To be inclusive I suggested kosher chicken and sought fellow JCarrot contributor Rabbi Shmuel’s advice on getting someone to schecht some local chickens. R. Shmuel suggested that bringing one person in from out of town to kosher slaughter some chickens might leave a greater carbon footprint than buying kosher organic chickens in bulk from a local distributor - hence Wise kosher organic chickens. Though we made sure that there were vegetarian and vegan options at the dinner (my other faculty colleague Deb Cato is vegetarian, as were a small number of the students), at the time we wanted to engage in the ecological problematic of sustainable meat. In hindsight, we decided the next time we do it, we will do a vegetarian meal. It’s not a bad lesson for meat eaters to learn that they don’t always have to eat meat!

I was very happy with all the discussions that making these decisions required, since that was in fact the whole point of doing a hyper-conscious intentional sustainable meal. The ethical issues of inclusiveness, local vs. industrial, vegetarian vs. meat, local conventional vs. non-local organic, cultural dietary constraints (like kashrut) vs. food decisions made solely on ecological or bio-medical nutritional grounds were all raised in the process of organizing, planning, and sharing the meal. Also, in moving to more sustainable eating practices, I like the suggestions of Jessie Cool and the Yale Sustainable Food project to make food purchasing decisions based on tiered preferences, e.g., 1st tier: RI/Southeast MA ecologically-grown; regional organic organic; local conventional small scale; 2nd tier: local conventional (medium scale), US organic (small scale), local conventional l(large scale); tier 3: US organic (medium scale - e.g., Wise Kosher organic chickens?), etc.,etc.

The Yale Sustainable Food project web site has a great chart for their food purchasing choices: http://www.yale.edu/sustainabl.....asing.html

One other big issue raised by this meal, these decisions, and the banquet in the Omnivore’s Dilemma is can one eat like this for every meal? Or is it more of a once or twice a year exemplary meal like the Passover seder (Pollan calls his a “secular seder”), whose hyper-conscious ritual mode of paying attention to food origins will plant a seed of awareness in the way we conduct our less demanding ordinary, every day meals?

And for me, with my Jewish cultural bias, it’s not Shabbos or yontif (and I really wanted this banquet to feel like yontif), unless there’s chicken and challah (I baked whole wheat challot for the event). It was hard enough to make it festive without serving wine or good local micro-brews, since nearly all the students were under legal age. As the talmud saya, ayn simchah bli yayin - “no festivity without wine!