In Case There's Any Doubt About Which 3 J-Blogs I Read Regularly ...

I hope to have a lot more new content up in the coming weeks. In the interim, here's a round-up of some good posts from other J-blogs this week.

On Monday, The Jew & The Carrot posted a picture of me in a carrot costume from Purim and linked to my July 2007 guest post about promoting vegetarianism as a carrot. (Check out my Purim post from earlier this month.)

On Monday, Jewschool featured a post asking where people can find good knishes in New York City. One person left a hilarious comment: "Why don’t you people stick with the whole wheat/tofu/wheat grass 'knishes' at your local organic health food store? Those are probably more your speed."

On Monday, The Jew & The Carrot talked about Jewish raw food and noted that parsley, pickles, and charoseth are the only three distinctly Jewish foods that are raw.

On Tuesday, The Jew & The Carrot featured a post talking about chef Anthony Bourdain's penchant for using some particularly disgusting meats and other animal products in his cooking and how some folks out there are veganizing his recipes. I particularly took issue with one of Bourdain's quotes: "To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living." Check out my comment (number 5) following the post to see why this statement is so troubling, if not downright offensive, from a Jewish perspective. The post concluded with a link to an interesting post on the Forward's Bintel Blog discussing whether it's OK for kashrut reasons to eat mock dairy products as though they were dairy products (to read my thoughts on similar subject matter from a year ago, check out my post on Counting the Omer and the fourth comment following the post).

On Wednesday, FailedMessiah noted that AgriProcessors had failed three separate USDA tests for salmonella, putting it in the worst 15% of U.S. slaughterhouses.

On Thursday, FailedMessiah reported that KAJ had indeed dropped its kosher supervision of Rubashkin meats for kashrut reasons. The post noted that "the point is clear – Rubashkin is not kosher enough for KAJ." Click here to read yesterday's follow-up post.

On Thursday, FailedMessiah talked about rising prices for kosher meat and noted a link between that and yet another controversy surrounding Rubashkin/AgriProcessors.

On Thursday, The Jew & The Carrot's Leah Koenig talked about how she'd been profiled on Midtown Lunch. "Turns out, Midtown is not the most veggie or kosher friendly place on earth," wrote Leah on The Jew & The Carrot. On Midtown Lunch, one person left a comment that's good for a chuckle: "Kosher vegetarian as the lunch’er - that’s pretty disciplined. How about a non-dairy kosher gluten-free vegan with a peanut allergy next? Now THAT would be something!"

Yesterday, The Jew & The Carrot featured a "Digest This" post mentioning that the USDA might give meat retailers approval to recall rotten meat without alerting consumers. It also included some AgriProcessors news that I mentioned in my last post.