This Purim round-up includes lots of tips and recipes to help you prepare plastic-free, vegan, healthy-ish and sustainable mishloach manot (gift baskets). There’s a range of recipes including, of course, vegan hamantaschen.
As important as giving treats to friends and family is giving matanot la’evyonim (gifts for low-income people) and I offer some resources for local groups for you to support.
Vegan Hamantaschen
For Purim, I wanted to share, again, my easy vegan hamantaschen recipe. Besides eating hamantaschen, there’s lots of other food-related activities for the holiday, including giving gift baskets (mishloach manot). I wanted to share some tips for making healthier and more sustainable mishloach manot. Click below the break to read and share the great Netiya card with tips. The other mitzvah is to support poor people. You can fulfill this great mitzvah by supporting your local food pantry or soup kitchen.
Purim sameach!
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Pomegrantate
I can’t believe I’m writing my third Rosh Hashana post on Neesh Noosh. I’m not sure what I’ll be writing for the coming year, but do expect more posts from me. I’ve been slowly working on putting things together for a cookbook, which I hope will eventually become a reality. Thank you to all of you for reading the blog and your comments and questions. Below is a round-up of Rosh Hashana recipes that you might want to include at your table. I hope you all have a wonderful Rosh Hashana celebration filled with delicious apples dipped in honey from a local farmer and a year filled with bountiful, healthful local foods. L’Shana tova!
Chanukah Sameach! I hope you enjoy 8 nights of lighting candles, munching on latkes, spinning dreidels, and more. I want to share with you some new and old Chanukah posts:
8 Easy Tips for an Environmentally Friendly Hanukkah (Haaretz)
Latkes and Chanukah for London’s Borough Market
8 Infused Olive Oils (Jewish Journal)
8 Ways to Make Your Chanukah More Sustainable
Peninsula Jewish Community Center’s Gan Tzedek (Justice Garden). Foster City, CA
Our nation is enslaved to an industrial food system that is making us sick and fat. It abuses workers (with many cases of modern day slavery), is inhumane to animals, pollutes our drinking water with manure and pesticides, and contributes to climate change. Eating is a religious act. These foods do not reflect Jewish values of humane treatment of animals, workers rights, protecting the environment and human health.
This Passover, we can liberate ourselves from this system by supporting farmers that grow food more sustainably. Below is a list of suggestions for your seder and throughout the year. There’s so much more that can be done, so please share your ideas in the comments section, at the bottom of the post. Continue reading
Vayeshev: Technicolor Stew
In Vayeshev, Jacob returns to his home to “settle.” But, there is not any internal or external settling for him. Jacob’s sons are upset by the arrogance of his favorite son, Joseph. The brothers strip Joseph of the elaborate tunic Jacob had given him and throw him into a pit. Rather than letting him die, though, Reuben convinces the other brothers instead to sell him into slavery. But, the brothers lie to their father that his beloved Joseph was killed by presenting his bloody tunic.
Why is Jacob unable to have tranquility in his life after everything he’s been through? Yanki Tauber writes, “many are content to live this lie: to forget what happened yesterday, avoid thinking about what will happen tomorrow, ignore the sadness in a neighbor’s eye, the poverty on the other side of town and the bombs in the other time zone.”
While one may look at a farm and see a tranquil, lush landscape, agriculture is anything but calm. Rather, it is the epicenter of global fights for human rights, land sovereignty and the survival of family farmers. This Wednesday, December 10, is Slow Food’s Terra Madre Day–a global celebration of local foods. The Terra Madre network in 160 countries supports food sovereignty–local communities control over the growing, production and eating of food. It is also about preserving indigenous food cultures and traditions in the face of threats from international agriculture and food homogenization that eliminates food diversity, hurts
Purple Yams. Pureland Farms. La Cienega Farmers Market, Los Angeles
small farmers and devastates communities. Part of Terra Madre’s commitment to preserving food diversity is through it’s Ark of Taste which has already 2,000 foods from around the globe that are at risk of disappearing.
It’s also Human Rights Day on December 10. While the family farmers of Terra Madre fight off threats from industrial agriculture, tens of thousands of industrial farmworkers are fighting for their human rights. The Los Angeles Times has an incredible story about farmworkers in Mexico picking tomatoes at “mega-farms” for the US market. They live in “squalid conditions, trapped for months at a time [and] camp bosses illegal withhold [of] wages.”
One worker said, The real truth is that we’re work animals for the fields.
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Neesh Noosh 