Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.“ - Benjamin Franklin, July 1779
Jeff Morgan is a man with a mission. As if being an author, winemaker and wine educator (not to mention a former professional musician) doesn’t keep him busy enough, he is also on a quest to change the way the Jewish community thinks about - and drinks - wine.
He and his business partner, Leslie Rudd, are the creators of Covenant Wines, a kosher wine company that strives to “harness quality commensurate with the rich and profound story of the Jewish people.” That might sound like a lot to swallow, especially considering that Jews tend to be linked with a legacy of barely drinkable kosher wines (ahem, Manischewitz). But the former West Coast editor of Wine Spectator
magazine is on to something sweet.
I spoke with Jeff right before Yom Kippur to hear more about his vino-philosophy. He shared his thoughts on the current state of kosher wine, where it’s headed, and why consumers should think twice before reaching for a Mevushal bottle.
Want to WIN Jeff’s amazing kosher wine? Tell us your favorite wine memory to be entered into a drawing to win two bottles of Covanent’s Red C Cabernet Sauvignon, 2006. This wine is made from grapes grown on a 2-acre parcel of land in Napa Valley and aged for 18 months in French oak barrels. Total retail value, $84. (Only one comment per person will be entered into the drawing - please comment by Friday, October 17.
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(Originally posted on Express Night Out, a new online segment of the Washington Post).
If Jews properly atone for their sins (no short and sweet confessions a la the Catholics), they are written into the “Book of Life,” which means they will live to see the next Yom Kippur. But once the sun sets and the starving is over, it’s time for the break-the-fast meal — a day of atonement followed by a night of binge eating.
Leah Koenig is editor of “The Jew and the Carrot,” a blog dedicated to the “New Jewish Food Movement”: sustainable food within a Jewish paradigm. Think local, organic, humanely raised food in a yarmulke — that tastes delicious. Koenig will help you navigate the world of forgiveness, fasting and food
(Ideas and recipes below the jump)
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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.
In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted. Read more »
Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory - it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.
The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)
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In a season filled with symbolic meanings, the question of whether to eat nuts during these days of repentence has advocates for the yeah and the ney. There are those who definitely avoid nuts of all shapes and sizes during these ten days. For some there is a deep symbolic meaning, as I mentioned in my Rosh Hashana post, as the Hebrew word egoz has a numeric value 17 (when you add up the value of each letter) [thanks to Devo for the correction] that is equal to that of the Hebrew word of sin (het) and as sin should be avoided so too should nuts.
I don’t personally find this to be the most persuasive argument against nuts, as I suspect that if I looked long and hard I might be able to find other foods whose value was similarly negatively associated. But there is another school of thought that suggests that nuts should be avoided in this particular season because they can have a negative effect on our ability to sing. (Their husks and meats have a tendency to get caught in or dry up throats and so they are to be avoided in this season when our need to raise our voices to God is so essential.)
Looking into this matter, I came across some wonderful rabbinic teachings about nuts.
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Thanks to Aaron Kagan for this guest post. Aaron maintains the blog Tea and Food.
While a Yom Kippur recipe might seem like an oxymoron, there are many food traditions surrounding the meals immediately preceding and following the 25 hours in which most Jews refrain from food. Jews in Iraq, for example, frequently break the fast with a nourishing yet easily digestible glass of rice milk.
I was surprised to find this beverage in such a traditional context, having until now chiefly associated it with vegans and the lactose intolerant. But it turns out that rice milk is popular in many parts of the world besides those places where you can order a dairy free smoothie for the cost of a meal. Take the Thai kokkoh or Mexican horchata, for instance. Cut the sugar and skip the cinnamon of the latter and you’ve got something that closely resembles both the stuff in the rectangular carton at Whole Foods and the drink made by Iraqi Jews to close the most holy day of the year.
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Hazon’s Associate Director of Food Programs, Judith Belasco was featured on the Heeb 100 - the illustrious list of up-and-coming Jewish musicians, foodies, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, etc. put out every year by Heeb Magazine. We are incredibly proud of our “100-nik” and excited to share her *mostly* accurate profile with you. See all of the Heeb 100 here.
Text by Sabrina Jaszi
Photo by Jesse Winter
As a disciple of the “new food” movement with degrees in nutrition, public health and urban studies, it’s all coming together for Judith Belasco. She’s currently associate director of food programs at Hazon, a Jewish community-based NGO that gets its members engaged in the challenge of sustainable living, with its name taken from the Hebrew word for “vision.” Among the activities coordinated by Belasco are “Challah for Hunger” bake-offs, “Jewish Farm School” and an annual food conference, to be held this December in Monterey, California.
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Dear The Jew & The Carrot readers,
You really outdid yourselves this time. We asked you to inspire us by creating the greenest, most locally-inspired, and delicious Rosh Hashanah dinner imaginable. And boy did you ever impress! All the submissions we received looked mouthwatering. But from a homemade vegetarian feast, to honey cookies made with local honey, to perhaps the only humanely-raised, kosher schected goat eaten anywhere this Rosh Hashanah, the winners (featured below), brought to sustainable celebration to the next level.
Check out their amazing meals - with pictures! - below the jump… Read more »
I love the quote from Avot de Rabbi Natan 31:1 included in Hazon’s Food For Thought curriculum book (thanks Nigel and Anna):
R. Achia ben Yeshaya said: One who purchases grain in the marketplace - to what may such a person be likened? To an infant whose mother died, and they pass him from door to door among wetnurses and [still] the baby is not satisfied. One who buys bread in the marketplace - To what may such a person be likened? It is as if he is dead and buried. But one who eats from his own (what he has grown himself) is like an infant raised at his mother breasts.
Thus, it was great to read about Will Allen’s work in Milwaukee, and especially to see such public recognition for it that comes from being awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” There are many other urban farming groups which I think will also benefit from the publicity surrounding Will Allen’s well-deserved award, such as my own local institution, the Southside Community Land Trust in Providence, RI.
Whether we grow and cook our own because it’s healthier and better for us, like mom’s milk, or because it satisfies our emotional and spiritual needs to feel “at home,” or because it addresses the economic injustice of lack of access to affordable, real food in urban environments (as Allen’s project does) - it’s encouraging to have this kind of service, what I would call avodat Ha-Shem be-gashmiyyut (service of God through everyday, concrete activities), appreciated in this way.
See Barbara Miner, “An Urban Farmer is Rewarded for his Dreams,” New York Times, 9/25/08.
Back in May, with Agriprocessors in the middle of its downward spiral (how far down it goes, nobody knows…), it seemed like there were people in Postville who still had some respect and appreciation for the jobs brought by the slaughterhouse, and felt their town was being unfairly picked on. On their blog Postville Voices, they wrote “We’ve had enough of every organization with an agenda cynically misrepresenting our town and workplace to further their own ends,” and added that, “There is one thing we do know — the people that run Agriprocessors are good, decent, honest people and we trust that they have acceptable answers.”
Well folks, the Associated Press has reported that the blog, was in fact created by none other than the son of Agriprocessors’ CEO Sholom Rubashkin, Getzel Rubashkin. And according to a professor of government at Harvard, this type of fake-grassroots known as “astroturfing” is common and generally accomplishes its goal.
“There’s not a big penalty associated with doing this and being caught,” said the professor, Herman B. Leonard. “There’s a potentially substantial benefit from being able to get out there with something that seems like a well-informed and active and energetic view that does not seem to be self-interested. So if you get away with it, it’s a plus. If you don’t, they say, ‘Well, it’s not too surprising.’”
Rubashkin claims that at the time, it did not occur to him that he ought to present his name on the blog in conjunction with the views espoused, and he did not intentionally leave off his identification in order to be deceptive. We’ll believe that when we also have all the accurate information about the meat coming out of the plant and the way it’s produced.
Note to self: Be sure to investigate the last names associated with all so-called front group blogs. Maybe it will be clear that they are barely even front groups after all.
A few months ago I wrote some tips on appropriate and helpful ways to bring food to someone who’s ill or grieving. At the time, my mother (that’s her in the picture, with me at our dining room table in happier times) was in treatment for terminal cancer, and though we were grateful to have an amazing community providing food for us during such a difficult time, I often found myself guiltily throwing out some leftovers that had gotten shoved to the back of the fridge to make room for new offerings. I suggested that people try to bring smaller portions.
Then, on September 9th, my mother passed away, and what had been a slight excess of food transformed into a mountain of baked goods, stacks of trays from kosher restaurants, and Tupperware as far as the eye could see. From the very first day of shiva we were completely overwhelmed with food, and the same women who were coordinating people to bring us meals were having to sort through the fridge and toss or freeze the obscene amount of casseroles, cakes and random snacks that people were bringing when they came to visit with us.
One of the rules of sitting shiva is that the mourners should not prepare their own food, so we had expected to have meals for the week made and prepared by others, but we were not prepared for the sheer quantity of what we ended up with. Among other things, we ended the week with an ant problem in our kitchen because there was so much food sitting out all the time.
Over all, I found shiva to be a difficult but incredibly healing week, and it was wonderful to have so many people showing us their support in so many ways. Still, it frustrates me to see so much food go to waste, and some of the craziness that resulted from having other people run my kitchen for a week was no fun at all. So, here’s some new tips and thoughts on bringing food to a shiva house.
Tips after the jump! Read more »
The word Monsanto tends to send shivers down my spine. Kind of like the scene in The Lion King, when the hyenas taunt each other by invoking the name of the dreadful king Mufasa:
Hyena 1: Mufasa!
Hyena 2: Ooooohooo, say it again!
Hyena 1: Monsanto!
Leah: Ooohooo, say it again!
The primary source of my fear comes from the series of lawsuits that agricultural corporation, Monsanto, has launched and won against small farmers for “stealing” the company’s patented Roundup Ready seeds, which had accidentally drifted from Monsanto-planted farms onto unsuspecting neighboring fields. (See The Center for Food Safety’s report for more). The lawsuits were just so screwed up and unethical, and the thought that they won many of them felt downright Orwellian - hence the uncontrollable shivers.
Recently, however, Jacobs Farm, an organic farm in Santa Cruz, launched a case of it’s own - and won! Their suit was not against Monsanto, but against a pesticide company whose chemicals drifted and contaminated a crop of organic herbs. A jury awarded the farm $1 million in damages. It’s a hopeful case - and a glint of hope from within the bleak landscape that Monsanto (ooohooo!) has created. Read the full story below.
(Hat tip to Emily Freed, a Jewish farmer who works for Jacob’s Farm, and is helping to plan Hazon’s Food Conference.)
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Sustainable foodies love to throw around the statistic that the “average meal travels 1500 miles from farm to table.” I know I’m guilty of quoting this stat in talks and articles - and so are countless other bloggers, food writers, local food chefs, and policy makers. In fact, if you Google the phrase “1500 miles,” the first website that pops up is “localharvest.org“ It’s such a nice, round number that succinctly expresses the notion that our eating habits are divorced from where we live. How could we resist?
Well, according to Jane Black at Slate, we should think twice before sharing the 1500 number so confidently.
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A farmer, an educator and an activist, Michael Ableman is also a photographer and a writer. His three books include his latest, Fields of Plenty: A farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it, for which Ableman traveled North America chronicling the passion and prowess of the new generation of American farmers. He currently farms in British Columbia with his wife and two sons, and will be joining us as a presenter at the Hazon Food Conference in December, 2008. (Click here to find out more and register for Hazon’s Food Conference.)
I talked to Ableman about his hopes for the sustainable agriculture movement, his many hats, and Judaism’s connection to the cycle of the seasons.
Find the full interview below the jump. Read more »
