At 7 PM tonight I picked up the very first bunch of veggie-goodies from my very first CSA share- with Heaven’s Harvest farm in New Braintree, MA. As we don’t have a Tuv Ha’aretz CSA in the Boston area, we have launched a campaign to ensure members of the Jewish community, beginning with those involved with the Moishe House Boston: Kavod Jewish Social Justice House, to join one of the many already existing CSAs in the area.
I had been anticipating it all week, wondering what freshly harvested items would be provided for me, a roommate and a nearby friend, who are all going in on the CSA share together.
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An article in the food section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle features Nigel Walker, the farmer of Eatwell Farm. Walker is “our” farmer at Tuv Ha’Aretz in Berkeley. (San Francisco’s Tuv Ha’Aretz’s farm, Capay Valley, is also mentioned.)
While the article talks about how CSAs are becoming more and more popular, one of the more notable points indicated that many consumers are not ready to give up certain non-local fruits and vegetables:
While the true CSA model means only getting what is coming straight from the farm or neighboring farms, [home organic delivery services like] Farm Fresh to You also offer the additional option of receiving bananas from Mexico and apples from Washington.”People are drawn to CSAs for different reasons. Some are on the local-sustainable bandwagon,” says Moyra Barsotti of Farm Fresh to You. “There’s also the facet that finds it convenient.”Barsotti points to a survey of her customers that asked what was most important to them: Whether food was local, sustainable or organic. They answered local. Yet in a separate section asking what their favorite fruit and vegetable was, bananas were the top pick.
Interested to find out more about organic delivery services? Click here.
I don’t mean join a CSA. I actually mean, hire someone to do it for you. In San Francisco, that someone is a business called MyFarm, whose employees will come over, design a garden in your backyard, and then do maintainence for it on weekly visits. You can read about it here.
I have to admit I am torn by this idea. By growing a garden in your own yard, of course you are much more connected to your food. But by paying others to maintain it for you, you introduce yet another middle-person.
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(x-posted from www.greenprophet.com)
I was so anxious Monday as I awaited word of the delivery of my very first Israeli community supported agriculture (CSA) delivery to its drop spot in Tel Aviv. I was nervous, not because I thought the vegetables wouldn’t be good or because I was unsure if I was getting a good deal (the veggies are great and it’s very cost-efficient), but because I was relying on this week’s box of straight-from-the-farm vegetables to convince my Israeli flatmates that CSAs are a worthwhile investment.
I picked up the box right near the corner of Dizengoff and Gordon in Tel Aviv. I walked home with vegetables in hand for ten minutes, smelling the basil and thinking about making pesto, which I probably won’t have time to make this week. As I approached my apartment I saw that nobody was home. Damn. I wanted my flatmates to see me walk in with it and “ooh” and “ahh” at the produce. I left the box prominently displayed in the kitchen and gently rearranged the chard and arugula to look a bit more presentable. Within twenty minutes one flatmate returned home. She was visibly excited about our new abundance so we started unpacking the box together when we noticed that one of the tomatoes was squished. She looked disappointed and I panicked. “We’ll use it for sauce,” I think I muttered in Hebrew, trying a bit too hard to stay positive. “Lo Nora,” she said, it’s not a big deal.
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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. This is her second installment of “Unboxed” - posts that demystify summer’s most seasonal produce. See her first post on rhubarb.
There is something very special about the first pick-up of the Tuv HaAretz CSA season. Having invested in a farmer’s harvest-to-come in the cold dark of winter and then waited patiently through the spring, the initial sight of tables piled high with the first produce of the season is a delight in the midst of the densely built environment. No wonder our ancestors were enjoined to bring offerings of first fruits to the Temple in gratitude for the blessing of the earth’s bounty!
At Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York City last week, new and returning Tuv HaAretz members gathered shares of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and eggs from Eve and Chris Kaplan-Walbrecht’s Garden of Eve farm. Early summer greens prevailed. Red lettuce, mesclun, and arugula went into bags and boxes of all shapes and sizes along with elegant asparagus spears, bunches of red radishes, and a single stalk of rhubarb each. Then there were the leeks. Sturdy and humble in appearance, these gangly onion and garlic cousins fit awkwardly among the leafy beauties.
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Thanks to Moshe Cohen for this guest post. Moshe is participating in Hillel’s Sustainable Agriculture Alternative Break at Kayam Farm in Maryland and sending in “reports from the field.” The alternative break is being led by the Jewish Farm School.
“I had a convo with my chi,” said Alison Fields, recently of Indiana University, leaning on her shovel during a work break in the shade. After our first full day at Hillel and The Jewish Farm School’s Alternative Break at Kayam Farm, we have already taken a complete tour of the grounds, dined on white mulberries right off the tree, sampled new vegetables out of the garden like garlic scapes and kohlrabi and participated in a morning Chi Gong session (hence Alison’s “chi conversation”).
Every day we have three work blocks where we split into teams to tackle a variety of assignments, working and learning together with farm staff and trip organizers. The first major project we undertook was constructing a fence to keep the deer out of the lettuce, reminding us that our food cycle intersects with other living things, as well. Some of us picked leafy greens from the garden and snuck away from the hot sun to “kasher the harvest” in the kitchen.
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One of the primary differences between shopping at a supermarket and joining a CSA is that, in the latter model, customers benefit along with their partner farmer when the weather is good, and share the burden when the weather is excessively hot, wet, or dry, and the crops fail. The farmer does not suffer alone, and the customers are more deeply connected to the seasonal shifts that impact their food source.
The following guest post, by farmer Vicki Westerhoff who farms at Genesis Growers with her family in St. Anne Illinois, is a pair of letters she wrote to Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA members about the recent flooding across the Midwest. In response to the flood damage, Tuv Ha’Aretz members will head out to Genesis Farms this month to help them replant their fields.
Friday, June 7
We are flooded. On Wednesday night last week we had a furious storm roll through the farm. It pummeled us with five and 1/4 inches of driving rain. The wind gusts exceeded 60 mph. The devastation I suppose could be worse, but what happened is bad.
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Every kid remembers a time when their parents urged them to “Eat your vegetables.” But what about “Eat your ice cream or you’re not leaving the table?”
Vegetable ice cream. I know it’s a radical concept, but I proved recently to my dinner guests that this unexpected combination of fresh spring peas and sweet cream actually tastes amazing together. I am a huge fan of green pea soup, puree, anything to do with peas. As a child, I would sneak a handful of frozen peas while my mom was making dinner, and I still love popping them in my mouth whenever I’m cooking with them. If you are lucky enough to have fresh peas, then by all means, use them, but frozen peas will definitely do the job here.
As usual, I turned to my trusty ice cream cookbook, David Liebovitz’s Perfect Scoop
, for inspiration (remember the indulgent rice gelato I tried during Purim?). From there, I let my improvisation run wild. This ice cream screams spring, and with a fresh burst of mint, you will be sure to impress your friends and family. They may even demand second helpings of their veggies!
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The shuk in Tel Aviv that so many travelers love — the idyllic market which people see as representative of the simpler way vegetables and other foodstuffs were once sold — is actually the source of so much frustration for me. Aside from the problem that all of the produce is fully conventional, I spend most of my time there yelling at vendors, being bumped (and bumping back) and trying my best not to be cheated.
While my blood pressure rises and I suffer the consequences of a thick American accent, I wax nostalgic about the farmers markets I frequented in Providence, Rhode Island, before I moved to Tel Aviv. Now those are markets. The vendors are usually the farmers themselves or their workers (or the people they hire to sell their stuff), and people are nice to you. They even smile. In fact, rather than the dog eat dog milieu of the shuk, the farmers market represents an eating community where people all respect each other for their role in this chain, from the grower to the cook to the consumer, etc. In so many ways I saw the shuk as a symbol of Israel, with all its frustrations, and the farmers market a symbol of my beloved America, in all its splendor, and in comparing the two I observed just how irreconcilable they were.
Then, on behalf of the Jewish harvest festival, Shavuot, Tel Aviv had to go ahead and start a Slow Food inspired farmers market…and further confound my already uncertain identity issues around food in Israel.
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Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.
Growing up, Shavuot for me meant lasagna - a delicious, cheesy creation that my mother would make for the one Jewish holiday on which we did not eat meat. (Actually, I was an adult before I realized that non-kosher lasagna was made with meat). I loved the lasagna, and Shavuot wasn’t bad either. Special food, staying up late the first night with my friends- Shavuot was a hit, and I didn’t think about it more than that.
One synagogue I went to hosted a “bikkurim (first fruits) procession:” they had people bring in baskets of produce and leave them on the bimah. I’d never seen a community mark Shavuot through any way but through a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (staying up all night to study) and by eating blintzes, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. It seemed a little pagan.
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Thanks to Rebecca Bloomfield for this guest post. Rebecca is an alumni of the Adamah program and a garden teacher at The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation and founded by Alice Waters.
The highlight of my week this week involved watching two of my students fight. Dodging the carefully-cultivated garden beds, one student ran after another. I hurdled over the strawberry patch to intercept the pursuer and was met by a stern pout that melted into a grin with the words, “she stole my snow peas.” I heard giggling and crunching behind me as the winded friend approached us both, handing us the peas. We snacked and returned to harvesting.
The Edible Schoolyard, in Berkeley, CA, is a force of healing and transformation for middle school students. As children turn soil, plant seeds, harvest produce, and build compost piles, they deepen their connection to food. As the garden transforms, so do the students. It is a space for things to change from that which is to that which can be: seed to sprout, compost to fertile soil, flower to fruit. Like the Mishkan that the Jews were commanded to build during the Exodus, the garden is a sacred space where a divine presence dwells. School gardens the nation over provide space for children to learn that they have choices when it comes to their food, their bodies, and their environment: things do not have to be the way they currently are.
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Jayne Cohen, author of the stunningly gorgeous new cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking (witness above) is officially a new poster-woman for The Jew & The Carrot. A talented and creative chef and food writer, Cohen loves traditional Jewish dishes as much as she loves improvising with them, and has a weakness for the farmers’ market to boot. Welcome home, Jayne! She spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about her passion for fresh vegetables, the benefits of occasionally going pot-luck, “foodie poets,” and why real Jewish foods deserve real butter.
Below the jump: The full interview, Jayne’s recipe for blintzes, and a chance to win a copy of Jewish Holiday Cooking.
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Okay, so you signed up for a CSA - (lucky you!) After weeks or even months of patient waiting for the earth to “yield its produce,” all of a sudden your kitchen is flooded with a flurry of real. live. vegetables. From now until the end of the season, you will be blessed with the opportunity to eat delicious green things, without even really having to think about it. However, some weeks it is difficult to eat all of those green things before they turn brown. I know this from experience - last summer, an early delivery of beets sat in my fridge, unloved all summer until my roommate quietly threw them out on my behalf.
To help you maximize your vegetables and avoid the guilt of throwing away soggy, wilted compost, The Jew & The Carrot offers a list of Top 10 Must Haves for the CSA Kitchen - Stir, chop, freeze, puree, and store your way to a waste-free CSA summer.
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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