How to dip your apple in honey

Shana tovah!

My adventures this week(end)

Earlier this past week I went out to water the garden (I was wearing a skirt; this detail will become important). I spent about 15 minutes outside and then came back in. When I sat down at my desk, I felt a sharp sting on my ass. Then another. I looked on my office chair but saw nothing. Sat back down. Another sting on my abdomen. Youch! Now I was freaked out and started shaking out my skirt. Sure enough, a yellowjacket flew out. My sweetie, hero that she is, caught it and put it outside, where, presumably, it is happily stinging somebody else.

Three stings and a lot of baking soda paste later, I was fine, if annoyed. Good thing I'm not allergic.

Then today I put a burned CD into my car stereo and couldn't get it out. When I went online to search for a solution (ain't the Web wonderful?) I found this:





Not sure what language he's speaking (it's not Swiss-Deutsch or French; could be Romansh), but you don't need to understand what he's saying to get the gist.

The fun just never stops here...

Don't look for explanations in 9/11 remembrances

I've been hearing lots of people's reactions to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and I heard several people complain that even though the media blitzed us with commentary, photos, video, interviews with survivors and families of victims, there seemed to be a lack of discussion about the underlying causes of 9/11.

I wasn't particularly surprised at this absence; nobody agrees about why 9/11 happened. In my New Yorker this week, Lorrie Moore, quoting writer David Rieff, summed up my take on it more eloquently than I ever could: "Politics is the ghost at the banquet of any national commemoration."

Honey laundering could sour High Holidays

I was disturbed to read about smuggled honey from China in this article a couple days ago.


As is true for most well-informed people who pay attention to where their food comes from, tainted food products coming out of China is not news to me. The scandals about powdered milk and pet food made international news when they broke (and caused a number of deaths of both children and pets, here and abroad), and there are a depressing number of other examples to cite, should one be so inclined.


For Jews, the story about tainted honey carries a special significance. During Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is coming up on September 28 (1 and 2 Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar), it is traditional to dip apple slices in honey to celebrate the sweetness of the new year. Clearly, using honey that contains illegal antibiotics and heavy metals negates the whole purpose of this tradition; never mind the health effects of consuming such additives.


Passing off inferior or illegally imported honey as safe and legal is far from the only example of such trickery/smuggling. Many high-end seafood and sushi restaurants serve fish identifed as tuna or something else equally expensive and desirable, when tests have shown the fish is in fact something else entirely (in all fairness, sometimes the restaurants are themselves cheated by their fish suppliers; without DNA tests, it can be very difficult to verify which fish is which). The same is true in the world of olive oil; often low-grade oil is sold as high-end virgin, and sometimes other oils are mixed into the olive to increase quantity.


But this honey story hit me in a different way. Not only is the product in this instance not what its sellers claim, but it is actually potentially dangerous to consume. With fish and olive oil, we're talking about basic fraud, but such frauds do not usually result in a product that can make you sick.


More to the point, from the Jewish perspective, using tainted honey to celebrate the New Year angers me, because the honey is being used in a symbolic traditional way, not merely for regular eating or cooking. It both enrages and saddens me to think of eating such honey to mark one of our holiest days.


On a related note, I just returned from the 6th annual Hazon Food Conference (I'll be writing more about that in upcoming editions of The Jewish Review; be sure to check it out). It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the scope of change facing all of us who work in the areas of sustainable, ethical food. The conference recharged me on many levels and I am excited to implement what I've learned here in Portland.


May this year bring real, lasting change to our broken food system, and may we all greet it with an apple slice dipped in locally produced honey, perhaps from the hives of someone we know. Amen.

The Green Thing

I subscribe to a food activism listserve; this was posted on it a couple days ago. I wish I could credit the author, but I don't actually know who wrote it.

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to her and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today.  Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

She was right—our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over.  So they really were recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind.  We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts—wind and solar power really did dry the clothes.  Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house—not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana .

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power.  We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.  And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Save locally grown greens!

Today the USDA and Big Ag are conspiring to implement a set of rules that favor giant industrial growers while placing small, diversified farms at risk. Known as the National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, this set of rules was designed by industrial growers to protect their market share while harming their main competition, the growing local and organic food movement. The Leafy Green agreement, drafted by the largest vegetable growers’ lobbyists in an effort to whitewash their growing food safety problems, would implement draconian practices that saddle farmers with one-size-fits-all rules and would drive local and organic farmers out of business with expensive regulations.

Tell Secretary Vilsack that it's time to protect family farmers and stop letting Big Ag write the rules by adding your name to the petition:

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/leafygreens/?referring_akid=.92252.M13cg7&source=mailto

Tuv Ha'Aretz 3rd annual edible garden bike tour

Spoke cards from previous bike tours; this year's is the yellow one.

On Sunday, July 10, Portland Tuv Ha'Aretz, Portland's Jewish connection to sustainable, ethical food for all, hosted our third annual garden bike tour. Led, as always, by intrepid Tuv member Beth Hamon, this year's ride theme was building community through edible gardens, specifically (and obviously) community gardens, for which Portland is justly famous.

A bit of Portland's community garden history:

The Community Garden program, founded and managed by Leslie Pohl-Kosbau, has provided gardening opportunities for the physical and social benefit of the people and neighborhoods of Portland since 1975. (Leslie has recently retired after 35 years on the job, and all gardeners in Portland, not to mention every citizen of the city, gardener or not, owes her a tremendous thank you for her work in making our city more beautiful and more edible).

There are 35 community gardens located throughout the city, developed and operated by volunteers and Portland Parks & Rec staff, offering a variety of activities. Immensely popular since their inception, there's now a 3-year waiting list (with over 1000 names on it) for a plot. A local nonprofit, 1000 Gardens, is hoping to add another 1000 plots by 2012.

We started our ride at the Woodlawn Community Garden, which is 14 years old this year, and shares space with Woodlawn Elementary School. One unique feature of this garden is the Thai jar rainwater-harvesting cistern, the first of its kind in the northwest United States, which was installed in 2007. It collects rainwater from the school roof, which is then piped to spigots placed throughout the garden:

Thai rainwater jar at Woodlawn Community Garden

Our next stop was the Rigler Peace Garden, located at 54th and NE Prescott. Here's some info about this special place:

Inverted gazebo roof with rain chain at Rigler Peace Garden.

In 2000, Will Levenson and Starr Hogeboom, Friends of Trees volunteers who were in the Cully neighborhood selling trees door-to-door, noticed an ugly, dusty piece of land that Rigler School was using for overflow parking. Given that the neighborhood had no park, they came up with the idea of creating a community garden in that space. For the next two years, they applied for grants, recruited volunteers, solicited donations from local businesses, filed for city permits, and negotiated a lease with Portland Public Schools to prevent the land from being sold. In total, the group received $60,000 in grants and $10,000 in fundraising. Donated materials were worth an estimated $40,000. The garden opened in September 2005.

The Rigler Peace Garden, as it was unofficially named by the group of volunteers who built it, is used for both community gardening and for education. Its entrance, made of bricks and featuring a shiny sculpture made of galvanized steel and student artwork, invites children to learn about natural science as well as how to grow flowers and vegetables. A concrete path leads to a gazebo where teachers hold class. The inverted roof of the gazebo captures rainwater and funnels it down a chain into an underground storage tank that is connected to a hand-operated water pump. The north side of the garden is shaded by dozens of native trees, each one sponsored by a different Rigler classroom.

Student artwork decorates the gate at Rigler Peace Garden

Our final stop was at Columbia Ecovillage, a sustainable co-housing community in NE Portland. Our friend Dennis is one of about a dozen Jewish members of CEV, and he gave us a tour:

Dennis (turquoise T-shirt) shows us the hazelnut trees CEV has planted in the parking strip; the nuts are intended to be shared with CEV's neighbors.

Dennis and chickens. CEV has 30 birds, including a rooster. Eggs, anyone?

Just a portion of the amazing garden space at CEV.

Bees at CEV.

5,000 gallon water tank, which harvests gray water from the roof to use in watering the garden. CEV can store up to 29,000 gallons of water with its tanks.

Thermostat and namaste inside the temperature self-regulating greenhouse.

Dennis assembled a salad for us, complete with edible flowers.

Group photo at CEV.

So what's Jewish about all this? The examples of community building we saw in the gardens and at CEV aren't specifically rooted in Judaism, of course, but as Jews interested in making strong, lasting connections with our neighbors and the land we live on, we can learn (glean?) much about how to build a Jewish community from what we saw on this ride. It requires patience, determination, a willingness to compromise and listen, and affords ample opportunities, as with reclaiming the land for the Rigler Peace Garden, to practice tikkun olam, repair of our world.

You can see more pictures from the ride here.