Thanks to Rachael Don for this guest post! Rachael is a Registered Dietitian in training and co-editor of the Jess Schwartz Jewish Community Day School’s Hazon CSA newsletter in Scottsdale, AZ.  A former healthcare administrator, she holds an MBA and a Masters in Health Services Administration. When she’s not cooking organic vegetables, Rachael is caring for her three young sons and husband, David in Phoenix, AZ. She shares these thoughts with the readers of that newsletter and all of you!

(Originally published in The Forward)

Last November, I koshered my kitchen for the first time. I did so with the full understanding that my decision came with certain compromises, like giving up my favorite cheeses and my delicious but uncertified collection of vinegars. While a bit heartbreaking, these were sacrifices I was willing to make as I welcomed in my new lifestyle. If only I had known that I might have to give up salad, too.

Leafy salad greens, along with berries, asparagus and a variety of other produce, have come under serious scrutiny in the kosher world over the past decade. There’s nothing treyf about these particular fruits and vegetables, except that they have a tendency to attract insects, which are halachically forbidden. Once they are removed from a spinach leaf or the inside of a raspberry, the produce is theoretically fit to eat. But kosher agencies like the Orthodox Union and KOF-K argue that certain bugs (for example, aphids, thrips and mites) are too small to spot easily, but large and common enough to be compromising.

It all started with an excessive amount of cabbage.  One of my housemates wanted to make a pretty and delicious green and purple cabbage salad for a dinner party she was attending.   “Why are your cabbages so big in this country?  In South Africa we have little cabbages!”  True, even after making her salad a few times we still had a lot of cabbage left over.

Then I got cabbage in my CSA share – two heads of it.  “How do you feel about sauerkraut?”  I suggested, thinking about my own German heritage.  “Or kimchi?” was her suggestion.  Now we started getting excited. She pulled out her Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, which was a rather comprehensive collection of pickles (although no kimchi).  So several kimchi recipes were consulted online and we got to work.

Cross-posted on From the Ground—the blog of American Jewish World Service (AJWS).

Imagine waking up one morning to find your crops—the food that keeps you alive—completely submerged in water and entirely destroyed. This is exactly what happened along the Sinú River in northern Colombia, a region that has supported a diverse community of indigenous people for generations. The Zenu and Embera people who live by the Sinú banks depend on the river for fish, irrigation and drinking water. But in 2000, the Urrá Dam, built by a consortium of Colombian, Swedish and Russian companies, submerged over 7,400 hectares of land, crops, homes and sacred sites. The dam displaced 2,800 people and continues to threaten the lives of 70,000 by altering vital food supplies. Areas of severe periodic flooding and drought caused by its flow have stymied traditional farming practices. Compounding this reality is the construction of a new dam—many times the size—by the Colombian government, presenting a constant looming threat over this beleaguered rural community.

Today’s New York Times features several letters to the editor in response to “Experts Worry About Feeding the World as Its Population Grows,” an article published on October 22. The letter writers call attention to several issues: the political realities that perpetuate global food insecurity; the relationship between access to contraception and reduced food demand; and a desire for integrated farming strategies that combine conventional farming practices with agro-ecological approaches. What the letters do not include, however, are examples of grassroots organizations that are implementing many of the creative solutions the authors are seeking.

The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby.  Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH.  “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.

So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes.  As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh.  I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda.  I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way.  The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes.  But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film.  If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.

Author’s note: The following is a drash I gave at my shul two days ago. My shul, Havurah Shalom in Portland, Oregon, is a participatory congregation.

We are in the final days of Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three harvest festivals, and one of my favorite times of year. The traditional observance of Sukkot: building a booth, decorating it with greens and seasonal fruits and veggies, eating and sleeping under its roof through which we must be able to see the stars, all highlight and make holy things we do every day: living in our homes, eating meals together, even sleeping. Perhaps this is why I look forward to Sukkot so much, or perhaps that it often coincides with my birthday (I’m still young enough to enjoy rather than dread it), or perhaps simply that it happens during the autumn, my favorite season of the year.

Judaism is particularly connected to food, and Sukkot especially to the bounty of our fall harvest. Now is the time for the first apples of the season, in all their amazing varieties, for winter squashes, for root vegetables, and for the last of summer’s abundance: the tomatoes, the zucchini, the pesto made from homemade basil. It is a time to celebrate the simple pleasure of growing and cooking and eating.

Q: What do you do when you have so many home grown zucchini your friends won’t answer the door when you try to share your harvest?

A: Find a car with an open window.

The triumph and the tragedy of the summer growing season is the sheer fecundity of gardens and farms. How to partake of fruits and vegetables at their peak without relying on the same old recipes?

Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers offer a mouth-watering solution with their book, Too Many Tomatoes . . . Squash, Beans, and other Good Things; a Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes.

I keep my kosher salt in an Israeli style pottery canister with a spring locked lid. It was a mishloach manos from my synagogue one Purim. I always feel like a kitchen alchemist when I reach for it.

Recently I was lunching with a business colleague in a casual Beverly Hills restaurant whose menu made a smug reference to its use of imported fleur de sel. My colleague said she’d been given some as a gift and it tasted wonderful.

The discussion rattled some of my assumptions about this elemental ingredient.  Is hand-harvested French sea salt at $1.42 an ounce the best choice for the savvy gourmet in the kitchen? Or is it lunacy, when coarse kosher salt costs me 6 cents an ounce?

If my summer were a cookbook, it would be called What to Expect When You’re Expecting— Expecting Company, That Is, and It’s a Heat Wave.

Yes, welcome to life in the global warming oven.  We are on at least heat wave #3 of the summer here in usually temperate Portland, and I’ve had a potluck to attend or guests to host for all of them.  And while the hot weather makes me want to eat ice cream three meals a day, I know I really shouldn’t.

Especially not when “eating” means “bringing to a potluck where it will sit out in the sun.”

So what has been on the menu?  Lots, and I figured I’d share it in case you can’t stand the heat but still need to be in the kitchen.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a member of the Tuv Ha’aretz at the JCC on the Palisades in beautiful Tenafly, New Jersey. Our farm has been hit by the weather pretty hard this year: from the tomato blight to the torrential spring/early summer rains to the above tornado, not much has been growing. What we have gotten is amazing: local, tasty organic produce.  It’s a tension: we all want to support local farmers and preserve agricultural land in this corner of New Jersey. But we haven’t been getting as much as we expected and we’ve been getting a lot of summer squash.

Yesterday, we received a letter from our CSA coordinators that explained what had happened this summer and sharing the comments of many of our members. I am proud at how many people feel a stake in our farm and the fate of our farmers. Through weekly updates from Ted and Annemarie Stephens, and trips to visit the farm, we’ve built a connection to the people growing our food. We may be disappointed, but this summer has been financially devastating to the Stephens. Our CSA shares make a real difference. I also give our coordinators a lot of of credit both for being honest with us about how this summer has not always met up with our expectations and for reiterating their commitment to keeping this CSA going next year. I know I will be signing up again, and I hope many others do as well.

Read on after the jump for the letter!

Dan Barber’s recent editorial ”You Say Tomato, I say Agricultural Disaster” in last Sunday’s the New York Times reminds us that even when we try to  opt out of the agribusiness system, we’re still part of the eco-system.  In our efforts in the Northeast to grow our own tomatoes, it looks like we home gardeners may have inadvertently contributed to the tomato blight plaguing our local CSA’s and other small farms.  I had really been looking forward to the tomato harvest, but instead I’m reminded sharply how sharing the harvest especially this year is sharing the risk. How are others dealing with the tomato blight crisis?

An August garden is pregnant with expectations.

The garden I share with my friends, Karen and Kate, has a tomato jungle. The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots.

Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its toll as well. No matter. The tomatoes seem to ripen from pearl green to bloody red as you watch.