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

Is there a Jewish — and thus also a non-Jewish —way to cook?

I’m not talking about kashrut, which defines what one cooks.  I’m talking about how one cooks.

Actually, I’m talking about how I cook, and how my not-a-member-of-the-tribe partner Chuck cooks.  I’m wondering if like so many other aspects of our lives, the differences reflect our disparate religious upbringing.

My male partner was raised Christian in Canada, achieving a veritable trifecta of soft-spoken repression, at least compared to this loud Jewish woman from New York with whom he’s chosen to spend his life.  The manifestations of our differences range from the onerous to the hilarious. And we’ve begun to wonder if our cooking styles are among the things affected.

A few weekends ago, we had friends over for dinner.  Chuck eagerly picked up a cookbook that we’d recently received as a present  and planned a three-course menu (stuffed dolma; lentil soup; and pureed squash and parsnips).  Eying the pears I’d bought a week and a half earlier, which were languishing toward rot, I figured I’d throw together something pear-themed for dessert.

Chuck read over his recipes.  He copied out the ingredients so he could purchase exactly what was needed in the prescribed quantities.  As we stood in the yuppie-mart and I looked over our grocery cart, I raised an eyebrow at the container of crème fraîche.

We have crème fraîche at home I said.

Not enough he said.

So mix in a little sour cream I said.   Peter [the friend who'd given us the cookbook] said you can.

I gave Chuck the look that meant:  crème fraîche is 7 times as expensive as sour cream; we never bought it before that snobby Peter needed it as an ingredient when he was visiting the week before last, and even he admitted he could have just used sour cream.

He gave me a look that meant:   you want me to cook dinner, don’t you?  so why are you butting your shnoz in when I am perfectly willing to do this on my own?

I decided to make myself scarce in the produce section.

Back home, we each went to work.  Chuck followed every step of all three recipes, word for word.  Meanwhile, I peeked at the recent jcarrot posting of Leah’s apple and pear crisp recipe, then at a few other online recipes.  I cut away the browned patches of the pairs, chopped out some candied ginger, threw in a few spices and a touch of something boozy (I don’t mean to be obscure; it’s just that I don’t remember what exactly I added).

I slid the pear dish into the oven on whatever temperature Chuck had it on for his dishes.  With nothing better to do, I gave him a bit of commentary on his efforts.

You should steam the dolmas I said.

The recipe says to boil them he said.

Can you guess how this story goes?  We served our friends a plateful of falling-apart dolmas that had all too much of the delicious flavor of the filling boiled away.  The soup was good but not quite spiced enough — which meant no one wanted to dilute the flavor with a little crème fraîche on top (certainly not enough to warrant a second container).  The puree was lovely.

But the big winner?  My dessert.

How do you get the pears to taste so . . . pear-y? One of our guests, a notoriously wonderful baker asked.  And though I was thrilled to have impressed her, even as I related my impromptu approach, I felt kind of lousy for poor Chuck, who’d worked so hard and not gotten the same results.

Why not?  Well, I’m positing it’s because Chuck treated the cookbook just like his fundamentalist Christian mother treats the Bible—as the literal word of a higher authority to be followed unquestioningly.

But me?  Let’s just say, People of the (Cook)Book though we Jews may be, between Torah and Talmud, Mishnah and just the mishegas of life, it feels like I’ve been better trained to observe a few commandments absolutely (the ones that stave off food poisoning, for example), while still reveling in debate and interpretation.  And of course the substituting in whatever you happen to already have in the fridge.

So what do you think, dear reader, is this a religious/cultural distinction?

In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted.

In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of doing food teshuvah or repentance: a gradual changing of mindset to try to do better to eat more consciously and sustainably. The comments to the post rightly pointed out the dangers of associating food with sin. There are so many issues to deal with when we make food choices. In the end, over-active guilt about each bite might end up back firing, leaving people to their old habits rather than dealing responsibly with questions like “Is it better to eat local but non-organic, or organic but from 3,000 miles away?” and “What if the only fruit my child will eat are strawberries and it’s the dead of winter?” Indeed, one of the problems with the American diet is that we’ve become so obsessed with the minutia of what goes into our mouths that we have forgotten to take pleasure in eating. We can see the corn stalks but not the field.

I want to suggest that this line of the Al Chet is on to something slightly different. First, its about responsibility. The formulation “We have sinned” requires us to admit that it’s not the chocolate mousse cake that is sinful. We’re the ones who take food for granted in a time when so many people are food insecure.

Perhaps more important is the reminder that this sin is before God—it’s not just about eating sustainably but about eating sacredly. We have to remember the Jewish version of Michael Pollan’s basic rule about eating: “Eat kosher food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Say a bracha.” When we forget to acknowledge that our sustenance depends on God and that we are blessed each day to be able to enjoy it, then we have missed the mark. Judaism provides us with ways to reinforce the sacred nature of our food—as my teacher David Kraemer taught me, we say a bracha not to make the food holy but because it is holy to begin with—saying a bracha thanks God for giving us permission to eat it, and only then does it becomes mundane. On Yom Kippur, we acknowledge as a community that we have been blind to God’s blessings.

There is a beautiful paragraph in the prayer U’netaneh Tokef that describes humankind’s fleeting presence on earth as compared to God’s eternity. One line reads: B’nafsho yavi lachmo, with a person’s very life he or she earns bread. We spend our lives focused on the basics of sustaining ourselves one more day. Learning to eat sacredly means to try to see past those blinders.

Looking deeper, we can see more in the Al Chet to inform our sacred eating. Another line asks forgiveness for sins done knowingly and unknowingly. As sacred eaters, we learn not to eat unknowingly, even if changing our behavior takes a bit longer. In light of recent scandals in the kosher food industry, we should also take to heart the line about sins in our business dealings (Masah u’matan). When standing before God, we cannot compartmentalize our religious obligations from our ethical obligations, and our sacred eating must reflect that synthesis.

It’s especially poignant that we recite this line of the Al Chet on a day when we are fasting. I, like I am sure many of you, end up dreaming about bagels and water as the last hours of Yom Kippur tick down. Most days of the year we can commit this sin. On Yom Kippur, we can’t. This offers us a fantastic opportunity to live our lives differently as soon as the holiday is over—we can begin to eat sacredly as we break our fast.

G’mar chatimah tovah—may each of us be inscribed this year for good in the Book of Life.

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

If you just focus on the technical things needed, the task seems simple. Which is what I did. Since the kashrut aspect was forefront in my mind, and since I’d actually worked as a mashgiach (kosher supervisor) at Isabella Freedman before and was familiar with the organization that gives them a hechsher (certification of kashrut), that seemed the best place to start. I called the Rav HaMachshir, the “head rabbi” (lit. “rabbi who gives the hechsher”), at the Hartford Kashrut Commission, to ask what his organization would need in order for the slaughter to happen with their blessing and the resultant meat, should the animal end up being kosher (they don’t always despite best intentions) allowed into Isabella Freedman’s kitchen.

He was very friendly and said they’d be fine with it, but a rabbi familiar with shechitah, preferably an actual shochet, would need to serve as an overseer- a mashgiach- to the process. Since he has no one on staff who fit the bill, we discussed some other options and I set off to find someone at one of the major hechshers that works in the meat industry who was appropriate. I quickly found someone from the OU who was very personable and excited to be part of the process.

My other concern was the legal aspects; there are very specific state and federal regulations around slaughtering meat and I wanted to make sure we stayed within those guidelines.  For the most part, animals can be slaughtered on premises for consumption thereon without an issue- which surprised me when I first learned it, but there it is. The rules become a little stricter but still perfectly manageable when the animal is being removed from the premises for consumption by whoever is purchasing the animal. Stricter still if they are being removed to be sold commercially in anyway, but staying within the state. And finally, the strictest regulations address meat being moved across state lines for commercial purposes. So our situation was simple and I trusted that whoever was doing the slaughter and the overseer, both having lots of experience in this area, would know what to do. I wasn’t disappointed.

We were moving along nicely- I’d dealt with the halachic (Jewish legal) and legal issues needed to allow the actual task to happen. Now I had to deal with the actual task- getting a goat and someone to kill it. More on that soon.

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.