What is Jewish food? Avoiding shellfish and pork and never eating meat with dairy? Hummus? Kreplach? Whatever your Bubbe used to make?

What makes a cuisine Jewish?  Other East Asian cultures have vegetarian diets, which by default wouldn’t be mixing meat with dairy.  Hummus is wildly popular throughout the Middle East. And are kreplach so very different than Italian tortellini?

So what is Jewish food?  It’s like what is asking what your comfort food is.  Probably whatever your family makes.  If you have an Eastern European background, brisket, matzoh ball soup and knishes may be the norm.  A Sephardic background may involve more Mediterranean dishes.

But can this identification with food change?  When I was in college, my comfort food was Macaroni and Cheese out of a box.  As an adult, my go-to comfort dish is sautéed mushrooms and kale.  So yes, I’m a believer that people can change.  So can what we think of as Jewish cuisine change?

The  Climate Change Bus Tour, a joint project of The Teva Learning Center and Hazon,  is now in its final leg of the their cross-country tour!

It has been an incredible journey so far. Hundreds of Jewish students, teachers, and families have engaged with environmental education programs and activities. Many have also signed the Jewish Climate Change pledge committing themselves to sustainable action and advocacy.

Check out the latest video of the bus tour’s Chanukah out west and the latest press in The Jewish Exponent.

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.

My dad has strong memories of his mother’s chicken soup: the aroma, the flavor, and the chicken feet at the bottom of the bowl. He especially liked biting into the pads of the feet, which were nice and chewy.

Like many ethnic cuisines that evolve at least in part out of deprivation, Jewish food has long mined the more interesting parts of the animal (think tongue). But though the tip-to-tail movement has made offal, bone marrow and pork belly trendy, I don’t know any Jewish cooks these days that serve chicken feet in their soup. I set out to dip a toe into the world of off-cuts by buying a bag of beef bones at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market in San Francisco.

“I grew up in a family that emphasized food and used it as an organizing principal for family gatherings – which is probably not unfamiliar to The Jew & The Carrot’s readers,” says anti-food-waste activist Jonathan Bloom.

As a freelance writer for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, Bloom wrote about food and travel. (“My travel articles were about going somewhere else to eat,” he jokes.) Like many Americans, Bloom became increasingly attuned to environmental issues and, he says, “My interests in food and the environment came together for me in 2005, when I volunteered at D.C. Central Kitchen, an organization that rescues food that would otherwise go to waste, and trains homeless people to be chefs using that food.

“Half a loaf,” they say, “is better than none.”  But it’s hard for me to cheer when I have half a challah left after Shabbat, doomed to sit on the counter, uneaten until it’s inedible, or tossed into the back of a freezer and forgotten until the pre-Passover clean up and then burned with the chametz.

We’ve been trying especially hard, recently, not to waste food – but when it comes to leftover challah, the challenge is twofold: For one thing, there are four people in my family and 15 slices in the average bakery loaf; you do the math. For another, halakha (Jewish law) requires that two full, un-sliced loaves appear at both the Friday night meal and again on Saturday as a reminder of the double portion of manna that fell from heaven before Shabbat when the Israelites were wandering in the desert. A lovely tradition – but it means the bread left over from supper can’t just be used up at the next day’s lunch.

That’s just one of the many reasons I bake my own challah: I can shape each loaf to the exact size I’ll actually need on a given Shabbat, depending on whether we’re expecting guests. And when I’m too tired/hot/lazy/cranky to bake, I now buy small challah rolls at the bakery, rather than full braids. Yeah, the little round breads look kind of lonely on the big challah board, but honestly, one slice of challah is really enough for each of us.

But even those anti-waste measures aren’t fail-safe – and there are many folks, I know, for whom it just isn’t Shabbos dinner without large, glossy loaves poking their noses out from under a silken challah cover. For all of us, then, I’ve been thinking about delicious ways to use up leftover challah.

Philadelphia – May, 1986. I’m walking down my college’s main thoroughfare, having just finished the very final final exam of my senior year. It’s late afternoon, and as I head toward my off-campus apartment, I come upon a street vendor selling shiny, green Granny Smith apples. I hand the man a quarter, and wipe the fruit on my pant leg. As I take my first bite, taut apple skin gives way to crunchy flesh and a delightfully fresh sweet-sour tang.

“THIS,” I tell the vendor, “is an apple that makes a person glad to be alive.”

I have eaten thousands of Granny Smith apples since then, and while few have been as life-affirming as the one I ate that May afternoon 23 years ago, many have been quite wonderful. Others have been crunchy-enough and sufficiently tasty. But every once in a while, I bite in to an apple and give it the same grade I got on that last exam: a disappointing C-minus.

And so it was, recently, when I ripped open a plastic bag of Granny Smiths I had bought at the Stop & Shop, pulled out an apple and washed it carefully (I’m a grown-up now) and bit in.

Fresh, local green beans should be here any day, now – but when they aren’t available, I rely on the frozen ones from Trader Joe’s. I like that TJ’s haricots verts are less waterlogged than many other brands of frozen green bean, and I appreciate the way each bean seems to have been individually frozen (rather than being suspended in a rectangular ice block), so that I can grab and cook just a handful or two at a time, knowing that the rest of the package won’t end up going to waste.

That last part is key, because my family is on a mission to cut down on wasted food —  not only for economic reasons, or even just because I hate it that an estimated 25% of the produce purchased in this country ends up in the garbage, but also because, from a religious point of view, it seems absurd for us to bother with separate forks and spoons for meat and dairy, but flout what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch called “the first prohibition of creation” – namely “bal tashchit” (literally, don’t destroy) – the commandment against wasting.

Now that my Tuv Ha’Aretz (Hazon CSA) has started this year, I’m starting to get into a pleasant routine of planning meals around my weekly bounty (and my boyfriend’s kitchen).  The last two weeks we have seen beautiful fresh spring greens perfect for fun and interesting salads that I’ve dressed with (in various combinations) grated raw beets, honey and almond oil, crushed raw cashews, whole grain mustard and balsamic vinegar.

We’ve enjoyed the meals, and fortuitously there always seems to be enough salad left over for a hearty lunch the next day.  Each time I carefully put the salad in a container to take to work with me – and each time I promptly leave it on the kitchen counter.  A practice that leaves me both without a lunch that day and a wilted salad back at my boyfriend’s place.

Getting beyond my feelings of guilt that I’ve wasted otherwise very good food, it did get me thinking.  Is it more economical to buy a salad out than packing my own?

Americans waste more than more than 100 billion pounds of food every year, at every stage of production from field to store to plate. That number doesn’t include the produce thrown out or left to rot by the millions of home or community gardeners. Wouldn’t it be great if all those leftover tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard could be linked with local food pantries and shelters?

Gary Oppenheimer had just that inspiration. He’s the founder of Ample Harvest, a project aiming to help home gardeners donate their unwanted produce to food pantries. Gary is a master gardener and the head of the West Milford Community Garden. I spoke with him about Ample Harvest and how home gardeners can make a difference.

A few years ago I came across a book called In Memory’s Kitchen, edited by Cara De Silva. The book collects recipes and food memories written by women imprisoned at the Czechoslovakian concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Though they were starving and undernourished, a group gathered to write a book of recipes and food memories to pass down to another generation. The recipes they included were for rich national foods of Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria, like fried noodles topped with raisins, cinnamon and vanilla cream, and traditional caramels from Baden Baden.

Food was constantly a topic of discussion, though there was little to go around, and certainly none of the luxurious ingredients a person would need to make many of the cakes and treats included in the book. Discussing and sometimes arguing about the best recipes and methods of preparation for various delicacies was comforting to the women who were starving, and they called this “mouth cooking.”

The other evening, I committed a crime: I watered my asparagus patch. Emboldened by my misdeed, the next morning I watered my lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and even some inedible potted plants.

No one’s coming to arrest me, or even to slap a fine on me. In truth, it’s not exactly clear if the new Israeli law prohibiting watering applies to all gardens, to public gardens or just to lawns. It’s also not clear who will be enforcing it: The “green patrol” is famously understaffed. You can be sure that bigger criminals than me will be watering lawns in the middle of the day this summer, and one or two of them may even get a slap on the wrist.

Passover is a natural time to take an “environmental inventory” of the chametz in our world and to be mindful of the simple lives our ancestors led in the desert in their pursuit of freedom. Chametz is the Hebrew term for any of the five basic biblical grains which traditionally observant Jews remove from their homes. These include wheat, rye, oats, barley, and spelt—that have been mixed with water and allowed to ferment.

When our ancestors were dwelling in the desert, they had no choice but to live simply. In our day, simplicity has come to mean conservation, not using more than you need, and not being wasteful. Jewish law prohibits wasteful consumption. When we waste resources, we are violating the law of bal tashchit—Do not destroy. (Deuteronomy 20: 19-20).

Matzah itself is a symbol of simplicity and humility, and is a metaphor for getting back to basics and our natural selves. It is in contrast to our leavened or puffed up, over-inflated selves caught up in accumulation and over-consumption.

Yosh and I got a worm composter for our wedding – it’s true, we are just that dorky!  For the last week or so (yes, we got married in November, but the composter arrived in mid-February, and I finally got around to getting the worms last week), I’ve been the proud mom of a brood of about 1,000 wriggling, very hungry worms.

They live in the Worm Factory, pictured above (p.s. definitely not our kitchen), and  I couldn’t be more excited.  Yosh on the other hand, is a bit more squeamish about the whole thing, though I can’t blame him.  He suffered through a bit of worm trauma when his last roommate neglected to properly feed worms, and the bin quickly self destructed.

But aside from the nachas I feel over the little munchies - which was a definitely surprise – I was certainly not counting on our compost bin bringing up halachic (Jewish law) questions.  Then Passover entered the horizon.