her to be more creative with her menus rather than having the full palette of base ingredients available to her to create more classic dishes.

In all, this is an exciting step in global Kosher cuisine, marking the first time a superstar chef has paired with a big name in the Kosher world to bring Jews world-class casual dining. Best of luck to a new JCarrot blogger and we look forward to her dispatches from Chicago; a ray of light in an otherwise kosher wasteland.

Chef Laura Frankel’s Website

Kapparot should be a solemn occasion, reminding people days before Yom Kippur that they are being spared from the theoretical cause-and-effect relationship of sin. In exchange for this, We are asked to reflect on life and it’s fragility; how it can be taken with one quick stroke of the blade. Instead though, we have turned it into a spectacle; children running around, playing with the livestock and us having little to no concern with their welfare. Traditionally we are supposed to even refrain from eating these chickens, donating them to charity instead. Fun and pleasure is not the name of the game.

Rather than eliminating the custom, perhaps those who feel strongly attached to this vestigial sacrifice should realize its depth and turn it into the solemn preparation for soul-cleansing that it really is. Those who choose to use a fish or money or other suitable replacement should not feel left out either; think about the words being said during the ceremony, and understand that this truly is a kapparah-an atonement for one’s sins over the past year. Maybe even think about sins committed against all creatures over the past year, and understand that the chicken-fish-money only counts as a repentance if it serves to focus us to repent.

The deer come out around mid-August every year as their food runs out in the forest. This season, they were here in July. Entire plantings of green beans, sweet potatoes and edemame, were gone. Badly eaten were the new and still tender tomato and cucumber plants.

Earlier in the season we cought 6 groundhogs over the course of a month and a half, and safely transported them to a wooded area a few miles away. Now we have an early deer problem, and a drought like we’ve never seen before.

Weeks go by with only an inch or two of rain. Throughout the month of July we got less than 2 inches of rain, watching thunderstorms and big gray couds float over us and delight neighboring towns with their moisture.

This week I am really starting to panic. With no rain in sight, and chances of thunderstorms amounting to nothing at all for weeks on end, having done rain dances, bonfires, and talking angrily to anyone who would listen, my husband Pablo and I decided to just bless.

I’ve prayed before. I’ve asked, begged, demanded, and promised. This afternoon, after harvesting in 105 degree heat and longing for the sour mood to stop, we sat down on a bench next to our harvest, held hands and recited in simple Hebrew, blessing the One who opens up the clouds and lets the rain fall.

This afternoon, while I visualized myself totally drenched like so many times before, we hand-watered many of our beds. We painstakingly removed each and every white fabric cover (deer protection), watered, and put it back. All the while the sky rumbled and dark almost-brown clouds floated by, like in the weeks past.  I thought if I imagined myself soaked in the rain it would attract the clouds to stay and open.

At dusk, a tiny little shower dragged by, seemingly teasing us for watering for almost all of the afternoon. Then, as the sun completely dissapeared and dark came, a big storm; loud, bright and majestic, came in.

Several hours later, the rain is still pitter-pattering on the metal roof of the house. Was it our little blessing that helped to focus the storm? Many other storms just drifted on by in the weeks and months past. What if our blessings had that kind of power all the time?

“Rain Blessing” painting by K.C. Benson.

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