Can You Be A Kosher Locavore?

Eating locally grown food can pose logistical and ethical challenges for the kashrut observant.

Kale and hearty: Rabbi Steven Greenberg checks out some leafy greens at a recent Hazon food conference. Photos courtesy of Hazon

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

‘Locavore” is 2007’s Word of the Year, as anointed by the Oxford American Dictionary. The word refers to someone who makes an effort to use locally grown ingredients. More than a word, it’s a collaborative movement, encouraging people to buy their food from farmers’ markets or grow their own, with the aim of eating healthier, supporting local farmers and avoiding the great costs of fuel in shipping foods long distance.
Locavores — some of whom set a 100-mile radius to define local — may be environmentalists, food lovers who appreciate a challenge, health conscious cooks, novice and veteran farmers, for those with a spiritual bent who want to be aware of what they’re eating and where it comes from. But locavores who are both

urban and kosher face particular challenges, especially in New York City in mid-winter.
The idea of eating locally has increasingly become part of the cultural conversation, with many postings in the blogosphere, and much attention given to books like the just-published “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press), in which he aims “to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.” Pollan’s oft-repeated comment to the many people who ask what — in the world of overly processed, genetically engineered, additive-laden, artificially sweetened food — we should eat is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
In the Jewish community, Hazon is spearheading much of the conversation about food choices and linking people directly with local farms. The organization founded the first community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs in North America, Tuv Ha’Aretz. As Nigel Savage, director and founder of Hazon explains, “We’re putting the purchasing power of Jewish families behind local, sustainable farms.” Program participants can sign up to receive weekly shipments of fresh produce, for 19 weeks, from Shavuot to Sukkot. Hazon has 19 sites around the country, with five in the New York area.
“Food is about how you influence your own health and the health of the land, and the health of our wider society,” Savage says.
The idea of eating locally isn’t altogether new. David Kraemer, author of “Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages,” points out, “Before the modern age, unless individuals, including Jews, were quite wealthy, they were locavores by need, by definition — humans survived based on what was available in the environment.”
Kraemer, professor of Talmud and rabbinics and director of the Library at the Jewish Theological Seminary, went on to provide a theological approach, explaining, “Everything that’s created by God is holy in its essence, and belongs to God. The foods that are kosher are those that God has given us permission to consume.”
He continues, “This is really about a relationship to the world. We have a right to use the world, when given permission, and to take responsibility. In our age, to take responsibility is to respect its sacredness, protect God’s creation, for example, by not using unnecessary resources.”
Pollan echoes this when he writes, “In the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”
Although he’s not one to make blessings over food, Pollan urges a sense of mindfulness about eating and encourages people to eat slowly. Before eating, he sometimes recalls a few sentences written by cultural critic and farmer Wendell Berry about how eating with the fullest pleasure is “perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and power we cannot comprehend.”
At the Isabella Friedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn., the staff and participants grow all of their own produce; they also do canning and fermenting to have fruits and vegetables through the winter months. They are expanding their kitchen and, later this year, their sauerkraut, kimche, pickles, jam and salsa will be available commercially. Their Adamah (earth) fellowship program combines organic farming, Jewish learning, sustainable living and contemplative spiritual practice.
“You have a sense of being involved in creation, not in control of it,” says Shamu Fenyvesi Sadeh, Adamah program director. He explains that eating things they grow themselves gives participants a whole new experience of gratitude. Having been involved in Jewish environmental work for more than 20 years, he sees this latest wave of interest as integrating health, agriculture, land-use planning and religion.
At a time when kosher cheese from New Zealand, buckwheat noodles from Japan and other kosher foods from all over the world are readily available, some kosher consumers might find little appeal in being confined to local products. Where would a locavore find olive oil?
When asked if he has sensed interest in eating locally among his customers, the proprietor of a large kosher market in Bergen County, N.J., was surprised by the question. He doesn’t carry local products, noting that there are no farms in the area. Nor does he have many requests for local or organic foods, which would raise the price of kosher food, which is already quite expensive. And he wondered out loud why anyone would want to eat anything from a place known for its toxicity.
An Upper West Side caterer suggests that those interested in the locavore movement may not have as many philosophies superimposed on their lives, like kashrut, motherhood and wifehood. But when she cooks for guests each week, she never buys anything prepared, insisting on fresh, quality ingredients. So she maintains her own healthy food sensibility.
In New York City, where greenmarkets flourish in several locations throughout the year, offerings can be slim in winter. And in an apartment, it’s hard to stock up on potatoes and root vegetables, as farmers might. For some New Yorkers, the closest they come to gathering their own vegetables is at a supermarket salad bar, where selections may not be particularly fresh, and might have traveled many miles to get there. And for others, eating locally might mean eating at a corner pizza shop or a kosher deli. But that choice too can have ethical value, when one is interested in supporting local businesses.
For those who favor the idea of finding their kosher food locally, the question of buying Israeli foods — where there’s much growth in organic offerings — and wine can be complex. The value of supporting and also tasting Israel’s latest efforts can clash with locavore values.
“In many points in our lives, we have competing values,” Savage comments, noting that at different times, different values might be fulfilled. At their recent Tu b’Shevat seder, they featured on their seder plate items representing the seven species from Israel, along with selections grown locally.
Another potential clash of values is when consumers are interested in buying fair-trade items, like coffee and chocolate, grown in far-off places, as a way of supporting those local economies. Being a locavore doesn’t have to be absolute.
“This is about shopping with our values instead of just shopping for value,” says Leah Koenig, food project coordinator at Hazon. About sources for local kosher products, she notes that “demand is growing. But there’s a lag time between demand and supply.” Koenig edits Hazon’s award-winning blog on the Jewish food movement, The Jew and the Carrot (jcarrot.org).
Based in Rye Book, Westchester, 5 Spoke Creamery is making kosher cheeses in the farmstead tradition from the raw milk of grass-fed cows, with no hormones or pesticides. Their artisanal cheeses are served in several of New York’s noted non-kosher restaurants. Alan Glustoff, the founder, explains that the cheese is now made on an Amish family farm in Pennsylvania, under kosher supervision, and he is planning to expand and set up another facility in Westchester later this month. At the new location, Glustoff plans to give tours and classes so that consumers “will really understand where their food comes from.” Now available in six varieties, the cheese is sold in markets and kosher shops around the city.
For chicken and meat, some new projects are under way. Simon Feil of Kosher Conscience is now planning a coop for free-range chicken and potentially other meat as well. He’s most interested in the humane treatment of animals. That the business will be local is, as he says, “not unimportant, but a byproduct.” He aims to keep the farm he’ll work with within three hours of New York City.
Organic chicken is now sold by Wise Kosher Natural Poultry, based in Brooklyn with their farm in Pennsylvania. And kosher venison is available upstate, from Musicon Farms.
Last month, Pollan spoke on a panel at the 92nd Street Y with Joan Dye Gussow, author of “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader.” Gussow lives 20 minutes north of New York City and grows all her own vegetables, year-round, on about 1,000 square feet of growing space.
“I therefore eat differently than most people — better, I think,” she writes. “In deciding what to eat, I bind myself to the seasons, augmented by what a small upright freezer will hold.” She grows seven kinds of potatoes, a variety of hot and sweet peppers, green beans, dry beans, leeks, garlic, carrots and more, which she augments with cheese, milk, eggs, bread and grains. At the age of 70-plus, she’s “absurdly healthy.”
Her book is a literary manifesto and a memoir of her efforts at “vegetal self-sufficiency.”
“It is my meditation, my learning, my caring for each thing the earth has produced as if my life depended on it,” Gussow writes, “because of course, in a larger sense, it does.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization