To Till and to Tend

After more than two decades as a vegetarian, I scarcely think about meat. We have a kosher home and I do most of the cooking. My husband (to his great regret) is a “vegetarian by marriage.” But last week, he kindly offered to cook dinner. To my dismay, my four-year old loved Daddy’s grilled chicken breasts. Gone was the child we typically cajole to eat two bites of his veggie burger or tofu curry. 

He paused from eating only long enough to query, “Mommy, where does chicken come from?”

“Where do you think chicken comes from, dear?”

My son paused for at least 20 seconds before retorting, “…Pigs?”

I had clearly failed as a Jewish mother: my kosher, near-vegetarian child was eating something he thought was a pig. And he’d asked for seconds.

I recovered from this double affront and launched into a thoughtful discussion about why mommy doesn’t eat meat. I chose my words with care. I hope my son eventually chooses to become a vegetarian. But I also don’t want him to condemn his father. I had little to fear. At the close of my careful monologue, my son declared, “I’m a T-Rex. You’re a stegosaurus.” And he took another bite.

Last Thursday, millions of Americans celebrated Thanksgiving—no doubt consuming a significant share of the roughly 270 million turkeys raised in the United States this year. And while turkey is far less energy-intensive than other forms of meat, it is, nonetheless, still responsible for significant carbon emissions. A British analysis found that a “typical” holiday meal for a group of eight produces the equivalent of 20 kg of carbon dioxide emissions—with the life cycle of the turkey alone credited for 60 percent. [Reader: take some comfort in the fact that British imports of cranberry sauce from the U.S. account for roughly .5 kg.] Combined, British revelers consume the carbon equivalent of 6,000 car trips around the world or 300 return car journeys to the moon in a single holiday. I hesitate to do the math for the U.S.

Of course, turkey is not the worst offender. Nonetheless, the UN reports that meat production (of all kinds) accounts for nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, raising cattle is worse for the environment than driving cars. And global meat consumption is poised to double by mid-century.

Unfortunately, according to Scientific American, keeping kosher doesn’t necessarily help. While Jews don’t traditionally eat pork (despite the perceptions of my four-year old), we don’t necessarily replace these calories with “low-carbon” veggies. And, replacing pork and shellfish with beef will only increase emissions.

This year, I was spared the angst of witnessing my son’s rapture for turkey. We shared Thanksgiving with our dear friends in Boston—who don’t keep kosher. And so, it was wild rice and brussel sprouts for Kefer and kin.

[For low-carbon vegetarian alternatives, visit Gentle Thanksgiving.]

[If you do choose to eat meat this holiday season, visit www.kolfoods.com to learn why you needn’t choose between keeping your values and keeping kosher.]

[Click here to determine the carbon emissions of your meals.]

Four Thanksgivings ago, I was in India. Though a rare day went by that I was unaware of my blessings (I didn’t need Thanksgiving for that) it was the foods of Thanksgiving that I craved. I love Indian food (there, as the joke goes, it is just called “food”), but sub-tropical climates just don’t produce my beloved winter squashes and cranberries, nor do its people prepare the dishes of the New World.

The culinary tendencies of America are diverse, yet most gather around a similar Thanksgiving table. Though my family table has never (in my memory) been graced by a turkey (nor a tofurkey, for that matter), I know that people across America will chow on pumpkin bread, corn bread, sweet potato pie, cranberry relish, mashed potatoes and apple pie! (I am also happy to share my recipe for any of the above…. just ask!)

One does not have to look far into the Thanksgiving story to understand why: On Thanksgiving, we commemorate a meal centuries old, before industrialized and imported produce disconnected us from the ways, seasons and places our food is grown. More critically, it was at this meal that Native Americans introduced the Europeans to the foods appropriate to their newly inhabited land. In the Northeast, all of the above dishes’ main ingredients are either just coming into season or were just harvested, stored for the long winter ahead: hard squashes survive the change of season, cornmeal is ground from the summer harvest, potatoes outlast the first frost, and apples fill the trees as the leavers of other trees fall.

But the United States has changed since that first Thanksgiving meal. We now inhabit the extreme dessert and tundra of America. For those in Phoenix, roasted squash on Thanksgiving is as unnatural as a white Christmas.

Even if we can’t prepare a locally grown and “traditional” Thanksgiving feast, we can embody the core of the tradition. Wherever you are, be like the Pilgrims: Meet and eat from local farmers. Remember the land and people from where you left, learn from the land and people where you joined.

I saw the first snowfall of the season yesterday. It lasted 10 minutes and melted before it hit the ground, but to me, that still counts. Winter is here and with it comes the winter blues. Scientists have blamed the bummer in moods on the decreased light exposure due to shorter days. These bad moods do not mean it is ok to turn up the thermostat and leave on the lights as these activities cannot make the sun stay up longer. Staying green when there is a chill in the air is a great way to help embrace the winter season.

 

If you haven’t noticed a trend in my blogs by now, the fastest way to feed my soul is through my belly! Don’t forget about your farmers’ markets. Many are still open. Squash and pumpkins are not only for decoration, but they’re delicious, nutritious, and in season. It is extremely easy to buy squash, pumpkins, and other produce like apples locally, even in a conventional food store. Nothing perfumes the home as well as fresh baked apple pie right from the oven. (To make the fruits of the season even warmer, invite friends and family over to share in a slice of the pie.)

 

When there’s a chill in the air even the best Jewish Environmentalist is tempted to turn up that thermostat… DON’T! Warm blankets, fair trade teas and coffees, and soy based candles are great ways to stay green and cozy. But, my all time favorite way to warm up is to snuggle! Snuggling can be done with friends, family members, puppies, and significant others, so turn on your favorite movie and get cozy.

 

Hannukah is not too far away ladies and gentlemen. This holiday has a stronger environmental meaning that I am sure we will all blog about as soon as Thanksgiving is over, but for now, embrace the seasonal ambiance of giving. Donate your time, leftovers, and smiles to those in need. Thanksgiving leftovers will be welcomed by local food shelters. It would not be the worst thing to TiVo the football game and spend a couple of hours serving Thanksgiving meal at a soup kitchen. It’s a mitzvah.

 

Stay in the sun on Shabbat. The cold morning temperatures make it tempting to drive to Synagogue on Shabbat, but like I said, winter blues is the result of not being in the sun. So make it a point to bundle up and walk as a family.

 

These are just a few ways to beat winter blues … What are some ways you stay green in the winter?

Leah Koenig, editor of www.Jcarrot.org, Hazon’s food blog, recently asked readers for food-based eco-suggestions in Jewish communal life.  We are happy to cross-post this blog here, hoping that our readers may have something to contribute.     

Deciding what to eat for lunch can be a challenge – but deciding what hundreds (or thousands) of other people should eat for lunch is decidedly harder.  But such is the charge for the many hospitals, schools, and other institutions across the country that feed people, en masse, on a daily basis.

In the past few years, a growing handful of institutions (e.g. Yale University and Kaiser Permanente) have attempted to bring institutional food away from Lunch Lady Land – sourcing produce from local farms, offering less junk food in favor of more fruits & veggies, increasing the number of homemade meals (vs. “heat-n-serve” foods) etc.  The Jewish community has jumped on the institutional food reform bandwagon too as synagogues, day schools and JCCs across the country begin to question their dependence on Styrofoam coffee cups and greasy kosher pizza.

As a Jewish organization committed to health and sustainability, Hazon is currently in the process of creating our own Organizational Food Purchasing Guidelines.  But we want to hear from you!  Let us know:

1. What “green food practices” does your synagogue, JCC, day school, Hillel (etc.) currently practice?  Anything is fair game, from swapping the Styrofoam for glass mugs, to ripping up a corner of the parking lot to plant an organic garden.

2. On the contrary, in what ways could your Jewish institution do a better job at bringing health and sustainability into your corner of the Jewish community?

Share your ideas below – we’ll compile them (along with others) – into a resource guide that can be shared with the larger Jewish community.  Here’s to eating better, together, in 5769.

Last spring, David Elcott tore up much of his front lawn to plant a farm.  Last we heard, he was just beginning to enjoy the bounty of his labor. Now, during Sukkot – the Harvest Festival – David shares his reflections as the season comes to a close. This has been a guest-blog initiative with jcarrot.org. To catch up or refresh, here are his first and second posts. 

Who would have imagined that from June until the middle of October, we would only be eating vegetables from our own garden: multi-colored summer squash souflee and barbequed okra, leeksand parsnips and carrots in a cabbage soup, eggplants in abundance, stuffed Napa cabbage, baby spinach and enough spicy greens and snap peas to feed an army, a cherry tomato tartine in gold, red, yellow and orange, a banquet of roasted fingerling potatoes, beans that never stopped giving, all flavored with garden herbs. I prepared cold sweet cucumber soup with the added tartness of rhubarb and ate beets for the first time as part of a root vegetable medley. We decorated our salads with nasturtium and zucchini flowers. And corn, corn, corn – much of which never made it to the kitchen but eaten fresh off the stalk.  A time for rejoicing indeed!

The pleasure was not just for the eleven of us in our family. I would look out my window to see neighbors and friends stooped over, harvesting from our farm. Olivia next door and the two sets of twins behind us, none over six years old, lugging a finally discovered zucchini almost as big as they are.  The repeated line of “is this all from your garden?” brings such enormous pleasure.

And here is an additional reality of creating a mini-family farm:  Once the clearing and tilling and initial labor of planting are over, with good mulching and a bit of hoeing and weeding, maintaining the garden throughout the season is not so much work.  These are plants that have developed over millions of years to want to grow, to soak in the sun and water, to resist disease and insects, to produce – just for our family.  So I sprayed the aphids with a soap solution and handpicked the beetles that wanted to eat the leaves of my eggplant, but really did not fight too much.  The garden seemed in balance and I shared with the rabbits and squirrels and birds.  None of us went hungry.

It is Sukkot now, the holiday of the harvest, the one holiday that is called “the time of our rejoicing.”  The crops are in, we will not starve, the world works, and all my hard work paid off.  The Rashbam, a Medieval Jewish commentator on the Bible, warns us to avoid the hubris of saying, “My power and the might of my right hand has gotten me this wealth (Deuteronomy 8:17).” He is so right. I had to control the ego that swelled when I walked by my little farm. Who am I kidding?  I am so dependent on the farmers that provided me with organic seeds and soil, the workers who mixed the organic fertilizer for me, the sun that warmed my plants and the plentiful rain that kept my crops watered, the bees and birds pollinated the flowers, even the wind which is necessary for corn to produce. Sustainable agriculture for me means that I remain acutely aware of this balance, that I am a part of the process and not its master.

We sat in our sukkah, that fragile booth open to the elements, decorated with corn stalks from our field, eating from the cornucopia of our little farm, and recited with great fervor: Blessed is the Eternal who has nurtured us with life that sustains us and allows us to celebrate this moment. This certainly has been a growing season of great rejoicing.    

Reusing sacred objects in performing another mitzvah is a longstanding Jewish tradition.  The main ritualized reuse which comes to mind is the etrog and lulav, since they are “one-use” ceremonial objects.  (Other ritual items either are wholly consumed, like ceremonial foods, or permanently reusable.)  Classic reuses for the etrog are creating a pomander studded with cloves or preparing etrog jam or liqueur.
The lulav dries over the winter and the custom is to use it as part of Passover preparation.  It makes a nifty little broom for sweeping up chametz.  Here are some other traditional customs:

1. R. Yehudah ben Kalonymus (Ashkenaz, twelfth century) used to save the aravot (willows) from the lulav in order to burn the hametz, basing himself on the above passage, and this custom was recorded in all of the classic custom books of Ashkenaz.⁵ In modern times, Iraqi Jews used the aravot from Hoshana Rabbah.⁶
2. In Yemen, on the other hand, it was the custom to use the lulav, hadassim and aravot as fuel for the oven when baking matzah shemurah.⁷ Finally, the Jews of Syria, Morocco and Baghdad used the lulav both for burning the hametz and for baking matzah.⁸

This year, since martinis are all the rage, let’s enjoy post-Sukkot ETROGINIs.  Leah Koenig over at Jewcy has just the ticket – complete instructions. She’s dubbed her creation a Sukkatini, but etrogini is more fun to say.  L’chaim!

I‘ve coined a new term, another Jewish acronym, GKE”T = “Glatt Kosher Eco-Treif”. It popped out of me in a conversation with friends Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman, just back from a remarkable journey to Madrid attending an Interfaith Conference hosted by no less than the King of Saudi Arabia.  There were quite a few Jewish leaders included and we discussed, among deeper issues, how the conference – pulled together on very short notice – handled all the participants’ varied food issues.  Phyllis mentioned that many of the Jewish participants, along with Hindus, ate local, vegetarian fare.  Some of the Jewish participants were provided with “airline meals in 4 layers of plastic wrap”.  I knew just what they meant, and that’s when my new term was invented.  I did find the term Eco-Treif on a fabulous blog, though – SustainableJudaism.
It seems paradoxical to me that food created out of heavily traveled ingredients, wrapped, and then shipped again, generating carbon emissions with each transport, and then packaged in one-use petroleum-based plastic, is nevertheless perfectly kosher, and that fresh local vegetarian food is not.  Not to mention that these catered meals include meat,  possibly sourced from a fairly infamous meat-packing plant known not just for illegal alien labor but also for water pollution issues,  at least in the past.  There generally isn’t any indication of where these kosher airline-type meals’ ingredients come from, just the info about where the caterer is.
I feel very conflicted about take-out food in general.  Not unique to kosher take-out, of course – any take-away meal generates a huge amount of disposables.  Until kosher (and other purveyors) provide compostable plastics, I avoid buying their products, much as I would like to. To me they’re GKE”T if, after a wonderful meal, I need to throw out a whole bag of heavy plastic containers.  Of course they could be washed and reused, but how many chicken rotisserie containers can a family use?
Tonight a friend stopped by a new local Indian take-out here, called Tiffin.  She brought her own containers, and they cheerfully filled them with their wonderful entrees.  The restaurant, needless to say, is not kosher.  Here it’s the opposite problem – Glatt Treif Eco-Kosher.  Even if I would eat their vegetarian food, I couldn’t do so in my own containers.
I am eager to hear how others address these competing values.  This is not theoretical! This is getting meals on the table….

The list of concerns when food shopping just keeps lengthening. Once upon a time, I simply bought on the basis of price, kashrut, and perceived quality but over time, my definition of quality has evolved. Price is actually much lower on the list of consideration.
Some of the concerns are:
1) ingredients. If there are too many, or I don’t recognize them as actual food, I don’t buy the product.
2) packaging. Is the packaging recyclable? If not (hello, hummus!), is it at least minimized?
3) extra points if the product is organic.
4) deduction of points if the product is from too far away. In many cases you can’t telll where the product is from, of course, but now we have to pay attention to food miles, how far the product has shipped.
5) extra points if the product has a hashgachah. But since I’m primarily vegetarian, I’ll go with a vegan or reliable vegetarian designation. (Obviously there is a wide range of observance on this issue.)
6) cost. It’s hard, but not impossible, to find extremely expensive vegetarian food.
7) size. It’s more resource efficient to buy a larger size of a product, providing you can use up the contents. (Like a plastic half gallon vs. a quart – they each have one cap, so buy the bigger one. Unless the milk will sour before you finish it.)
is the product Israeli? This used to be a big plus, since I felt like buying Israeli was virtuous. Now I’m coming around to it being a minus, since it’s shipped such a long distance.
Like I said, oy vey. This is hard. My personal compromise is that I buy light weight items from Israel, such as tea. (Which is only packaged in Israel; the tea is imported from Asia, I presume.) And Israeli wine. The studies that came out awhile back about wine showed that wine miles are counterintuitive. East coasters are better off, ecologically, by buying wine from Europe than California. In any event, I don’t buy that much wine, so have permitted myself to indulge in Israeli wines. My favorite was one we found last summer, organic wine from the Galil, named “Barn Owl” in honor of the barn owls which eat so many of the critters that do wine in that the vineyard can eschew pesticides. I wasn’t able to find it on line for this post, so perhaps it was a special edition wine.
How do you work your way through the food purchasing decision tree?

David Elcott’s farm has started to produce its bounty. Through a guest-blog partnership with Jcarrot.org, we are excited to share David’s second piece on sustainable local farming with you.  To read the first post, click here.

I couldn’t write this past month. Too nervous. The temperature dipped, I read up on all the pests and bugs and germs that could kill the seeds. The little seedlings looked so vulnerable. When it looked like the temperature would hit the low 40’s I panicked and ran out to Home Depot, bought some metal to make hoops and heavy plastic and actually hid my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants in their own private green houses. The days between Pesach and Shavuot are for counting the Omer – fifty days that according to tradition are anxiety producing because the dry winds or heavy rains could wipe out the crops and people would starve. I certainly identified with that anxiety even if I knew that the green grocer was open and waiting for my business. So, as I said, I could not write.

But now I can. It is approaching the advent of the summer, the sun is warming the earth, the rains keep the Farm, the Cornfield and the Potato Patch generously moist. The vegetation is luxuriant and lush. My son took one look at the rows of colorful lettuces, micro-greens, red rocket lettuce and a variety of multi-colored munchables whose name I do not know, and declared, “This looks just like the finest salad bowl.” Just sitting happily on my little farm, providing fresh salads – meaning about five minutes from earth to plate! I throw in cut herbs – the herb garden is growing like wild – and even a few nasturtium and broccoli leaves. I was showing Liore how the peas are starting to bloom when we both kneeled down and realized that the vines were already resplendent with edible snap peas. The watermelon radishes are sharp and tangy and look just like, well, miniature watermelons. And who would have guessed that by June 16^th we would harvest our first tomato, sliced thin for sharing and sprinkled with top- grade olive oil, Portuguese sea salt and fresh ground pepper? It is a beautiful sight. And if the corn is not as high as an elephant’s eye, the stalks are growing nicely.

The rabbit. He hopped into the garden, through the mesh fence or under the buried black mesh or somehow got in. I ran out – as my wife said, it was a good thing we do not even allow toy guns in our house since she was convinced my eyes gleamed with murder. But when I got out there, he had nibbled a few leaves and bounced happily away. If I am planning to share with my neighbors, why not allow the rabbits a bit to eat as well. A bit, okay. We will see.

Other dangers lurk. I know all about the slimy squash vine borer who waits patiently until the flower blooms and the cute little squash begins to grow. Then it pounces and you come out the next day to see mush in your field. And when I asked Liore to tell me the name of a pretty orange and black beetle, she said that you call it, “Kill on sight!” So I did. To be a farmer is to be vigilant and steadfast, like the colonists fighting the Revolutionary War, like the Israelites in the desert. Up at 6 and out to see whether everything vanished during the night. So far so good.

When Noam and Julie had their first pea or radish – don’t remember what – they recited shehechiyanu, the blessing that celebrates a wondrous new occasion, and then borey p’ree ha’adamah – blessing the vegetables that grow and flourish out of the soil. I love saying blessings, but they sound different when recited over the earth that I tilled and watered, the furrows that I hoed, the seeds and seedlings I planted, and the plants that I nurtured. Along with the rain and sun and wind and pollinating birds and bees. Vaya’ar elohim ki tov—and God saw that it was very, very good. And tasty, too.