Cooking a Vegan Shabbat Dinner

Last Friday, I hosted a homemade vegan Shabbat dinner for friends. A lot of time and effort went into preparing the food, but all the dishes (with the possible exception of the challah) came out terrific. I've been shul-hopping quite a bit since I moved to New York City and I've enjoyed many Shabbat stops along the way, but there's a special feeling when you have friends over for a healthy, vegan meal in a relaxed setting. The menu featured challah, carrot-parsley salad, cucumber-chickpea salad, charoset, tempeh-potato salad, polenta with bruschetta, curried lentils with wild rice, and roasted cauliflower and carrots. Two guests brought homemade cupcakes and cookies.


I've cooked Shabbat dinners for my parents and grandma a few times in the last year, but until fairly recently, I didn't feel up to the task. Not too long ago, my idea of adventurous vegan cooking was rolling GimmeLean Ground Beef into "meatballs" and mixing them with white-flour spaghetti and a jar of tomato sauce. As recently as early 2008, I was a lazy cook who relied too heavily on mock meats and other processed foods. At that point, I'd never hosted a non-potluck meal for more than two guests. I assumed the identity of a bad cook, and I never tried to get past it.

Thanks largely to the influences of The Jew & The Carrot, Michael Pollan, my boss, and a couple of lead-by-example friends, I saw the need to cook healthier food and stop being a mockmeatatarian. All it takes to become a better cook is a can-do attitude, the willingness to follow some more exciting recipes, and some practice. As one friend who gave me a cooking lesson said, being a decent cook is as simple as following a recipe. Even if you make a few mistakes along the way, you'll get the feel of how different spices impact a dish and what ingredients go well together. Usually the experiments gone wrong are still edible. Almost always, the feeling you get from making a tasty dish yourself is very satisfying.

I don't claim to be a great cook. But I've gotten to the point where I truly enjoy many of the foods I make, and I'm confident enough in them that I want friends and family members to enjoy them too.

On my birthday last November, I spent the whole day in the kitchen and was proud to cook a Shabbat dinner for the very first time. As my birthday approaches this year, I feel as though I can conquer the world, or at least a vegan cooking competition. All joking aside, I actually will be spending the day in the kitchen and then competing as a chef in Veggie Conquest 3. If you're a processed-foods kind of vegan, put forth a little effort and you, too, can make this transformation.

Photos of my tempeh-potato salad and curried lentils by Val Zimmer. Click the images for a better view.

Etc.

PunkTorah Featured on CNN.com, Launches Indie.Yeshiva
On Friday, CNN.com ran an article about "New Jews." The article discussed older "New Jews" institutions like Heeb and JDub and also featured some new voices, including PunkTorah founder (and CAN!!CAN frontman) Patrick A.:

For Atlanta, Georgia, punk-rock musician Patrick A, or Aleph (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet), this means he can seamlessly blend who he's been with his newly embraced religious observance.

"When I'm on stage screaming, hitting my face with a microphone and pouring beer on my head, at least I'm singing about the Torah," said the 26-year-old founder of PunkTorah, an outreach effort to inspire Jewish spirituality.

Last month, PunkTorah launched a new project called Indie.Yeshiva. The site aims to "to bring the Light of the Torah to the people; to open the book for everyone to read and understand as best as they can." Indie.Yeshiva encourages people to contribute essays about Tanach, rabbinic literature, halacha/ritual, spirituality/philosophy, Hebrew, liturgy/prayer, history, and lifecycle/holidays.

Rubashkin Trial Update
The first federal trial of former AgriProcessors executive Sholom Rubashkin is in its fourth week. The defense began presenting its side earlier this week, Rubashkin is expected to testify today, and lawyers will likely make their closing arguments on Monday.

I noted last month that not one of the combined 163 charges that Rubashkin faces in two federal trials pertains to treatment of animals. His supposed livestock-related charges are for allegedly violating the U.S. Packers and Stockyards Act, which has apparently never been invoked in a criminal case before. I've seen very little coverage of these 19 or 20 charges since the trial began, but the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier did devote an article to this topic last Tuesday. The article noted that the 1921 law requires "buyers pay cattle providers within 24 hours of a sale." The article explained:

Prosecutors presented several checks from Agriprocessors to Equity Cooperative Livestock Sales Association, based in Baraboo, Wisc., that showed the plant frequently mailed a check several days after purchasing cattle.

The paper trail, which relied on Agriprocessors records and hand-written notes from Equity's office staff, showed Agriprocessors sometimes waited a few days to write a check, let a few days pass before time stamping the envelope, followed by another few days delay before receipt at Equity. . . .

Another executive at a livestock provider company, Waverly Sale Co., offered similar testimony.

Co-owner Ronald Dean said Agriprocessors, while sometimes late in payments, always paid its bills in full before its next purchase.

Source: Failed Messiah

"Kosher and Vegan"
Last month, The Jewish Week ran a letter to the editor titled "Kosher and Vegan." The writer said, "For me, to be kosher is to be vegan. I don’t want to be involved in destroying the life of any animal, regardless of how that killing might be rationalized. True, we must eat organic matter, but we can at least avoid killing living, feeling creatures and restrict ourselves to a plant-based diet."

Spork Foods' "Hanukkah Gone Wild!"
Spork Foods offers vegan cooking classes in Los Angeles, and the December 16 class has a "Hanukkah Gone Wild!" theme. The class description says, "If you know the story of Hanukkah, it’s all about oil – and traditional Hanukkah recipes use a lot of it! But why not create healthier and lighter variations, without sacrificing taste?" The menu features baked zucchini and potato latkes with a lemon dill sour cream topping, fresh green salad with roasted beets and spicy maple-glazed pecans, herb-roasted chickpea dip with vegetables, and jelly doughnuts. Click here to read last year's guest post from Spork Foods head chef and co-owner Jenny Goldberg, titled "Vegan Passover Guide for Hungry Jews."

"Kosher Punk"
Last week, an ethnomusicology student at Penn blogged about "Kosher Punk" and used information from heebnvegan as her starting-off point. I don't agree with some of what she says in the post, including her assessment that Jewish punk is a "trend" that's "surfacing in the late 2000’s," but it's still fun to see that someone has called the Jew-punk scene a trend.

Religious Leaders Eat Vegan Lunch at Windsor Castle

Earlier this week, more than 200 representatives of the world's major religions gathered together for a vegan lunch at Windsor Castle in the U.K. Jewish, Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Hindu, Muslim, Shinto, and Sikh leaders involved in environmental efforts were participating in the "Many Heavens, One Earth: Faith Commitments for a Living Planet" interfaith conference. Prince Philip and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon were also on hand.

According to Reuters UK, the local and sustainable menu reportedly included "a salad of roasted English pear, celeriac and cobnuts (a type of hazelnut grown in Kent)"; "mushrooms stuffed with artichoke, red onion and thyme, served on pearl barley and butternut squash risotto"; and "non-alcoholic cranberry and orange cocktails."

In the Forward last week, Leah Koenig wrote that the eight Jewish delegates from the U.S. and Israel included Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair (founder of the Jewish Climate Change Campaign in Israel), Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur, and Hazon founder Nigel Savage.

Koenig explained that conference organizers "chose vegan food to provide a low-impact meal that accommodates the widest spectrum of the delegates’ dietary needs." Nevertheless, she noted that despite the organizers' "least-common-denominator approach," "the lack of a mashgiach and separate dishes means that kosher-keeping Jewish delegates will not be able to eat the lunch." They are apparently "the only participants unable to do so." Koenig added that some of them declined an offer to order food from "an outside kosher kitchen" because, as Rabbi Sinclair said, "I realized I'd be eating food that was triple-wrapped in plastic with disposable cutlery at an environmental conference."

Girls in Trouble's Debut Album Out Now!

While going through the Book of Maccabees, have you ever come across the struggle between Judith and Holofernes, read about how the latter was sent (by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar) to get vengeance against nations that hadn't assisted the king, threw up your devil horns when decapitation ensued, and thought, "This needs to be an indie/folk song!"? If the answer is yes, I have an album recommendation for you!

Even if you've never experienced that kind of thought process, Girls in Trouble's eponymous debut—out today on JDub Records—is worth a listen. Singer-fiddler-guitarist Alicia Jo Rabins—better known as the fiddle player from Golem—wrote the songs in tribute to female characters in the Bible, who are often obscure and sometimes even anonymous. That motif is underlying and shouldn't alienate listeners who don't typically rush to Biblical music, as themes like seduction, adultery, and violence are most noticeable in the lyrics. The music ranges from upbeat, poppy rock to much slower folk numbers.

My favorite track is "Mountain / When My Father Came Back," which tells the Book of Judges story of how Yiftach inadvertently vowed to kill his daughter, who is never named. The tale is haunting, and the lyrics are quite beautiful:

When my father came back from the war
I knew he would want to see me first
So I ran out to greet him
But he fell to his knees in the dirt
He told me daughter
I have promised G-d to offer
The first creature that I saw . . .

The night he took me to the mountain
Neither of us spoke
We reached the peak together
Just as sunrise broke
I could have run from him
I almost thought he wished it
But I could not run from G-d

Check out Girls in Trouble's MySpace page and JDub's "lyric guide" for the album.

Image courtesy of Girlie Action

Two Thumbs Up for Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.

Can we tell a new story?
—Jonathan Safran Foer

Following a media explosion in the last few weeks, Jonathan Safran Foer's nonfiction debut, Eating Animals, is finally in stores. Foer makes an impassioned case against factory farming that begs to be heard and, judging by the storm of recent media coverage, is being heard by some. Here's hoping it can change minds and habits on a large scale.

After being an on-and-off vegetarian for much of his life, Foer set out to explore where meat comes from when his wife got pregnant with their first child and he had to make decisions about eating animals on someone else's behalf. The search that follows is part memoir, part journalism, and it delves deeply into the issue of where meat comes from. With Foer's revered knack for storytelling, Eating Animals takes readers on a journey that will make them find factory farms nothing short of repugnant. All this is done in a style that is very accessible to the general public and never too preachy or pushy of Foer's viewpoint.

Indeed, Foer never comes to an all-out conclusion with regard to whether readers should go vegetarian. He gives them the information they need to start their own journey. He grapples with the thinking of The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan, among others, and neither condemns the relatively small number of supposedly humane farms nor chooses to eat meat from them. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that the scarce existence of such farms is not justification for eating meat that comes from factory farms, as 99 percent of meat in this country does.

Eating Animals raises important, hard-hitting ethical considerations without forcing readers to reach the same conclusions:

• "The global implications of the growth of the factory farm, especially given the problems of food-borne illness, antimicrobial resistance, and potential pandemics, are genuinely terrifying. India's and China's poultry industries have grown somewhere between 5 and 13 percent annually since the 1980s. If India and China started to eat poultry in the same quantities as Americans (twenty-seven to twenty-eight birds annually), they alone would consume as many chickens as the entire world does today. If the world followed America's lead, it would consume over 165 billion chickens annually (even if the world population didn't increase). And then what? Two hundred billion? Five hundred? Will the cages stack higher or grow smaller or both? On what date will we accept the loss of antibiotics as a tool to prevent human suffering? How many days of the week will our grandchildren be ill? Where does it end?"
• "Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?"

Eating Animals is peppered with references to Foer's Jewish identity, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with his National Jewish Book Award–winning novel Everything Is Illuminated. Perhaps the most gripping Jewish-themed tie-in is the one involving his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who refused to eat pork when she was struggling to survive; click here to read about an excerpt of this story, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine last month. This should not be taken as criticism, but Eating Animals is essentially absent of religious inquiry into the question of eating animals. Foer's brief discussion of what "kosher" means in the context of modern kosher meat, reminiscent of his 2006 PETA video "If This Is Kosher ...," is worth reading. Here's an excerpt:

We have no reason to believe that the kind of cruelty that was documented at Agriprocessors has been eliminated from the kosher industry. It can't be, so long as factory farming dominates.

That raises a difficult question, which I ask not as a thought experiment but straightforwardly: In our world—not the shepherd-and-flock world of the Bible, but our overpopulated one in which animals are treated legally and socially as commodities—is it even possible to eat meat without "causing pain to one of God's living creatures," to avoid (even after going to great and sincere lengths) "the desecration of God's name"? Has the very concept of kosher meat become a contradiction in terms?

Recommend Eating Animals to friends who have never seriously considered vegetarianism and aren't about to pick up a copy of Erik Marcus' Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating. Recommend this book to the so-called "ethical meat-eater" in your life who is sympathetic to discussion about vegetarianism but isn't quite there yet. And with the holiday gift-giving season right around the corner, keep Eating Animals in mind as a great gift.

Animal Rights Discussed in the Knesset

This past week, Haaretz reported that the Israeli Knesset rejected a bill that would have renamed Israel's Animal Welfare Law as the Animal Rights Law. "The proposed law is based on the unacceptable premise that animals have rights," one opponent told the Knesset.

MK Yoel Hasson (Kadima), who proposed the bill, realized that it would not pass this time around and had tried changing the bill to remove the term "animal rights." He said he will try again to get this bill passed in six months.

The highlight of the article is the input from Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, a dog guardian who reportedly "showed great interest in the debate." He said, "I do not know what I would do to a person who killed my [dog] Stephan." The speaker of the Knesset also explained that he is a longtime vegetarian:

I do not eat meat, I am a vegetarian for ethical reasons. My dog was taken to a kennel since he bit someone, or someone thought he had bit them. The kennel was next to a slaughterhouse. When I saw how they were slaughtering animals, I became a vegetarian. That was more than 40 years ago.

Etc.

Tips for Cooking Healthy Meals on a Budget
On Thursday, GirlieGirl Army posted about holistic health counselor Jackie Topol's "Tips for Cooking Healthy Meals on a Budget." All of this helpful, practical advice is applicable to vegetarians and vegans. Some of it might seem like common sense, but in the way that all the tips are compiled together, this is wonderful food for thought. Also check out Topol's 2007 heebnvegan guest post, "My Experience as a Farmer and Why I've Decided to Go Vegan."

Hartzveytik
Jewy indie/punk band The Shondes, who are hard at work recording a heartbreak-themed album, will be playing at Hartzveytik: A Heartbreak Survival Society Social on November 14. Terry Hope Romero, co-author with Isa Chandra Moskowitz of the upcoming Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (as well as Veganomicon and Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World), will be on hand with vegan treats. The show is at Southpaw in Brooklyn and also features Soft Power, Royal Pink, and The Low & The Lowsome.

Alicia Silverstone's Favorite NYC Vegetarian Restaurants
The Kind Diet author Alicia Silverstone recently blogged for Grub Street about visiting her favorite vegetarian restaurants in New York City. Silverstone also made a video of her restaurant adventure, which included a stop at vegan bakery Babycakes with GirlieGirl Army's Chloé Jo Berman and "the greatest Reuben" at Sacred Chow.

Spira-Inspired Tips for Animal Activists
Earlier this month, The Vegan Dietitian featured "Ten Tips for Animal Activists Based on the Life of Henry Spira." The late Spira was a Jewish animal rights activist who was pivotal in ending the kosher meat industry's use of shackling and hoisting in this country. Read Peter Singer's Ethics in Action for more information about his campaign.

Kosher Cheese Controversy
Toobro LLC, a halav yisrael cheese company in Hewlett Neck, N.Y., has so far avoided having its plant shut down after it reportedly failed to pay rent, utility bills, and downpayments in a timely manner. Under its previous owners, the kosher plant was shut down by state officials earlier this year because "continued operation and distribution of its products could pose a serious danger to the public's health, safety and welfare." The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets said that the plant had "excessive levels of bacteria and coliform, as well as containing non-food grade oil" and that the "facility and equipment [we]re in extreme disrepair, posing further potential contamination." (Source: Failed Messiah)

Explosion of Media Coverage for Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals will be in stores on Monday, and it's already causing an explosion of media coverage. Foer had an op-ed on CNN.com on Wednesday, titled "Eating Animals Is Making Us Sick." The Forward has a pretty positive review of Eating Animals in its new issue. The Jew & The Carrot is giving away a free copy of the book here and noted yesterday, "There are not many references to kosher meat practices in this book, nor to the Jewish philosophies on eating or not eating meat. Foer seems to imply that most meat (99%), kosher or otherwise, is industrial and therefore subject to the same problems outlined earlier."

Kudos to The Huffington Post for featuring numerous reviews of the book from people with a variety of opinions. The first four this week were all from members of the tribe. The following are excerpts from each, in chronological order.

Aaron Gross (founder of Farm Forward; he cowrote PETA's "A Case for Jewish Vegetarianism" pamphlet):

It's time we have a more intelligent and reasonable discussion about the state of animal agriculture. And it's time that vegetarian advocates and omnivores who simply want animals and the environment treated with basic dignity insist that we focus our national discussion of food on a challenge we all can agree about: transforming the factory farms that now produce 99 out every 100 farmed animals in America.

Natalie Portman (actor; check out yesterday's post, "Natalie Portman Brings Vegetarianism to Top Chef"):

Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. ... [T]he highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling. . . . Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

Dr. Andrew Weil (founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine):

[I]f you still eat meat from factories ... you have not, by definition, absorbed the reality of factory farms. If you truly understood the nightmarish brutality of what happens inside these windowless animal jails and abattoirs that dot the American ruralscape, you simply would not eat this meat. Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals.

Rabbi David Wolpe (rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles; he appeared in Foer's 2006 PETA video, "If This Is Kosher ..."):

[U]ltimately the message of the book is summed up in Foer's simple observation: "It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep." I hope he is wrong. I hope this book falls with an explosive charge on the somnolent consciences of meat-eating Americans. We know something of the agony, waste, disease and unhealthiness behind the gleaming counters. Perhaps Eating Animals will persuade us to stop pretending to be asleep.

Click here to read about Foer's recent appearance on Larry King Live. Click here to read about his "Against Meat" essay in The New York Times Magazine earlier this month.

Correction (11/2): In the first sentence of the original version of this post, I said that Eating Animals would be in stores on Tuesday. The book was released on Monday, November 2.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-david-wolpe/ieating-animalsi-jonathan_b_337578.html"

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-moral-ferocity-of-eme_b_335811.html"

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-portman/jonathan-safran-foers-iea_b_334407.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-portman/jonathan-safran-foers-iea_b_334407.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-portman/jonathan-safran-foers-iea_b_334407.html