What’s In The Beef?

By Deena Shanker

Like so many kosher cooks around the country, you have probably recently wondered if there is pink slime, the ammonia-treated-meat-scrap-mixture found in most ground beef, in kosher meat. Well I have good news and I have bad news. The good news: according to the Orthodox Union, there is no pink slime in any product they have certified. The bad news? There’s almost certainly other stuff – worse stuff – in your kosher burger.

In a food animal’s life, the rules of Kashrut don’t kick in until slaughtering time. That means that until reaching the shohet’s knife, there is no difference between the cow in a Glatt Kosher OU burger and the cow in a McDonald’s Big Mac. (In fact, sometimes they are the exact same cow, as Rabbi Mandel at the OU told me – kosher meat producers routinely sell hindquarters to non-kosher processors.) A kosher label, therefore, doesn’t tell you anything about what happened to the cow while it was alive, including whether it was fed antibiotics and/or pumped with growth hormones. But even though this information is not in your kosher seal, it has strong implications for what’s in your food.

By adding antibiotics to the feed of every single animal on a factory farm, companies are able to inoculate animals living in extreme crowding and filth from infectious diseases that would otherwise wipe out entire herds. (Picture the Black Plague in Europe, only it’s e. coli on a feedlot.) Further, through the use of growth hormones, cows can reach unnaturally large sizes in very short periods of time. When you eat a burger – even a kosher one – you are ingesting those hormones and antibiotics (not to mention more highly evolved versions of the bacteria the antibiotics were meant to kill).

Unlike pink slime, which has no known negative health effects, the introduction of massive amounts of antibiotics and hormones into our food supply is extremely dangerous. Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to healthy farm animals in doses high enough to protect the animals from most infectious diseases but low enough to allow for the survival and then breeding of “superbugs.” According to the World Health Organization, we are nearing a “post-antibiotic era” in which these highly evolved microorganisms are completely resistant to our antibiotics. (Though with any luck, a recent court ruling ordering the FDA to investigate the effects of these practices may end them.) The use of hormones is no safer. After finding evidence linking hormone use to cancer, Europe banned the practice in 1989, but it is still an industry norm in the U.S. These problems are not just limited to beef: recent studies found that arsenic, anti-depressants, and painkillers are being fed to chickens.

But don’t worry. I am not about to tell you to become a vegetarian. Hazon, a Jewish organization dedicated to sustainability, has put together a great list of kosher meat producers that raise animals on natural diets without the use of antibiotics or hormones. Try it once and you’ll be hooked – not only is the meat healthier for you and more ethically and naturally-raised, it tastes better too.

Rights of Nature and an Earth Community Economy

by Osprey Orielle Lake

Many of us realize that we are at a crossroads both as a species and as a planet. On the current trajectory, our very survival and that of all future generations is at risk. Pivotal to successfully navigating this particular human-made strait of dangers is our ability to transform our relationships with each other and the ecosystems upon which our lives depend. Within this context, it is paramount that we swiftly transform our legal and economic structures and institutions to better align with the natural laws of our Earth and the deeper core values shared by humanity.

Rights of Nature

I want to address Rights of Nature in the context of some wise words from one of our great foremothers and seminal environmentalists in the United States, Rachel Carson: “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

Today, as we stand at the precipice of the destruction of all life as we know it, this question of what we call “civilized” truly tears open the reality of our startling and dangerous circumstance.

We know we can no longer live as we have been and clearly, our worldviews, laws, economic structures, and governance systems must change.

I believe one of the most critical areas of work that we can focus on is Earth law. The idea of Rights of Nature or Rights of Mother Earth can address our dire need to truly become “civilized” in the highest sense of this word—meaning to live civilly with each other and our Earth, respecting both natural laws and the Earth’s ecosystems.

Around the world, and in almost all non-indigenous systems of law, nature and ecosystems are treated as property. Our life-giving rivers, forests, and mountains are treated as property to be sold and consumed, often protected under commerce laws. As property, these natural communities and ecosystems are not recognized as rights-holders. In our legal systems, because nature is property, it is invisible to courts.

Beyond the legal frameworks, this nonrecognition of the inherent rights of nature has dangerously contributed to distancing us culturally and personally from our living planet. I think we should consider this old, property-based legal system as highly uncivilized.

That said, what is very encouraging right now and brings promise is that for the past three decades, environmental lawyers and visionary thinkers around the globe have been developing a new theory of jurisprudence to change that system.

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The Grinch Who Tried to Steal Lag B’Omer

 When a mayor tried to put an end to traditional Lag B'Omer bonfires out of environmental concerns, a community rose up in protest. With a potential war on the horizon, why not let the kids enjoy their toasted marshmallows now?

There’s nothing Israeli kids love more than Lag B’Omer. For weeks beforehand, they roll stolen grocery shopping carts around town with their friends, collecting every scrap of wood in sight for the class bonfire. As a kid in America, where Lag B’Omer - one of the most minor and forgettable of all Jewish holidays - is often overlooked - massive bonfires were not part of my childhood. But as a parent in Israel, I have spent countless nights watching my ash-encrusted kids run in circles around the campfire, thrusting sticks into the flames, enjoying the forbidden thrill of playing with fire, poking the flames to see if their foil-wrapped potatoes are fully cooked and spearing sticks with rows of marshmallows to be roasted. No one is quite sure what they are commemorating. The death of an ancient rabbi? The Bar-Kochva revolt? Nobody cares. It’s an excuse to steal, play with fire, get dirty, stay out ridiculously late and then miss a day of school - all socially sanctioned. What’s not to love?

Clearly, I’m no big fan of the ritual, but most Israeli adults harbor nostalgic affection for the annual bonfire, remembering the camaraderie and romance of the bonfires of their childhood and adolescence. (Unless they suffer from asthma or breathing problems, in which case they miserably barricade themselves indoors, windows sealed tight against the massive amount of smoke in the air.)

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Eco-Kashrut: Environmental Standards for What and How We Eat

It reads, to modern eyes, like a cookbook. The Torah portion of Shemini begins by telling us to bring beef, mutton, and pancakes to the sacred altar at the transcendent moment of its dedication. It ends by making sure that on any ordinary day we do not eat whales, hawks, camels, or shrimp. For even in our ordinary lives, some foods are sacred.

And between these two celebrations of the sacredness of food, we witness the deaths of those who brought "strange fire" to the Holy One.

How did biblical Jews get in touch with God? By eating and choosing what to eat. Not by murmuring prayer; when Hannah did that (I Samuel 1:13), the priest Eli though she was drunk.

Why by eating? Because in the deepest origins of Jewish life, the most sacred relationship was the relationship with the earth. For shepherds, farmers, orchard-keepers, food was the nexus between adamah, the earth, and its closest relative, adam, the human. So ancient Jews got in touch with God by bringing food to the Temple. With our bodies we affirmed, "This food comes from a Unity of which we also are a part: from earth, rain, sun, seed, and our own work. It came from the Unity of Life; so we give back some of it to that great Unity."

In our most mundane moments, we affirmed through the rules of kashrut that what and how we ate was holy. And in our wildest poetic fantasies of the history of humankind, we thought that what went wrong was somehow wrongly eating--a mistake that brought upon us an earth that would bring forth only thorns and thistles for us to eat, as we toiled with the sweat pouring down our noses.

When the moment came for us to turn history around, we learned to rest. We learned Shabbat. Not from the thunderclap of Sinai, but from eating--from the manna--that sweet and flowing breast-milk of El Shaddai, the God of Breasts, All-Nourishing. From the manna, we learned that together with the earth, we rest. And rest was then extended from the seventh day to the seventh year, when the earth was entitled to rest and the human community that worked the earth was obligated to rest as well.

Today, most of us have shrugged away the bringing-near of sacred food, the sacred choice of foods we do not eat, the sacred pausing so that one-seventh of the time we do not grow our foods. We think that resting is a waste of time that could be used to make, invent, produce, do.

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Jewish Energy Advocacy from COEJL

 From hydraulic fracturing to tar sands, a rift has been forming between those seeking energy independence and those seeking to protect the environment. But at the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, the mandate to protect the environment while simultaneously fostering energy independence has been the bedrock of our work. As global energy demand continues to rise and new technologies are developed for extracting fossil fuels, the task of supporting both energy independence and the environment becomes increasingly challenging and complex.

COEJL finds the balance by focusing on energy security — sustainable energy production that is sound both politically and environmentally. Mirroring the tension in the rest of the nation, the Jewish community is challenged in terms of how to approach energy security largely because of a desire to reduce our use of fossil fuels while increasing energy independence.

Hydraulic fracturing, also known as hydrofracking or simply fracking, is a relatively new way of drilling for natural gas by blasting water, sand and chemicals at high pressures into shale rock. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a threat to our clean water supply or a way to supplant coal with relatively cleaner burning natural gas.

Supporting the extraction and transport of Canada’s vast supply of tar sands — oil saturated in the earth like water in a sponge — also poses the promise of lessening reliance on oil from regimes hostile to both the United States and Israel. Yet supporting the tar sands by building a transcontinental pipeline to carry it from Alberta across America would increase our reliance on oil. Tar sands oil is a dirtier fuel than even standard crude oil and would require more energy to extract and transport than other fossil fuels. All of this would further increase greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

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