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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
Culinary Corner: Green Cuisine
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
One girl's adventures in eco-kashrut.
Like most of my fashionable 20-something friends, I like to consider myself pretty green. I don't compost or anything weird like that, but I use organic cleaning products, and I have those light bulbs that conserve energy. Then the time came when I kept hearing people talk about eco-kashrut, and how it changed their lives and how I should totally embrace it. Yeah, I know about Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi coining the phrase in the 1970s. I also know about Arthur Waskow's book Down to Earth Judaism, where he talked about how Jews should integrate ideas like water conservation and recycling into their lives. But when a Jewish girl isn't sure about something, she has one good way to get answers. I called my mom.
My mom thinks that people who restrict their food options in any way, unless they're allergic to something, are deliberately making their lives more difficult. Growing up Presbyterian, she sees two sinks and two ovens not as ways to keep food separate but as more stuff to clean. When I tried to explain eco-kashrut to her, she wanted none of it. "So you don't just have to eat kosher food, you have to make sure it's organic too? Why go to all that trouble if you don't have to?" She made a good point. And yet the idea of eco-kashrut, living in harmony with both nature Judaism, sounded appealing to me. After all, I once did a book report on "50 Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth." The hippie ideal wouldn't die for me just because my mom thought it was inconvenient.
Then I turned to the experts. I talked to Leah Koenig, who works for the Jewish environmental group Hazon and blogs at The Jew and the Carrot. "I would have bought your mom's argument 20 years ago," she said, "but now, it's so much easier to join a food co-op or even order food online." Koenig calls herself "a pluralistic eater." Though she's a longtime vegetarian, she thinks it's more important to teach people about how eating meat contributes to global warming than it is to just tell them to stop eating it.
Koenig made good points, and her life didn't seem more complicated because of her eating habits. After I talked to her, I called Shamu Sadeh, Director of the Adamah Fellowship at the Isabella Friedman Center in Connecticut. For Sadeh, eco-kashrut is not just about food, but about acknowledging the role that food plays in our existence. He believes in cultivating gratitude, humility, and respect as well as nourishing our physical bodies. I told him about my mom. He responded, "Food is not a logistical challenge. It is a great joy."
It was then that I thought about the component of eco-kashrut I had been missing out on. Since finishing high school, I hadn't really had big family-centric meals anymore. Growing up, my mom insisted that the whole family eat dinner together. Even though my sister and I kind of resented it, we wound up enjoying catching up on how everybody's day went. As an adult, the only time I ever got to have those big chummy meals were on holidays. All Jewish holidays involve food — can you imagine Passover without the seder, or Rosh Hashanah without apples and honey? Even Yom Kippur is about food, since it's about very pointedly not eating food. Practitioners of eco-kashrut want to make that feeling of connectedness last all the time, and how could I fault them for that? Sadeh agreed, noting, "I believe there is a desire among many Jews, especially young Jews, to make Judaism more relevant." What's more relevant than food, something we interact with a minimum of three times a day?
The thing I heard most often from devotees was that eco-kashrut was "a way of life." They didn't just tell me about changing the way they ate; they talked about growing vegetables in window boxes in filthy apartments in Queens and rewiring their toilets to use less water. Being competitive by nature, I wanted to be as hardcore green as these people. I had fantasies of going vegan and only wearing secondhand clothes and only using one square of toilet paper every time I went to the bathroom. But I remembered something else my mom used to tell me: "Life is not a contest." She was right. My interest in eco-kashrut needed to come from some place pure, not just from wanting to be a bigger hippie than all my friends.
A month after reading everything I could find about eco-kashrut, where am I? I make a point to buy locally grown vegetables. And you know what? They taste better. But I'm not ready to rewire my toilet just yet. And I think God is cool with that.
-- Text by Lilit Marcus
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
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