She Is What She Eats

Leah Koenig For teaching us to eat right, and with compassion for the earth.

Leah Koenig For teaching us to eat right, and with compassion for the earth.

by Randi Sherman
Staff Writer

At Leah Koenig’s wedding last month, the details had to be just right. The groom, musician Yoshie Fruchter, understandably insisted the music be good, easy enough. And Koenig wanted the menu to be good, a more difficult task considering her strict stipulations.
“I couldn’t find a caterer who could make food kosher enough for me, my husband and our guests, and who cared about the food being organic and seasonal,” said Koenig. One caterer who fit the criteria couldn’t handle the size of the party. The caterer for the JCC in Manhattan, who Koenig was excited to work with, suggested strawberry shortcake, but the berries were out of season and wouldn’t be locally grown.
To get the caterers to work with her, Koenig suggested

apple crisp with vanilla ice cream instead. Anna Stevenson, a friend and former colleague, provided butternut squash, beets and potatoes for the meal from the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut. Guests, some dressed as carrots and peas to honor Koenig’s tradition of sometimes dressing up in carrot costume for coworkers’ weddings, praised the food served at the meal. Koenig calls it her “crowning glory.”
While a fruit’s seasonality might not be a factor for most brides, to 26-year-old Koenig, serving strawberries in mid-to-late fall is nearly sacrilege. As editor-in-chief of “The Jew and the Carrot,” Hazon’s “Jews, food and contemporary issues” blog, Koenig’s work is all about these very ideas: locally grown produce from a farmer whose face and name you know, making the laws of kashrut function in and contribute to the modern, edible world. The blog serves as a resource to Jews worldwide, deciphering information about the latest Jewish food movements, like Hehksher Tzedek, the Conservative movement’s efforts to establish a kosher certification system that factors in treatment of workers and other social issues.
Koenig shares her story with The Jewish Week at Ozzie’s, an organic, fair trade coffeehouse in her neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. She grew up in Oak Park, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, in what she calls a “very treif-y” family, getting together at dinnertime to consume a meal often containing chicken or beef, washed down with a glass of milk. She became a vegetarian at 17, but it was “less about an interest in food ... and more about conserving natural resources.”
It sounds strange for a woman whose life seems to revolve around food, but it wasn’t until her college years that Koenig learned how to cook. Living in a co-op as an undergraduate at Middlebury, Koenig was responsible for preparing sustainable, local and organic food for her 17 housemates and many guests. Although she was an environmental studies major with a focus on religion, Koenig didn’t really begin to actively consider the intersection of Judaism and food until the fateful day she found Hazon.
“I was at Middlebury, looking for an internship in New York, and I Googled ‘Jewish environmental New York.’” The search led her to Hazon, and she sent them an e-mail, asking if they could use an intern. Turns out they could. “It was such an amazing summer. There was a ‘this is meant for me’ moment.”
When Koenig returned to Hazon after graduation, “life became a Jewish environmental bubble,” she said. She began as a consultant to volunteers for Tuv Haaretz, Hazon’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) network.
Stevenson, who worked with Koenig at Hazon before she started at Adamah: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship at Isabella Freedman, commended Koenig’s hard work. “She puts a lot of herself into her work,” Stevenson said. “She took over Tuv Haaretz soon after I started it. She met with core groups, shlepped out to New Jersey ... She was the bright, young, wide-eyed worker staying late at night right out of college. Her commitment is really what makes things happen.”
“People would come to me with questions like ‘My farmer just quit on us. What do we do now?’” Koenig recalled. She was involved in almost every aspect of the project, “but I didn’t get to do any farming,” she said, with an air of disappointment. Seeing farmers bring their offerings days, sometimes hours, after harvesting, “the cycle of the growing seasons and the Jewish holidays really started to crystallize for me. Of course we eat apples at Rosh HaShanah: they’re fresh off the tree. We eat latkes at Chanukah because potatoes are in storage.”
After working for more than three years on Tuv Haaretz, Koenig was given the opportunity to run Hazon’s first food conference in December 2006, the catalyst for The Jew and The Carrot. What began as a lead-up to the conference quickly became its own entity, winning “Best New Blog” and “Best Kosher Food/Recipe Blog” in the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards. It allows the conversation to take place year-round.
“[The blog] provides an ongoing record of how these conversations progress, gives a lot of how-to’s, recipes, advice on greening your Shabbat table, on bringing the natural connection back to Sukkot. You can go to our food conference, but then, what next? The Jew and the Carrot provides the ‘what next,’” Koenig said.
“We’re realizing now that the kosher food industry is just as broken as any other, and that realization is inspiring change,” she continued. “The meat conversation [around Agriprocessors, the kosher meat-packing plant in Iowa accused of violating immigration and child-labor laws] is the most powerful example.”
Nigel Savage, executive director of Hazon, has seen the shift towards awareness and concern for these issues in the Jewish community, and credits the growth to the right combination of timing and people.
“It’s about people who care about being Jewish, care about keeping kosher,” he said in a phone interview from Israel. “The questions people are asking now include use of pesticides, the treatment of animals, will this contribute to childhood obesity? The Jew and The Carrot is a way, from all over the country, and the world, to stay connected to those questions.
“I’m incredibly happy with the role Leah has played at Hazon,” he continued. “The movement has really exploded in the last couple years, and she’s a really big part of that.”
Shortly before the interview, Savage met Hannah Schafer, project coordinator for the Israeli environmental organization Zalul, who grew up in eco-conscious Portland, Ore. Living in Israel, she is an avid Jew and The Carrot reader.
“The blog helps people make informed decisions about what they eat, and to consider what it means to eat locally,” she said. Although agriculture is a big part of Israeli society, it was The Jew and The Carrot that inspired her to join Or-gani, a CSA outside Hadera.
Of all the issues that are discussed on the blog, the conversations on kashrut and relationships mean the most to Koenig, who, now married to Modern Orthodox Fruchter, has started keeping a kosher home. “It’s something I’ve struggled with, how the food we eat and decisions we make about food limit or expand our community,” she said.
A posting by a Hazon board member illustrates the point. Hazon staffers were invited to Phyllis Bieri’s Fire Island home for a retreat, but she did not keep kosher. It chronicled her inner dilemma, how, as they discussed kashering the kitchen, she couldn’t help but feel as if she were being pulled in opposite directions, wanting to be a good hostess and feeling invaded simultaneously.
As a writer, Koenig is always looking for inspiration; hers usually comes from her kitchen.
“It’s the dinner sitting in front of you where you can track the majority of what’s on your plate back to a farmer,” she said. “When I have a fresh plate of kale, when I know where it comes from, I never forget to say a blessing.”
“I really think what we’re seeing now is the beginning of a seismic shift in the Jewish community,” in people becoming more involved with their food, she said.
With a new beginning for the Jewish community comes a new beginning for Koenig. During the interview with Hazon’s Savage, he mentions, with a twinge of regret, that Koenig is leaving Hazon, but Koenig hopes to edit The Jew and The Carrot as a consultant.
She’ll also continue to freelance, for publications like The New York Times and Lilith Magazine.
“I’m totally honored to be a part of this journey to the extent that I have been,” she said. “I’m excited to see where it goes.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization