So last week, Ana Joanes, director of Fresh offered me the opportunity to hear Joel Salatin give a lecture.  Being a big fan of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Inc, and of course Fresh, this Jew was beyond thrilled to be able to spend Easter Sunday listening to this rockstar sustainable farmer explain how we can afford local artisanal food and how we could really feed the world with it.  Fascinating discussion.  His passion and dedication to the subject is undeniable.  I can’t wait to buy his book Everything I want to do is Illegal.

I got the chance to chat with Joel right before his talk.  Although the food movement is anything but new to him, I asked him what changes he has seen in the last several years.

Listen here.

So what changes in food have you seen over the last five years?  What positive changes have you made?  Are you eating differently?  Are healthy sustainable foods more readily available today than they were before?

The good people at Fresh were kind enough to give us two free passes to see the movie being shown at Quad Cinema in New York City April 9-15.  For a chance to win the tickets, leave a comment on this post about your thoughts on how the food movement is making changes to our lives.  Drawing will be held on Wednesday April 7 – so leave us a comment on the Jew and the Carrot today!

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Hope oozed out of his eloquent speech. But I had spent my morning at the local Unemployment Office in the office of a pasty Career Counselor whose doughy hands gripped my resume. “So what do you do?” With ten years’ worth of work experience, I’ve run successful political campaigns, helped get innocent people out of prison, helped stop gun traffickers and written scathing white papers on the pharmaceutical industry. Yet right before Rosh Hashanah, after winning a successful campaign helping people who were injured by defective products, I came into work to find my office cleaned out and a “I’m sorry, we have no more money to pay you” speech. My office had been near Wall Street so after all the months of seeing the six-figure investment bankers doing the walk of shame with their boxes filled with their personal items after being handed their walking papers, I was the one going home at 10:00am with a tiny severance package and my personal effects in a box of my own. “People are out of work and they are hurting. I want a jobs bill on my desk right away.” I spent the afternoon job hunting. I sent out my resume to job postings, emailed friends and acquaintances asking them for their help. And then I waited. Waited for the phone call, that interview, that job offer. But the later did not come, and still I waited. I networked. I hoped. At least I try. But looking for a job is a vicious cycle. You have to constantly be at your best, but you get rejection at every turn. That job you would be perfect for, that you’ve labored over the cover letter, contacted everyone you know who knows people who can help you get that job, and maybe you even had an interview. But the job goes to someone else. I am one of 25 interviewees out of a pool of 250 candidates, but someone else will start working and I will be back to sending out resumes. It starts to wear you down, all that rejection, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. When you are job-hunting people ask you, “What do you want to do? What are your dreams?” I don’t know. My dream job would be to cook for people. Shop at the farmer’s market, bring home the freshest and best produce and cook up healthy and delicious meals for someone who will pay me a living wage and give me health care. But who is going to hire me as their personal chef? I may love cooking, but I never went to culinary school and people with the money to hire chefs probably want more credentials. And my credentials say that I should be a community organizer, an advocate for good causes, someone fighting for tikkun olam. A couple of years ago when I was employed, I had decided I wanted to advance my career (the organization I was working for did not have any room for advancement). I decided that I wanted to be a Jewish professional, in part because I saw some really great organizations doing amazing social justice work. But I didn’t grow up Jewish, so I didn’t have the summer camp connections or the Hillel friends to network with. So I started getting involved, volunteering and through grit and determination my resume began to fill up with things that said, “she’s really involved with the Jewish community.” But the economy tanked, and the non-profit world didn’t have a lot of room for career moves. I would get interviews, but the people they were hiring had a lot more experience than I did. Then my job disappeared and the hope I was feeling that I was making my career going somewhere faded. The civil servant assigned by the Department of Labor to give me career advice continued to be baffled by my resume. “How did you get these jobs before?” I smiled. Dumb luck really. A friend of mine ran into an old friend of his on a subway platform. While catching up the old acquaintance talked about his new job and my friend said, “I’ve got the perfect girl for you, she just finished winning a campaign and is looking for work.” Another time a friend of mine asked me, “Have you ever considered being a private investigator?” Yes, I know how I got those jobs, being at the right place at the right time. It wasn’t a great epiphany that I needed to network myself into the right situation. That is where job hunting is so much like dating. You might be the prettiest girl with the most charming stories, but the guy sitting across the table from you is looking to settle down with a girl who reminds him of his mother and have a lot of babies. You might both be terrific people, but just looking for different things. I had a phone interview for a job I was completely perfect for the other day. But the Executive Director on the other side of the line, who clearly didn’t have the time to be doing interviews asked me, “so what is organizing exactly?” I tried my best to explain what I do and how great I would be for his organization, but I didn’t get a call back. I didn’t give him the answers he was looking for, even though I know I would have done a really kick-ass job at their organization. So I wait for my phone to ring. I jump on every opportunity I can find even when it annoys friends and acquaintances. On Martin Luther King Day I was in the bodega near my house. I overheard a delivery guy saying to the clerk, "MLK? Only people that get today off are white. I’ve still got to work." Looking around the tiny shop at who was shopping and who was working he might have had a point, but I wanted to turn to him and say, "but at least you have a job!" Some days I don’t want to get out of bed and spend the day in duckie pajamas watching Hulu overcome with depression and embarrassment that I still don’t have a job. Obama’s speech last night didn’t give me a lot of hope. It might be said to a room full of applause that jobs are a high priority, but my email box is still empty, my phone isn’t ringing and my only hope from Congress is that they will extend my Unemployment benefits to give me more time to keep looking, keep hoping someone will realize that out of the pool of candidates they have in front of them, I am the best and that they should hire me.

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Sure, I had heard of turkey bacon, beef bacon, and even lamb bacon but never duck bacon.  “Is it any good?”  I asked my curiosity piqued by his tone while the slim rectangular packages were placed into the cooler.  After my shift was over I did a little shopping and found myself back at the meat cooler.  I thought of a friend who loves duck, so why not try this? So we arranged a brunch.  A few friends over on a sunny winter weekend to sample a tasty new treat.  We cooked up a batch of the duck bacon and placed tiny pieces on crackers.  I had even bought a duck liver pate (pork-free) that we smeared on tiny wedges of toast.  There were many other delicacies that afternoon, but for the meat eaters of the group all anyone remembers was that taste.  Squares of thin sliced smoked duck meat fried in duck fat – all that salty, smoky soaked in silky tender duck fat.  What flavor!  Bursting from each cracker.  Why aren’t more things cooked in duck fat? A few days after the brunch, a friend was home sick with a cold.  And what’s that saying? “Feed a cold, starve a fever.”  And what clears a stuffy head better than duck?  There was some left over after the brunch.  I brought a loaf of fresh bread and we soaked up the duck fat and sprinkled the bread with garlic powder.  And to make things even more treyf my friend had some leftover macaroni and cheese.  It was the most decadent meal I think I have ever cooked. By the end of the week, I was hungry and alone.  My boyfriend was at work and there was little in the house to eat.  A few potatoes, onions and the rest of the duck bacon.  I didn’t know if could top the ecstasy of the last time I had eaten the duck, but I roasted the potatoes and cooked the onions in with the bacon and tossed in the potatoes until they were coasted in the silky duck.  I was glad I was alone, because sometimes it’s just better when you are alone with duck juices dribbling down your chin. I don’t know if there is a food more naughty to kosher keeping Jews than pork – although technically it is no more a sin than any other prohibited food.  Yet, bacon gets many Jews really riled up (read the comments).  So all this talk of bacon feels a little scandalous even if duck bacon can be kosher (okay, not eaten with mac n’ cheese).  But the really naughty here is how amazing duck bacon really is.  To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Was that bacon, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?” Oh yes, I will be looking for duck bacon again.

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If you’ve ever been to New York in December, you’ve probably walked through one of these random street corners lined with trees wrapped in large hair nets and strings of bulbish lights precariously dangling from red wooden stakes.  Tucked within the trees is almost always a shabby little shack cobbled out of bits and pieces with perhaps a bit of heat to protect and provide comfort from the elements to these sentinel street vendors who indefatigably hock their wares. Walking through these temporary showrooms can be a briefly transformative experience.  The street noise dampens slightly, the scent of pine sap gently assails your nostrils, and for a moment you don’t feel you are in a loud bustling city of eight million people.  Perhaps it was this feeling that sparked the romance. Several years ago I had an ecologically conscientious roommate.   She cared about the environment so much that she never flushed the toilet.  Purportedly this omission of common courtesy was an effort to save water, but it only really resulted in pissing off her roommate who – with my own standards of sanitation – would flush twice.  That and her other earth-saving tricks made me conclude that she really would be much happier in life living in a cabin in the woods.  This conclusion was reinforced by her December fling – our Christmas Tree Guy. Our neighborhood Christmas tree stand was only about a hundred yards from our apartment and directly in the path to our closest subway stop.  So it wasn’t uncommon to walk through the trees several times a day.  First it was, “oh, I’m just bringing the Christmas Tree Guy some coffee,” she’d giggle as she ran out the door with a travel mug in hand.  Then there was a dinner date.  Not too long after came the late night moans and the ecstatic rhythmic thuds of Christmas Tree Guy sex. The next morning my walk to the subway was a vicarious walk of shame.  “Oh hi,” I bashfully managed, “you know, the walls in our apartment are really thin.”  But the Christmas Tree Guy turned out to be very sweet.  He was a forest ranger by trade, but during the winter makes good money by selling Christmas trees.  When we wasn’t on duty, he shared a tiny apartment with about 15 other guys.  He said people were generally friendly and welcoming, bringing him coffee and snacks, but even so I suspected my roommate was the only one providing carnal comforts.  The local street gang had dubbed him “Tree Guy” and helped protect his trees from petty theft.  The only trouble he said that he was having was with the bank at the street corner where his trees were set up.  They would argue about where he could place his wares and hassled the vendors until the Christmas Tree Guy posted a sign that said “***** Bank Hates Christmas.”  Christmas eventually won. But Christmas trees, obviously, are the biggest and most obvious symbol of, well, Christmas – a Christian holiday.  In my journey to become Jewish one of the big questions many Jews by Choice who had Christian backgrounds are faced with is – what do you do about Christmas?  That, is basically what my roommate asked as she started bringing home trees.  Perhaps it was her hyper ecological savvy, but she only brought home live trees – the little ones in tiny pots.  They were just green needle covered plants pruned to roughly resemble the conical shape of Christmas trees.  She never decorated them, although she did dress a bookcase in steady white lights, but those had stayed up all year and were turned on occasionally for mood lighting.  But nonetheless our apartment was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and I was trying to be Jewish. December came and went and our apartment contained a half dozen little trees and one large one in a big pot that the Christmas Tree Guy had wrapped in a black plastic bag and asked me to drag home to surprise my roommate.  Their romance trickled to a near stop by February since he had retuned to Canada and the long distance diminished the interest.  But November of the following year she got a phone call from the Christmas Tree Guy and by the time he returned to the City things were hot and heavy again. That year he didn’t gift us with nearly as many trees.  Perhaps since we had managed to kill all of them in fairly quick succession.  Our apartment did smell strongly of pine when he would shed his multiple layers of work clothes, but that was about as much Christmas as we had in the apartment. We both moved after that.  But when I walked through a street corner last week, breathing in the sweet smell of pine, I wondered what our Christmas Tree Guy was up to this year.  Was he back at our street corner?  Does he keep in touch with his December lover?  Although my life is so recognizably Jewish now I won’t forget that during a period of questioning Christmas in my conversion process, I was very intimately – if vicariously – exposed to a lot of Christmas trees.

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Living in New York City poses its own set of challenges and provides a certain range of advantages.  I mean in New York, you can get anything and usually get it delivered (at least in Manhattan).  I’ve found that mostly to be true – that is, until I tried to serve venison for Thanksgiving.

A couple of years ago I decided that Thanksgiving was all about traditions.  Whether or not the legends of Pilgrims and Indians were anything like what we used to represent out of construction paper, glue and paper bags, my Thanksgiving table was going to be full of indigenous and local produce.  That was remarkably easy to procure in New York City.  I ordered my Heritage Turkey at The City Bakery and gathered my veggies at farmer’s markets.  But venison is hard to find in NYC, and the clock is always ticking.

Perhaps here is where I should point out that I start planning for this holiday weeks in advance.  I am totally a list maker and once the menu is set, I plot and plan on where and when I will procure what is required.  I dash around the City often picking up specialty items from various locations.  My grocery list is set by date and location.  But, even with the best of planning, there are always obstacles.

I had previously found venison at the 125th Street Fairway market, but around Thanksgiving they don’t restock specialty meats (like game) to make room for more turkeys.  This year, I played phone tag with “Raymond”, the Meat Department’s manager, for a week until he rudely told me no, they didn’t carry venison and would not special order for me despite previously telling me that he would do so if I would only call back later.  Apparently, this is a stressful time of the year for Meat Department managers.

Not having much luck with any other grocery store I called, I made my case to the next obvious choice – Facebook.  “Mia Rut still needs venison. Fairway has been giving me the run around for a week only to hang up on me now. Very annoyed,” said my status update.  Remarkably there were some good suggestions, including one from my uncle the hunter, who kept a bunch of venison tucked away in his freezer.  Too bad he didn’t live any closer.

So the search continues.  Time is running short, my money is running out and I think that our menu may have to be adjusted.  However, despite the lack of deer meat on our table, we have a slight variation to our theme this year.  We typically host a Thanksgiving Shabbat dinner, foregoing a big meal on Thursday in favor of a more communal Friday night (friends often share Thanksgiving with family, but will come over for Shabbat dinner the next night).

This year we are shaking things up by using traditional Thanksgiving ingredients placed into a traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat dinner – traditional flavors presented in surprising ways.  So instead of matzo ball soup and gefilte fish we are starting out with fish consume.  I even started testing out the more experimental dishes, and thus far they have had rave reviews.  Everything is homemade, even the cranberry pasta for the kugel (use cranberry juice concentrate instead of water) which was another feat of scouring the city for a pasta machine (that didn’t cost an arm and a leg). But feel free to weigh in how this menu sounds:

Corn Bread Challah Fish Consume Cornish Hens Roasted in Acorn Squash Butternut Squash Gravy Seared Venison Sashimi Cranberry Sauce Kugel Chestnut and Sage Stuffing in Baked Apples Roasted Pumpkin in Soy and Crushed Sesame Green Bean Gelee Mashed Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Kimchi Tzimmis Sorbet Shoo-Fly Pie Chocolate Cake

The post The Thanksgiving Hunter and Gatherer appeared first on Jewcy.

Then I got cabbage in my CSA share – two heads of it. “How do you feel about sauerkraut?” I suggested, thinking about my own German heritage. “Or kimchi?” was her suggestion. Now we started getting excited. She pulled out her Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, which was a rather comprehensive collection of pickles (although no kimchi). So several kimchi recipes were consulted online and we got to work.

Big canning jars were purchased along with some chili paste, fresh ginger, scallions and lots of salt. The cabbage was washed, sliced and ready to wilt. “It says to let the salted cabbage to sit for several minutes to let it wilt, but it’s been twenty minutes and it’s not wilting.” This was us looking at our bowl of crisp and fresh purple cabbage sparkling with salt. About an hour later the outer edges appeared slightly limp. The cabbage was then firmly packed down into the jar it’s salty cabbage juices covering the leaves. We jerry-rigged a cover and some weight to press the cabbage down firmly into its own brine. “Fermentation is usually complete in three to six weeks,” she read. “Weeks?” Oy this was a lot of work for a little sauerkraut. And neither of us knew how the purple cabbage was going to work – especially since it had been so reluctant to initially to wilt.

The kimchi, on the other hand was remarkably easy. Let the cabbage soak overnight in a water and salt mix. Rinse then mix in a blend of chili powder (although I used paste) salt, sugar, ginger and scallions. Instead of chopping I simply threw the spice mixture in my food processor making a nice even and smooth paste I massaged into the dry cabbage leaves (using a glove since the chili can burn your skin). I packed the kimchi into jars and let it sit on our kitchen counter.

And a few days later, bright and shiny with flecks of red in a hot and tangy liquid, the kimchi was ready and remarkably delicious and was quickly eaten. The purple sauerkraut continued to sit on the counter. It smelled bad (as sauerkraut does) and overflowed its jar a few times (making a big purple mess). Occasionally we could see some bubbles from the fermenting process, but other than that there was great skepticism in the house whether or not this was going to be successful.

More kimchi was made with the next week’s CSA cabbage. While picking up that week’s share I traded some other veggies for more cabbage. “What do you do with all that cabbage?” I was asked. Good question, what does one do with lots of kimchi? We brought out the bamboo steamers and made dumplings. We made sushi. Not authentic Korean foods, but delectable. And there was more cabbage. And beets. I forgot to mention the beets. There were also lots and lots of beets. Pickling spices simmered on the stove with a stick of cinnamon in apple cider vinegar. Cooked beets and this tangy brine were poured into more jars. The fridge was starting to get full.

Shabbat dinners began featuring our pickled goods. Kimchi on a Shabbat table? Why not. We brought jars of beets as gifts to dinner parties. Then the sauerkraut was ready. It didn’t taste anything like the mushy stuff that my mom would cook on New Year’s Day with pork loin. I never liked sauerkraut. It was offensive I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth and dripped its rancid liquid everywhere. But our purple sauerkraut was still crisp, had very little liquid and very little smell. It gleamed like strips of scarlet silk on our Shabbat table. The beets were like deep rubies and the kimchi was just fun and exotic.

I love cooking. I love cooking for other people. Being unemployed gives more time than I would have if I were working. So I feel like I can try new things. Although pickling is a way of preserving fresh foods, it has also been preserving my sanity as I have tried to find a new job.

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“It is early, and I need carbs. You can quote me on that,” said Lilit Marcus, Jewcy’s Editor, this morning as I walked in (late) for the 9:00 AM sessions at the J Street Conference. “How can there be 1,200 Jews in a room and no bagels?”

Apparently Lilit is not alone in her bagel angst. Amy Spitalnick, a J Street staffer just tweeted, “That’s because you can’t find a good bagel in DC!” Is that true? Could DC, the epicenter of world power, be lacking in chewy crunchy bagel goodness? This apparently seems to be the case – at least here at the Grand Hyatt.

If food (and alcohol, but it is a little early for that) is a social lubricant, shouldn’t there be a good nosh while people mill about networking and figuring out how to create peace in the Middle East? However there is coffee, tons of coffeefor those who need some morning caffeine (there is decaf, although we have yet to see anyone partake).

The sessions and speakers are pretty amazing (so far, although I couldn’t find the one I wanted to attend this morning) but they are not so fun when your stomach is rumbling, and I don’t drink coffee. However, I am apparently alone in my coffee aversion. Check out this video of Rabbi Andy Bauchman (filmed by his daughter Audrey) and what he had to say about the conference coffee.

Update: Day 2 of the conference featured bagels. Maybe this blog post had something to do with it?

Here’s some photo evidence:

The post Can There Be Peace Without Any Bagels? (Updated) appeared first on Jewcy.

Still a little under the weather and definitely shocked, I made my way home and baked brownies.  In a moment my entire life had changed – for the better or for the worse I wasn’t sure.  I did know that all my expectations were tossed on its head for that morning, that week, the upcoming holidays, my moving plans (I had been looking for a new apartment), my career path.  I won’t lie, I didn’t like my job, but the crappy paycheck was far better than no crappy paycheck.  I got laid off the day Ben Bernake had announced the recession was “likely over” but I had been job hunting for over a year already, so I didn’t see my newly acquired unemployment status changing as quickly as it arrived. The next couple of days were a bit of a blur.  I told my roommates that on account of my dramatically decreased salary, I was going to need to move.  I didn’t know where I was going to go, but paying rent for an apartment I wasn’t living in didn’t make much fiscal sense (I had been de facto living with my boyfriend for the last several months). Luckily for them they found someone new right away, which meant that by the end of the month was likely going to be jobless and homeless. While so many of my friends were thinking about apples and honey and wishing everyone a sweet new year, I was virtually “pounding the pavement” in my pajamas in front of a laptop looking for a direction in my life.  Where was I going to find a job?  Where was I going to live?  At a time of year of introspection and forward thinking, I had dropped a few rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Instead of thinking about being inscribed in the book of life for 5770, I was wondering about how when I packed all my worldly possessions into a Uhaul shortly after Yom Kippur, where that U-Haul was going to go – which puts things in a whole new perspective. But as the dust from the last few weeks has finally begun to settle, I finally have a moment to think back on my year, and think about the year to come.  First, I feel very fortunate.  Why, at a time like this, would I feel fortunate? Well, it was no secret that I was very very miserable in my old job.  I had been job-hunting pretty much since I had started working there.  Now, I didn’t have to spend my days unhappy in a job I hated.  I also didn’t like my apartment.  I felt that I was paying way too much money for way too little space.  I had found the place on Craigslist, and although the roommates were nice enough, it just didn’t feel like home.  So even though I am scared and unsure about what comes next, I will no longer be in those unwelcoming environments – and, for that, I feel fortunate. Of course, I also feel scared.  It is great to be excited about what might come next and be upbeat about making one’s life better by not doing what you dislike, but options for the future seem few and far between.  Just before the layoff I had interviewed for a job in which I have been only one of ten applicants that were offered an interview out of a pool of 125 people who had applied for the job.  Although there are jobs out there, there are lots of people also looking for work.  Ditto the New York City housing market.  I didn’t like my apartment because it was expensive and small.  Yet the decrease in my salary meant a decrease in my living options.  The only places I could afford now were tiny rooms in weird shared spaces or located way way out in the outer boroughs. In other words, Rosh Hashanah was nothing what I expected.  Being wildly distracted and stressed, nothing worked like we had planned.  My boyfriend and I missed the services we planned on attending (in part due to a misread email).  At the last minute his mother came to town so we made dinner for a few people, which meant I cleaned his apartment like it was Pesach (not that is was that dirty, but I alleviate stress by cooking and cleaning).  But 400-pound elephant in the room was our decision whether to move in together.  We had only started dating shortly after Purim, which is not really long enough to chose to sell off half your furniture and shack up together.  But we did not really see too many other viable options if we wanted to keep our relationship strong and growing (moving in with my parents eight hours away may have solved my affordable rent issues, but would have really killed our sex life).  So Rosh Hashanah was filled with lots of conversations about the future – about our relationship, about our domesticity, and whether I should look for another job in another city (more opportunities, but again not so good for us). With Yom Kippur right before us, there are lots of things still totally up in the air for me.  The High Holidays haven’t as much of a time of reflection as a time for action.  In three days I will be packing everything I haven’t sold off into a U-Haul and consolidating stuff with my kitchen – at my boyfriend’s apartment.  I’m writing this amongst moving boxes and piles of stuff that needs to go to the trash, to Goodwill, and stuff that needs to be E-cycled.  I’ve spent the week emptying closets, organizing, sorting, and cleaning not just my life, but also my boyfriend’s life.  It’s probably not what he was expecting to do be doing during the High Holidays either, but this is the season for self-reflection – some of us have just been doing it very fast and furiously with far more immediate change.

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So instead of a morning of dull research and nursing a cup of tea wondering if I was well enough to be in the office that day, I was packing a box of my personal items and officially joined the 9.6% of the New York City population counted as unemployed. The rest of the day was kind of a blur. I recall a tremendous outpouring of support and suggestions. Friends sent job postings and made suggestions for networking opportunities. My boyfriend came home early from work to find me in his sunny kitchen hammering away on my laptop looking for job leads.

What a way to start the New Year! Soon the anxiety soon began to creep in. How long can I afford my rent? Where will I live? Just the day before I was planning a trip to Tucson to see my sister and her new baby due this fall. Can I afford it now? My boyfriend and I had been planning on going to Sukkahfest – is that the best use of my (now much more) limited resources?

That and so many more questions were swirling around in my head. But I found myself in my comfort zone, my (boyfriend’s) kitchen, and hungry for dinner. Since I had been sick we were pretty low on groceries, but there were enough odds and ends to pull together some pasta, a basil-kale-chicken stock-raw cashew pesto (with a clove of fresh garlic, it was incredible). But the real comfort food were the black bean brownies.

I had first tasted a friend’s black bean brownies at a Shabbat potluck. I asked for the recipe but she brushed me off saying I only needed to Google for a recipe. A few weeks later I found myself cooking for a crowd, which included vegans, so I attempted the friend’s sage advice and found this recipe for vegan black bean brownies. I baked the brownies in greased muffin tins and what came out were soft and chewy delicious chocolaty goodness. I tried them again a week later, but forgot the oats. Bad idea – they need the gluten in the oats to stick together.

So the other night, even though I was feeling shocked, scared, anxious, happy, sad and all sorts of other emotions, a warm batch of these chewy chocolate delights (with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream) and sitting on the couch with my boyfriend made everything just a little bit better.

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And for those desiring to gather and produce their own local fare, we have illicit urban agrarian societies in New York that go foraging or keep bees.  But as it turns out, not all local foods are created equally.

Monday’s Daily News ran an article on toxicity of local fish – and despite the danger, how many low-income people are turning to fishing as a source of food.  This raised all sorts of conflicting thoughts for me.

1. OMG! we have polluted our local waters so badly that we shouldn’t eat what they produce.

2. We have a society where we have hungry people eating toxic food.  What can we be doing about that?

3.  Another question comes to mind, similar to the one raised the other day by Liz Schwartz, but is “eating locally” elitist?

I’m curious about others thoughts and concerns.  Please leave a comment!

Cross-posted from The Jew and the Carrot 

The post When Eating Locally Is Bad For You appeared first on Jewcy.