NIGEL SAVAGE
Keeping Kosher in the Time of McDonalds and Monsanto: American Jews and the sacred foods movement

Did you know that traditionally observant Jewish people don’t eat meat products and milk products together? It’s one of the rules of kashrut – of keeping kosher – and it leads to enormous practical complications in a kosher kitchen – having two sets of dishes, two separate sets of pots and pans. You have to know how complicated meat and milk is to understand this traditional Jewish joke:

"You shall not seethe a kid in it’s mother’s milk" says G!d (Ex 23:19)

Oh, says Moses: so I guess we can’t eat milk and meat together, then?

"You shall not seethe a kid in it’s mother’s milk!" says G!d (Ex 34:26)

Oh, says Moses: so I guess we have to have separate dishes as well, then?

"YOU SHALL NOT SEE THE A KID IN IT’S MOTHER’S MILK!" says G!d (Deut. 14:21)

Oh, says Moses: so I guess we need separate dishwashers and sinks and not sell milk and meat together either, then?

And G!d says: "Oh I give up; have it your own way…"

From the Jewish perspective, it’s a self-deprecating joke. It reflects how complicated it is to keep kosher, and it also accurately reflects the extent to which the traditional Jewish understanding of kashrut arose from a process of biblical exegesis which over a period of centuries has moved considerably beyond the original meaning of the text. The rabbinical tradition starts from a presumption that no word of the Torah is superfluous, and in fact the rabbinical extension of the rules concerning meat and milk derives explicitly from the three-fold repetition of these words in the Torah.

So for more than 2,000 years, Jewish people have followed the laws of kashrut: eating only animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves (cows good, pigs bad), and requiring that animals be slaughtered in accordance with shechita, which mandates that they be killed as swiftly and painlessly as possible. We have only eaten fish that have fins and scales: salmon and carp are good, shellfish is prohibited. And, to this day in Israel, farmers there follow the laws of shmitta (leaving the land to lie fallow one year in seven) and in some cases leaving the corner of the field unharvested so that poor people may help themselves (peah).

But the world, as we know, is changing fast. The way that most people in the West eat food has probably changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500. In general we have lost touch with the seasons; we eat an enormous amount of processed food; we cook far less from first principles than we used to. My late grandma, of blessed memory, died three years ago in Manchester, England, aged nearly 96. When she began her life, she got a kosher chicken by going with her mother to the kosher slaughterer, picking a chicken, watching the shochet slaughter it, then taking it home and plucking its feathers and purging it in the manner required by Jewish law. By the end of her life she had great-grandkids living in California who simply take a kosher chicken nugget from the freezer and put it in the microwave. The chicken that became the chicken nugget was killed in the same way that the chicken ninety years ago was killed: but the lives of those two chickens will have been very different, and the eating patterns of those who ate the chickens is very different indeed.

The pace of change in food production and distribution has moved faster than the rabbinical tradition can quite cope with. How do we infer laws from the Torah about whether GMO foods are ok or not? What does the Torah have to say about industrial monoculture? What does the Torah say about the extent of food packaging and transportation today? Or about obesity, or fast food, or vegetarianism?

In the face of the challenge posed by postmodernity, the Jewish community’s attitudes about food partly reflect other pre-existing divisions within the community. In a public sense, the most visible response to the issues raised above has come from the more liberal parts of the Jewish community: those who in general do not consider themselves bound by traditional Jewish law. Growing numbers of liberal Jews have started to talk about "eco-kashrut." The word "kosher" literally means "fit" (ie, is this fit for me to eat?) and so liberal Jews are applying that meaning more contemporaneously. Is it fit for me to eat monoculture crops grown far away, if local organic produce is available? Is it fit for me to eat a battery-farmed hen, or egg? Is it the case that I merely have a preference for free-range eggs, or do I consider the eggs of caged hens to be prohibited to me?

Although the more visible exponents of these positions – especially Rabbis Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Waskow – are outside the orthodox world, I think that, beneath the surface, more and more Orthodox Jews are asking similar questions. In Washington DC a young orthodox woman, Evonne Marzouk, set up an organization called Canfei Nesharim ("on eagle’s wings" – Exodus 19:4) which is precisely raising questions like these within the strictly orthodox community.

For now, however, the challenges thrown by eating ethically often create a divide, even if we might prefer that this was not so. I know of two couples who have chosen, in the last year, to go from having a kitchen in which they ate only meat which was kosher, even if it was not organic or free-range, to eating meat which is free range or organic, even if it is not kosher. (Kosher organic chicken is now quite widely available; kosher free-range beef, let alone grass-fed free-range beef, is not widely available, if it is available at all.)

These issues underpin the work of the organization that I founded, called Hazon (Hebrew for "vision"). We foster new vision, within and beyond the Jewish world, through outdoor and environmental education. In the last two years we’ve been doing more and more work around food, because we think that addressing these challenges helps to renew the Jewish community, and because we care seriously about applying Jewish tradition and the resources of the organized Jewish community to making a better world for all.

We began with the first Jewish CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture project) in the American Jewish community, when in 2004 we partnered with a Manhattan synagogue and a farm in Long Island. We aimed to get forty families to sign up, but in fact 80 did so, and it made the front page of the main New York Jewish newspaper. In 2005 we launched a second one in NJ; this summer we launched three more, in NY, MD and Houston, TX. And right now we’re in the process of selecting a further five communities around the country to launch CSAs in 2007. Our vision is that within ten years we will have several thousand Jewish families around the country all putting their weekly purchasing power behind local farms, and that in doing so we’ll both support the farmers and help Jewish families and communities think through their deeper relationship with food and how it’s grown. (This year two of our five farms had Jewish farmers: that was an added benefit in providing Jewish role models different from the traditional urban Jewish role-models, but it is not our focus, and as this program grows, we expect that the overwhelming majority of farmers will not be Jewish.)

We called our CSA program "Tuv Ha’Aretz", a biblical play on words which means both "good for the land" and "the best of the land." (Ezra 9:12) Alongside it this year we are launching "Min Ha’Aretz" ("from the land"), in which we’ll work with children and parents in Jewish schools to learn about food through the double prism of Jewish tradition and contemporary life. We are supporting Adamah (Hebrew for "land/earth"), a program that enables a dozen Jewish 20-somethings to spend three months learning sustainable farming and integrating that with Jewish learning and intentional living. And in December we’re organizing a conference that we hope will become an annual tradition: "From Latkes to Lattes: Jews, Food & Contemporary Life."

Most Jewish people today in America, like most Catholics, live at one and the same time in a complex postindustrial society and in relationship to an ancient wisdom tradition. The food that we eat reflects our heritage but, in truth, it is the modern food economy which is often the stronger force. The process of unlearning unhealthy habits, and of reconnecting to older and sometimes healthier habits of food consumption is not straightforward. Hazon’s work within the Jewish community is part of our broader hope and vision: that, slowly but surely, all of us will think more deeply about where our food comes from, that we will shop more thoughtfully, that we will eat more mindfully, and that in so doing we will help to make a healthier world for all. n

Nigel Savage founded Hazon in 2000. Though Hazon is focused on the Jewish community, all of its events are explicitly open to people of any religious background. For more information on Hazon, go to www.hazon.org. (Nigel would especially love to hear from anyone who runs a sustainable family farm in reasonable proximity to significant Jewish communities, and who would be interested in partnering with the Jewish community in a CSA.) Nigel@hazon.org.


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