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.

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Just a thought, but could the new food credo of “Eat food not too much, mostly plants,” be a threat to the Kashrut industry as we know it?

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.

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For all of the back and forth here about whether to shecht a goat at the upcoming Food Conference (which is certainly a noble and lively debate), very little space has been given to the what of shechting. Or the how, I suppose. While certainly secondary, the technical aspects of what goes/would go into slaughtering a goat at a Jewish retreat center in rural Connecticut with no facility set up for such a thing, and kosher are by no means simple. I was given the debatably enviable task (I loved it) of figuring out the answers to all the whats should we move ahead. Given that I’ve spent the better part of 18 months (2 years if you count my initial pangs of conscience) trying to get my ethical, kosher meat co-op off the ground, I figured I’d know all the pieces by heart and would just smooth them into place- heck, 1 little goat vs. dozens of cows? Piece of cake. Turns out that’s only half true.

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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.

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The recent controversy regarding the custom of Kapparot (see article in the Forward) made me realize that Kapparot is virtually the only remaining ritual that uses an animal sacrifice as an atonement for human sin. In Temple times, any inadvertent sin had a corresponding animal sacrifice that was intended to cause the sinner to contemplate the nature of sin and how this animal is now losing its life instead of the sinner. pretty powerful stuff, if your environment is agrarian and animals are preciously traded commodities. Today however, things are much different. Read more »

Last night I listened to the Book of Lamentations/Eichah. Today I read the words of Barbara Kingsolver:

Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three visions of damnation. Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth. Is it such a stretch, then, to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of of its production and transport?

As Naf posted earlier, the ritual of fasting on Tisha B’av and other major fast days presents an interesting question for those who already use their food choices to represent their values, Jewish and otherwise. While I have traditionally fasted on Tisha B’av, I felt that the fast would weaken me too much to be at my “fighting weight” for a full day of work as the Farm Bill moves to the House Floor this Thursday.

Making connections between the mourning of the destruction of the Temple and the idea of Tikkun Olam as a substitute for the rebuilding of the Temple that many in the post-Messianic diaspora age make, I’ve recently viewed Tisha B’av as a moment to take a look at what is falling apart around us, as Anna posted earlier today.

However, as my teacher in Mexico used to say, when you dream about the world you imagine is possible, you should wake up and live it the next morning. Since the world I want to live in would have a wholly different food system, I decided that whatever food I would eat today should be representative of that world, Read more »

Recently, a friend asked me if I was a foodie, a question which caught me thinking quite a while for an accurate response. “Well, I used to be” was the only thing I could think of. Reflecting back on that answer, I found myself questioning what and how I eat and how that differs from what one many think of when they think of a foodie.

Typically your average culinary fan tends to place a high value on taste and other palate-based pleasures. Different tastes and cuisines are prized and much is made of importance of the finest ingredients. Star chefs, award-winning cookbooks, and the finest tools become things to live for. But, I like food. I like to eat good food. What makes me feel that I am different that this? I pondered this and came to the conclusion that perspective was key.
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I’m writing this post from Oakland, Ca at the “Adamah West” house. Here live 3 Adamah alumni doing their best to live the ideals that they developed at Adamah. Having spent a few days here, I can tell you that they’re doing a pretty solid job. First of all, the house is both dark and cold, which as I’ve learned is the first step in being an environmental household: no heat, no lights. Seriously though, they pick oranges from the tree in the backyard (and give them away as party favors), the cabinet in the living room contains at least 3 different strands of bacteria fermenting various types of vegetables and other goodies, and I just enjoyed a slice of fresh bread hot out of the oven….

Today I saw my first redwood trees while hiking in the Muir Woods with two friends. I wanted to see a redwood tree up close, and Ian wanted to forage for chanterelle mushrooms. At about one o’clock we pulled off the trail into a patch of “dappled sunlight” to sit down for our bagged lunch. Before we took our first bites, Adam asked for a communal blessing over our food so I said the “Hamotzi” and Ian offered some words of thanks to the Source of food, life, fresh air, and all growing things. Since we’re Jews, we didn’t just eat; we ate and discussed, and played variations of one of my favorite games, Amateur Geologist!

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Someone made a comment at the Food Conference that ‘ethnic foods’ were unhealthy; take your pick between Italian (heavy sauces), Indian (full of butter), Chinese (high fat & sugar content), and nobody’s national dish is particularly good for you. Nigel countered this with an important distinction: what we think of as “typical” cuisine from other countries is often, in that country, reserved for special occasions, whereas we eat it any (and sometimes every) night of the week. Couple that with the fact that when we eat out we’re likely to eat more than we are hungry for, and still have dessert–and yes, eating special occasion food all the time IS bad for you. It’s the equivalent of having a Thanksgiving-type meal four or five nights a week.I hadn’t really thought about this before. Our culture assigns different kinds of foods and meals to different kinds of occasions, and more and more, the category of ’simple sustenance’ is giving way. Food plays a lot of different roles in our lives, and its importance for feasts, festivals, gatherings, important occasions cannot be understated. But in terms of what we need to stay healthy, our bodies require much less than society would like to feed it. We risk numbing ourselves by excess (not to mention getting fat, encouraging overproduction of our farmland, and increasing the disparity between this country and most of the rest of the world).

I do it all the time — I ‘treat’ myself. If I’m feeling sad, or stressed, or I woke up late, or even if I just happen to be biking past the bakery that gives a 50% discount on all its pastries if you arrive by bicycle (how do you turn that down!?)–I buy something yummy to get me through the day. But when I stop to tally up the week– the ‘treat’ hot chocolate, muffin, pastry, carrot cake… I’ve eaten something like that nearly every day.

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Rabbi Shmuel responds to The Jew on why Eitan’s goat cheese isn’t kosher.

The bottom line - I wish the goat cheese venture much hatzlacha (I know what it means to be a good steward of baalei chayim) but it should be labeled according to what it is - kinda kosher, sorta kosher, kosher style or virtually kosher. We can sell or do or make or eat what we want, but the only thing we are allowed - legally and morally - to call pure Vermont Maple Syrup is just that
- pure Vermont Maple Syrup. So it’s really more of a disclosure/truthfullness issue than a kashrus one.

Surely within recent memory the almighty hechscher was less important: when we were peasants, when we grew and manufactured our own foods, we also had responsibility to see that ingredients and processing were kosher.

Is there a trend toward fetishizing the hechsher? Could it be a recent byproduct of our modern, industrialized and standardized corporate food system?

Tell us what you think.

I had an amazing morning. Here was just the first little bit:

I went for a walk with Marco and Talia (aged 3) to find the goats and the hens. The goats are just roaming around, doing hen-like things, and looking pretty happy. The difference between how they live and the pictures one sees of hens in cages is pretty dramatic. Last year some of the Adamahniks gave me eggs from here - they were like eggs I’d never eaten before; kind of like the eggs that Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore’s Dilemma — dark and rich and strong. The eggs of happy hens.

So then we wanted to find the goats; and en route bumped into Eitan, Freedman’s very own Jewish goat herd. Standing there with a big shovel, a load of old food, and four big bins of compost. Here’s the conversation, roughly:

Marco (who’s a Wall St guy — and an interesting one): You’re composting that?

Eitan: yeah. I let the hens eat the leftover food from Freedman for about a day, but then I compost it, because you don’t wanna let mold grow on it, or too much bacteria — the hen feces is good for compost, but not good for the hens to eat.

Marco: Yeah. And great compost.

Eitan: Yeah — do you compost?

Marco: Yeah — we have a place at the beach and we compost and grow stuff — asparagus, tomatoes, cucumbers.

Eitan: What kind of cucumbers?

Marco: The Amira ones, the little Israeli ones.

Eitan: Oh yeah, Persian, they’re really great.What do you use for mulch?

Marco: We harvest seaweed, at the seashore…

Eitan: That’s really cool

Marco: …And we have great raised beds; a few years ago this guy from the circus gave us some tiger feces, it was really good

Eitan: Wow, that’s really cool — carnivore feces just has totally different bacteria. Great compost…

And I’m stood there and I’m thinking: I’m an urban Jew. I’ve never grown a cucumber. I don’t know what an amira cucumber is — and maybe I’ve eaten one, and maybe not. And I’ve never composted. And tiger feces — and it’s relative merits in composting — who knew??

And how cool for Talia and her sisters to grow up like this.

And then a different question: Eitan makes goat cheese. It’s great cheese - I’ve eaten it. But it’s not being served at this conference. How come — because it’s not hechshered.

Has to have a hechsher, otherwise we can’t serve it. So it’s not kosher, right?
Wrong! Ridiculously wrong!!

Eitan’s cheese is the most kosher cheese you could meet in the whole world.
The goat is called Zilpah! She’s milked by a Jewish guy — called Eitan. He makes cheese, very simply. Kosher rennet — hechshered kosher rennet. And gives it to me, who eats it. I know the goat, and the guy who made the cheese, and what went in it - how often is that true of the cheese you eat?

And then I went to a great session Arlin Wasserman did — “What’s In A Symbol?” - all about this stuff. The kosher market in the US is now $140 billion a year — hot dogs alone, $30bn. People choose it, according to his data, 35% on taste, 16% because they like the guidelines, 5% because it’s safe or healthier, 8% because they’re observant, 4% because they can’t get halal, and 8% because they’re veggie or for other reasons.

Well: I want the market to be $140,000,001,000 — because I think we should buy $1,000 of Eitan’s cheese this year — at least — and I want someone to be able to certify in a really simple way that it’s kosher…

– The Jew

What is it to be a Jew these days, and not have a little guilt, or a little dilemma, or a little identity crisis? We have an amazing 3000 year old history. We live in all places of the world. We’re strugling with a tradition that is at times grounding, liberating, shackling, horribly out of date, incredibly meaningful and powerful. Writing as The Jew on this blog, is essentially a conversation between tradition and post-modernity.

So — let me tell you about dinner. This evening we ate amazing food — starting off with pumpkin snacks, grown here by the Adamahniks; and lasagne and kale and salad for dinner — and writing it simply doesn’t let you know how great it was. And then bensching — introduced by Rabbi Beccy Joseph, and Tali Weinberg, the farm manager here at Freedman. How often do you get to bless the food you’ve eaten with a rabbi and a farmer — and Beccy introduced bensching, but Tali actually led it. An amazing sense of kavannah, of shleimut, of coming home.

There are three interwoven conversations — at least three! — that thread through this conference, and this blog. One is “the wandering Jew” — all the countries we’ve traveled through, all the foods, all the traditions. Different recipes for charoset — from Yemen, Egypt, Venice - America today. All the history, all the recipe books. Bagels, chopped liver.

The second is the land of Israel. That we arose as an indiginous people, in relation to land and place — and food. The sheva minim — the seven indiginous species that grow in Israel; named in the Torah — and in May this year a bunch of Jews (and Palestinians and Jordanians, both Moslem and Christian) cycled from Jerusalem to Ashkelon — and in that one day, we passed all seven species growing. What’s our relationship to Israel — especially if we don’t live there?

And the third is the contemporary conversation about where food comes from, and local food, and eating sustainably. Omnivore’s Dilemma; Fast Food Nation; Wendell Berry; Chez Panisse.

And here’s where The Jew is at: how do these three conversations fit together? How do they shed light on each other? What happens if eating local is a key value - how then do you eat traditional Jewish food? Or vice versa?

What if you eat kosher meat — and it’s a value to eat grass-feed beef, like at Polyface Farm? I know of two couples who in the last year switched from eating kosher meat, even if not organic, to organic meat, even if not kosher? (We’ll introduce them to Simon Feil, who’s here, who wants to create grass-fed kosher organic beef).

For more questions, about why this night, and this Jew, are different… stay tuned.