A Very Green Rosh Hashanah

Lisa Borden's Blog for Jewcology.com

On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the New Year and give thanks for the creation of our world. We dedicate time to family and friends and we reflect on our past year and celebrate the start of the new year. It's the perfect time to make new goals for the year ahead and try to do better for yourself, your family, and our world.

Shopping for the holidays
Be eco-"logical" about planning your family gatherings right from the get-go. Shopping locally for an organic Rosh Hashanah meal, apples and honey will not only help support your neighbours and community, but you will also serve kind, chemical and pesticide-free food. And don't forget, shopping tools can be as important as the food itself. What a shame it is to carry home glorious food in a toxic throwaway.

Tote the right thing
Plastic bags are a thing of the past, but if you're toting a 99 cent reusable, you could be doing more harm than good. Non-woven polypropylene reusable bags are made from the same stuff as disposable plastic bags -- petroleum (ick!) and have been found to have high levels of lead. It's time to carry on (literally!). Arm yourself with a bag that will last you all of your shopping to come. Try a fair-trade bag that is lab-tested, lead-free and is washable.

Dress your table
In Judaism, the colour white signifies transformation and purity. We strive to ensure that everything is clean, neat and sparkly and we traditionally dress our tables with a white tablecloth and white napkins. In keeping with the tradition, lose the chlorine bleach and adopt safe and responsible practices. Rosh Hashanah is a sacred holiday, so make sure your personal and shared environment is safe for your loved ones, and our planet.

Hands off!
Is it worth wearing gloves and feeling like you might pass out just to have shiny happy silver? Harmful silver polish has danger warnings about inhaling it or touching your skin. Do you want that hazard on your soup spoon? I would advise cleaning your silver with natural toothpaste or putting it in a sink with aluminum foil on the bottom -- just add warm water and salt. Same sparkly results, but fume and residue-free. Take a whiff of that!

Table toppers
When you pull out the "good stuff" for the holidays, make sure it's actually, truly good for you. I believe that napkins and tablecloths that are vinyl, backed with plastic or even cotton, treated with chemicals (you know the ones that claim they are stain-proof or wrinkle-resistant?), should absolutely be avoided. Some consider cotton to be the world's 'dirtiest' crop due to its heavy use of insecticides. Choose natural linens like organic cotton, but regardless of your choice, please make sure they are reusable.

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Spotlight On: Jonathan Neman, Sweetgreen Co-Founder

Talking to the LA native about Shabbat, sustainability, and the salad chain’s New York City debut 

By Jillian Scheinfeld for Jewcy.com 

“Sweetgreen for lunch or Sweetgreen for dinner?” This was a common question throughout my college career, and I’d say four times out of the week it would be one or the other. I’m not the only Sweetgreen freak—there are many fresh food lovers, and many of my friends, who have flocked to the D.C.-based salad establishment since it opened in 2007, seeking salads, health juices, and frozen yogurt.

New Yorkers, get excited: Sweetgreen’s first New York location opens today in the Nomad Hotel on Broadway and 28th Street.

I spoke to Jonathan Neman, who, along with Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru, founded the salad chain, which also produces the annual Sweetlife festival at Merriweather Post Pavillion in Maryland (featuring artists such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Phoenix, and The Shins). From opening their first location in Georgetown, which had no room for diners to sit and eat, to gearing up for their New York City debut, the Sweetgreen crew knows what they’re doing—and they’re clearly doing it well.

Where did you grow up and what did you study in college?
I grew up in Los Angeles, and I studied business management, entrepreneurship, and finance at Georgetown University.

How did the idea for Sweetgreen originate? Why salads?
Sweetgreen originally was something we wanted to build for ourselves. We looked around and nothing like it existed. The whole lifestyle is built off this life that we live. Could you have a meaningful productive life that’s still fun, and can you still eat healthy food and have it be delicious and affordable? So from the beginning we wanted to create a lifestyle surrounding healthy food.

Did the idea for ‘Sweetlife’ idea come before Sweetgreen?

It was Sweetgreen first in terms of thinking about salad, but it was always thinking about this idea of a greater lifestyle.

Who thought of the name?
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An Environmental Confession for the High Holidays

by Rabbi Lawrence Troster for the Huff Post

The Jewish month of Elul is the last month in the year and marks the beginning of the season of repentance that culminates with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Ten Days of Repentance, also known as the High Holidays.

The Jewish concept of repentance is called Teshuvah ("return" in English) and one of the critical aspects of repentance is the act of confession. In the High Holiday liturgy are numerous public confessions that are couched in general terms for a whole series of sins.

Jews confess primarily in public rather than in private, and in general terms rather than in specifics, because this allows everyone in the community to confess without shame or embarrassment. Public confession also binds the sins of one person to that of the whole community so that all take responsibility for one another. While Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) once wrote that we confess in specific terms only for sins between one person and another, sometimes it is worthwhile to confess publicly for other kinds of sins. If we have sinned against a particular person, we are supposed to go to them, confess and ask forgiveness. If they have died, we are supposed to go with a minyan of ten people and confess over their graves. In all our acts of repentance, we are supposed to try and undo the damage we have caused.

While the traditional list of sins is fairly comprehensive, the time has come to add a new one: the careless destruction of Creation. At a conference for Jewish environmental scholars that I once attended, I heard an environmental educator say that we can become more environmentally aware and responsive by publicly confessing our environmental sins. He then proceeded to do so. Everyone there laughed a nervous laugh of embarrassment, because we all realized, without saying a word, that we all have such sins to confess.

I, too, have committed environmental sins in my life. Here is one that would be more fitting to confess over a river in Northern Ontario (you will soon see why), but because this is the season of repentance, I do it now.

When I was sixteen, as part of my summer camp program, I went on a canoe trip in Northern Ontario and I participated in a frog massacre. I had been going to this camp in Haliburton for nine years, and now I was a CIT (counselor in training). Five of us and a "tripper" (a counselor who specialized in taking out canoe trips) set out in two canoes from the middle of Algonquin Park for a six-day trip that would take us to North Bay.

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20 Ways to grow, think about, and EAT food

From The Vermont Quarterly, University of Vermont (UVM)

 

by Joshua Brown | Megan Camp ’84 | Lee Ann Cox | Jon Reidel G’06 | Amanda Waite ’02 G’04 | Jeff Wakefield | Thomas Weaver | Dave Zuckerman ’95

The study and practice of food systems threads through academic disciplines, across political boundaries, and into the lives of every individual on the planet. As complex as these questions are, they might be boiled down to this—creating positive approaches to food for the wellbeing of the environment, farmers, and ourselves. Extension Dean Doug Lantagne ’77 directs UVM’s Transdisciplinary Research Initiative on Food Systems, a focus particularly well-suited to Vermont. On a visit to the state several years ago, author Michael Pollan, a leading voice in the food movement, was struck by the passion, expertise, and innovation he found in Vermont and at the state’s university. Read on for a glimpse of some of this work being done by UVM faculty, students, and alumni.

AGRICULTURE & AESTHETICS
A social geographer’s view
"Food systems, to me,” says Cheryl Morse, assistant professor of geography, “is not just about food choice. It’s about the landscape that provides the food.” Here in Vermont, the look of that landscape—the idyllic pastoral scene, the “sweeping view with a mountain in the background and a maple tree in the foreground”—cuts right to the soul of the state for most people. The irony, Morse says, is that classic mix of farm buildings, open land and forest was a nineteenth century creation of the state to lure back people who had fled after the Civil War, whether as tourists or to live. “They crafted a narrative about the rural ideal and the agrarian landscape of Vermont,” she says. Leave the land alone, and it wants to be trees.

According to Morse, it’s not just agriculture that’s keeping spaces open but private landowners who see scrubby boundaries creeping in and bring out the brush hog. “It makes people really sad,” she says. “It makes them think people aren’t taking care of the land. So it’s not so much an ecological perspective they’re coming from, it’s more from a cultural historical legacy.”

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