I love food. So what?

As a Jew raised vegetarian, with a sprinkling of Italian heritage, I learned life through food.  The kitchen has always been my comfort zone.  For my sisters and I, food was never something that appeared out of nowhere ready to eat.  We were our parents’ kitchen staff- garden assistants and prep cooks- peeling whole heads of garlic, picking green beans, serving soup, stirring the polenta, slicing the pickles for the requisite first course of the epic feasts for Shabbat and every one of the dozens of annual Jewish holidays for which the framework is primarily “they tried to kill us, they didn’t… lets eat!”

I am not a fancy chef. However,I have a passionate relationship with food- a deep reverence for the processes and people that make it happen.  (My partner laughs at me because I am often deeply moved by a recipe or a description of a meal and I can get the chills while reading an article about a chef). I was so emotional this summer when I harvested baskets of tomatoes that I grew from seed for the first time that I had to laugh at myself.

Although I have no professional cooking training, I do have to say that my forced conscription into the Sabbath feast preparations every single week until I left home, instilled in me a useful solid understanding of how to host- how to bring people together with artfully prepared delicious food, how to ritualize a meal, how to set a table with seasonal, conceptual unity between garden flower arrangements and colorful dishware, how to serve and clean up after large numbers of (often demanding) people.

Brooklyn Shabbat dinner during a parental visit

My brain tends to work like a switchboard. In this way I am an apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree; being the daughter of a rabbi and an artist-educator, I grew up directly witnessing my parents’ community organizing skills in action.  I think I just absorbed the understanding that what one does in life is build things- relationships, projects, communities, spaces. In a society where people do not often learn how to effectively communicate, get organized, solve their own problems, express love, connect with others…I was taught that those were the most important parts of being alive. And for me, food is a central part of that- a simultaneously creative and mundane act, an opportunity for gathering and for individual expression and experience.  Cooking is a collaboration with nature- it’s about drawing out the essence of the ingredients you’re working with, capturing them at the right moment, combining ingredients thoughtfully, understanding their needs, powers, and particularities, paying close attention, being humble yet confident, balancing age-old wisdom with innovation and discovery…just like effective cooperation amongst people.

There was a period of time during which I was in graduate school, helping produce the film Slingshot Hip Hop, running an after-school program, coordinating a collective of activists & artists doing workshops internationally about the struggle for self-determination in Palestine. I was so busy and so exhausted (while also, for the record, feeling excited and inspired) that the only time I ever felt ok stepping away from working was when I was cooking for the crew. I was never able to justify reading  a book or watching a film- I couldn’t escape the never-ending to-do list running through my mind. But cooking was a creative act and a form of decompression that I didnt feel guilty about because it was necessary in order to live.  I was able to relax into it. To this day, even though I’ve managed to balance out my schedule a bit more, one of the only times I feel completely present and never doubt my choice of place and activity is when Im cooking.

Birthday Brunch Tacos for Olivia- our New Years baby

Along with my gratitude for my food-loving family and the wisdom it has provided me with, I have questions at times about the potential lack of healthy balance in my family’s relationship to food and drink.  Sometimes it seems that we could benefit physically and energetically from letting go and taking a more casual approach every once in a while.  There is a fine line, as it turns out, between intentionality and obsession. Boundaries and balance in terms of food and alcohol can be tricky for us as individuals and collectively. There are times when we need to challenge ourselves to focus on other elements of culture, other ways of being together.

I am trying to learn how to let go sometimes- knowing that my culinary ideas and organizational skills are valuable during my crew’s myriad celebrations but that even benign bossiness ain’t cute for too long Plus I want to be able to enjoy receiving as much as giving and to trust others to make things happen and teach me things.

Cava & Oysters feast in honor of our dear Giovanna’s birthday

I am currently in a period of transition in my life. I am considering shifting away from the community education work I’ve been doing within the Jewish community for a decade.  Although I have always bounced between worlds and woven together interests and communities, I am committing now to focusing in on culinary art/culture/community. BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!! In the current context, in which white 20 & 30-something-year-olds throughout urban centers of the U.S. are r(e)discovering food like Columbus discovered America, what is useful? What is necessary? It is not enough for me to say food makes me happy. I try not to consider my life choices in a void, ignoring the big picture of the country and world I live within.  Happiness is of course a goal (and one we all need to embrace more) but also purposefulness. While brooding over this recently, I found Patti Smith‘s questions in Just Kids resonant. She was speaking of art, I am thinking of the world of food:

“Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.”

“Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.”

As someone exploring possibilities of jumping more fully into the word of making and serving food and the culture that surrounds it, I too should certainly feel concerned about not just participating in the gluttony that Patti Smith refers to. Otherwise I am just aligning myself with the wealthiest people on the planet- those with the resources and time to indulge in such things while the rest of the population is being pushed off their farmlands, picking fruit covered in poison, losing their olive trees to bulldozers, struggling to hold on to their food traditions, grocery shopping at Walmart, being served processed animal garbage in their schools….

Patti Smith created her boundary-crossing collaborative poetry-music-art as a heartfelt rebellion against the social and economic systems the music of her day was being shaped  by.  Her words, although originally written about rock n roll, provide us with perfect metaphors as we reflect on the “new food movement” we are a part of, wary of, reliant upon, and hopefully making an intervention into:

“We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.”

So where to from here?

No blood money in our food please

We believe that linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to our communities and the planet is a key element of the world we want to help build.

City Harvest collects excess food from all segments of the food industry, including restaurants, grocers, corporate cafeterias, manufacturers, and farms. This food is then delivered free of charge to community food programs throughout New York City using a fleet of trucks and bikes. City Harvest also addresses hunger’s underlying causes by supporting affordable access to nutritious food in low-income communities, education for prevention of diet-related diseases, and channeling a greater amount of local farm food into high-need areas. This is important work and deserves the high level of visibility and support it receives from major chefs, celebrities, and city officials.

The problem is, that one of the big names that is now associated with City Harvest is directly responsible for undermining food sustainable food systems, creating poverty, and destabilizing communities from Palestine to Namibia to Brooklyn. Lev Leviev is a villain out of a Disney movie- it is that black and white. He makes money through exploitation and destruction. And now he is claiming to be a big supporter of City Harvest.

As we continuously articulate, The Big Ceci is committed to the goodness of food on multiples levels- the systems of agriculture, labor, health, and community-building that are involved in the making, serving, and enjoying of food.  We all want there to be more equality in who gets to grow and eat what…right?

Well…Leviev is a billionaire who is directly involved in increasing food insecurity and poverty of Palestinian families by developing Israeli settlements on expropriated Palestinian farmland.

Palestinian olive trees uprooted to make way for Israeli settlement construction, sponsored by Leviev’s company.

And Leviev’s diamond companies are also involved in brutal human rights abuses, unethical business practices and impoverishing communities in Angola and Namibia and possibly now Zimbabwe as well. He has also in the past been involved in shady business in Brooklyn connected to new construction gone terribly wrong.

Unfortunately, City Harvest is now linked to Leviev’s abysmal human rights record through a number of media reports over a two year period, saying that Leviev is hosting fundraisers and donating money to City Harvest. Leviev Diamonds publicly stated its plans to support City Harvest with a portion of its November sales and there has been some buzz about hosting diamond-adorned benefits as well.

Local activists from Adalah-NY have been tracking Leviev’s actions since they first heard his plans to open a jewelry/diamond store in New York in 2007, holding pickets outside his store starting from its opening night. Since then, public pressure (yes, including letter writing campaigns!) and the careful research has compelled a wide variety of groups to officially sever ties with Leviev including UNICEF, Oxfam America, and CARE. In the case of Oxfam America, Leviev was promoting himself as an Oxfam supporter without their knowledge, and they were grateful to be tipped off by true supporters, quick to publicly state that they were disturbed to discover that they had unknowingly been a part of the “deliberate strategy of Leviev Diamonds to connect itself with unwitting charities.” Could it be that Leviev is trying to re-bolster his reputation as a philanthropist by associating with City Harvest now?

SO….it’s painfully clear that City Harvest needs to immediately disconnect itself from Leviev and his settlement funding and diamond dealing so that our food systems here are not relying on the exploitation and oppression of people in Africa and the Middle East, and so that destructive forces like Leviev can’t whitewash their dirty business by claiming to be philanthropists. Two letters have already been sent to City Harvest by Adalah-NY, Grassroots International, Brooklyn For Peace, Jews Say No!, and Park Slope Food Coop Members for BDS. But it seems like City Harvest needs to hear that others are concerned as well.

Can you write personal letters? Can you get the restaurant owners/chefs/food writers you know to use their good names to help make sure that good food in New York City isn’t linked with companies that cause major harm to other communities?

Often we feel impossibly bound up in a cruel and destructive system…so concrete opportunities like this to resist it are precious and important.  City Harvest does not need Lev Leviev’s support. This is a simple and direct way for all of us who care about food justice and ending poverty to act in a manner consistent with our values, and to ask our local organizations to be consistent with comprehensive food justice values too. Sometimes it is impossible or difficult to avoid supporting corporations profiting off of the earth’s resources while destroying communities but this is not one of those times! City Harvest and the rest of NYC can indeed avoid Lev Leviev and his blood drenched money, and doing so will make our efforts that much stronger and righteous.

demonstration in the Palestinian village of Jayyous

Palestinians are involved in daily struggle to resist the continuing colonization of their land, but the obstacles they face are that much bigger when the colonization is bankrolled and supported by companies abroad…so it’s on us to push back on these companies (like Leviev) in New York whenever we can!

You can read more about Leviev, diamonds, and settlement building here, and sign a letter to be sent to City Harvest through the Adalah-NY website.

Food Worker Justice is Food Justice!

Knowing as we do that any true vision of food justice must include justice for food workers, we’ve got two important links for you today on The Big Ceci.

1. We want to send our congratulations to the workers at the Upper East Side Hot and Crusty, who finally won their battle with the boss after being fired and locked out of their store for organizing their own independent union, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association. We’re filled with admiration for their courage in the face of tremendous threat, and we send them love and solidarity!

2. In other food worker news: the boycott of grocery store Golden Farm in Kensington, Brooklyn is entering its fourth week. The store spent more than ten years paying employees less than minimum wage and no overtime while they worked 70+ hour weeks (they were earning under $5/hour). Today, a year and a half after filing a lawsuit demanding the back pay they are owed, workers still haven’t seen a dime. They’ve called for a community boycott of the store to put pressure on owner Sonny Kim. We want to voice our solidarity with the workers of Golden Farm, and alert you, fabulous readers, to some ways you can support them.

WHAT YOU CAN DO [modified from the boycott's campaign page on 99 Pickets]

• Pledge your support for the boycott.
• Call Sonny Kim, the owner of Golden Farm, at (718) 871-1009, and tell him you support the workers and the boycott.
• Sign the petition demanding Sonny Kim pay workers their back wages and sign a fair contract.
• Donate to support the family of Felix Trinidad (a Golden Farm worker who worked throughout his battle with stomach cancer – afraid to lose his job if he took time off to go to the doctor – and passed away in July 2012).
• Follow the boycott on Twitter at @BoycottGF.
• Finally, and perhaps most urgently: visit the picket line! This is a beautiful time of year to be outside, after all, and what better way to do it than showing your support for worker justice. Spend an hour or two gathering signatures and talking to local folks about the importance of basic benefits and fair wages for all workers. A little goes a long way – sign up for a shift here.

We’ll leave you with an awesome cartoon (yay for multimedia information sharing!) by badass cartoonist Ethan Heitner, sharing the story of the Golden Farm boycott:

CULTIVATE: Connecting Community through Meals and Media

Last Wednesday night on one of the hottest days thus far this summer, I took a steamy, crowded subway ride from work in SoHo to South Brooklyn for an evening presented and co-organized by The Big Ceci and SIGNIFIED featuring Just Food, the Brooklyn Food Coalition, and the 718 Collective. The event, held in the basement of the Church of Gethsemane on a tree lined street in Park Slope, was a dinner by the 718 Collective, followed by the premier of SIGNIFIED’s second season episode featuring the 718 collective, an interactive presentation with Just Food and the Brooklyn Food Coalition, and a community recipe exchange.

As a recent resident of Brooklyn (I moved here just a little under two years ago from Boston via Mexico City), the idea of cultivating community in a city as varied and expansive as New York can sometimes seem like a daunting task. I have tried to foster relationships with people who share common interests, and have worked to become invested in certain elements of my local community. For example I joined a social-justice focused CSA and take an active role in working towards making the CSA accessible to lower-income families. And I am pleased to find that through my efforts I have been able to feel that I not only live in Brooklyn, but that I have found a space to give back and invest in my community.

The feeling of having a distinct community where I have laid down my roots has always been an important element in finding happiness in my daily life. Finding that community here in Brooklyn has been difficult, but ultimately very rewarding. While I do feel secure and rewarded by the space I have made for myself here, I am aware of the general demographic of those with whom I spend the majority of my time. While I actively try to be open to meeting new people and work to interact with those from different backgrounds, it can be easy to slip into a space of 20-something artists, writers, and activists who live in Brooklyn, ride their bikes, brew kombucha, volunteer for various causes, and care to know who grows their food. While my friends and neighbors are rich in creativity, experience, and understanding, rarely do I feel that I truly step into the shoes of those with very different lifestyles from my own. But cultivating a varied community just to feel that I have a diversified friend group can also be problematic. So how does one truly work to connect with a community different from their own, without it feeling strained or disconnected?

During the CULTIVATE dinner I had a great conversation explaining quinoa and kale to the man sitting to my left who had never seen the foods before, and who, in turn, regaled me with tales of his fledging rap career. After a screening of SIGNIFIED’s episode, everyone at the event joined together for an exercise by the Brooklyn Food Coalition about the school food program.  The children of Brooklyn are a community that surrounds me, but with whom I rarely interact. While I live across the street from a public school, I rarely find myself in conversation with anyone under the age of 18 for longer than a few sentences.

The exercise entailed a woman from the BFC who would give out a word or fact that everyone in the room was then asked to free-associate and to write down the first word that came to mind. We then walked around showing off our answers and briefly talking to each other about the phrases that we were inspired to put down. Terms like “school food” brought out negative association words like “yuck,” “fatty,” “heavy,” and  “too expensive.” The fact ”The NYC public school system buys the second largest amount of food in the United States, after the U.S. Military” brought out thoughts like “capitalism,”  “schools, prisons, military,” and “buying power.” It was unfortunate that many of the associations she threw out  with school food terms were negative and depressing. When the fact was read— “One parent working in the school food system has the opportunity to affect hundreds of children,” more positive words began cropping up — “possibility,” “opportunity,” and “stand up.” Because children are a community that, by and large, do not have the ability to stand up and advocate for themselves, it is up to those who are older to support, educate, and advocate. So while there can be negative associations related to advocating for communities that may seem disparate from our own, and while I do not yet have children of my own, it is up to us who have have a voice and an understanding of the injustices of our food system to take a stand for them.

While the community of children in Brooklyn may seem far away from my daily life, in reality, they are just down the block. They are a part of my community and as a fortunate child who benefited from healthy school lunches in Oregon, and from the tireless work of my mother, it is my job to help cultivate positive associations with the school food system for this new community of mine.

See more photos from the event here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nora_chovanec/sets/72157630259177140/detail/

Presenting CULTIVATE: Connecting Communities Through Meals and Media.

Hey people – Naomi here, and I’m writing with some exciting news. It’s been a little over a year since we started The Big Ceci, hoping to create a space on the blogosphere where we could bring together our love for food and our commitment to justice. It’s been a beautiful year, and I’ve been excited and inspired by how many people have contributed to this blog – it’s truly been a community effort.

So, yes, blogging has been good to us, and we look forward to continuing in our second year and beyond. But the one thing you can’t do on a food blog is…you guessed it, folks – EAT!

That’s why this week, The Big Ceci is making moves – stepping out of the Internet and into the neighborhood – to present our first-ever event: a dinner-discussion-screening-salon-experience called CULTIVATE: connecting communities through meals and media.

Get ready, y’all…because this is gonna be a fun one.

CULTIVATE is a collaboration with the fabulous queer documentary project SIGNIFIED (please do the Internet equivalent of running-not-walking to their website if you haven’t already seen it…you need to). During this interactive evening of food and media, we’ll eat a delicious meal prepared by the talented chefs of 718 Collective, discuss food justice work in Brooklyn with Just Food and The Brooklyn Food Coalition, swap stories and recipes across the table, and get to see the premiere of the latest SIGNIFIED episode.

If you’re not catching my drift, people, let me put it to you this way: if you care in any way about alternative media, food justice, Brooklyn, hot queer chefs, or just really delicious food, you will want to find a way to get your butt to our table on Wednesday, June 20.

Space is limited, so we strongly encourage you to buy tickets in advance here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/252443

And of course, for more info, check out the Facebook event here and the Tumblr here.

We’ll see you at the table!

Manouche Impossible

“And so it had taken me all of sixty years to understand that water is the finest drink, and bread the most delicious food, and that art is worthless unless it plants a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.”

- from “Twigs” by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali

I spent my birthday weekend this past March visiting the town Cosoleacaque in Veracruz, Mexico.  Friends of mine were living in a house there along with several musicians.  The town is known for being the birthplace of Son Jarocho music, a folkloric music played on mandolin-size guitars called Jaranas.  The players of the Jarana are called Jaraneros and my friends, along with their housemates, were all Jaraneros.

Within the first 12 hours of my arrival I had to redefine my idea of “bare necessities”.  There was no running water and I had to fill a bucket from the well outside the house, and that bucket had to suffice.  When I finished taking my birdbath I asked for a towel and I was handed a pretty, bright turquoise bandana. When I asked for coffee, that same bandana was pulled off the clothesline and used as a coffee filter.  Then it was washed again and used as (drum roll) a bandana!  So you get the idea what we are working with here.

On the second day we decided to go to the beach.  We were going to get up early the next day (my birthday) and drive to a remote beach, stopping at some majestic waterfalls that were on the way. Along the way we would pick up another Jaranero, one that makes his own guitars, and proceed to the falls.  My friend Ximena suggested that it would be delightful to have home-made manouche to eat at our stop at the waterfalls.  Manouche is a type of Lebanese pizza that I had mentioned in a previous post in The Big Ceci.  It is basically a pizza with the zaatar spice and whatever else you want to add to it.

Now this is tricky business as it is hard enough to get it together to make the manouche at home, let alone in an unequipped kitchen with so many unknowns.  I always tell people that I am a chemist and not a cook and that is particularly true when it comes to baked goods.  The oven in the house was not working so that meant that we would have to make the dough and fixings the night before and then stop at one of the Jaraneros’ houses on the way out.  So we set to working on the dough and one of the musicians asked me to teach him how to make the dough as he had aspirations to become a baker.  So I did a batch and taught him how to do one.  Since there were no measuring utensils, it was all a wild guess and I had no idea what the batches will look like when they rise (if they rise at all).  You usually have to let the dough rise for an hour and half but in this case we had to let them sit overnight.

The next morning I saw that the dough did rise properly (and optimally).  We set out to our first stop, to cook the manouche.  The kitchen there was tiny with barely any utensils. The oven was small and narrow, looking more like something belonging to a playhouse.  We quartered the batches of dough, letting them rise and then washed a bottle of wine and set about rolling out the dough into pizzas.  In the meantime, my friend Anna made desert for the picnic, lemon bars in a Pyrex dish.

Guitar maker that we picked up on the way to the waterfall.

We put the Pyrex dish on the bottom rack of the oven, and the first batch of pizzas on the top rack.  We checked 10 minutes later and saw that nothing was heating up much.  So our host turned up the oven full blast.  Ten minutes later there was a constant flow of white smoke seeping from the back of the oven.  Our host inspected it, waved her hand at the smoke and let things be, the room was well ventilated.  We finished baking our first batch batch of Manouche and put in the second.  A few minutes later the Pyrex dish that contained our dessert, turned out not to be “Pyrex” (thought labeled so) and it exploded.  The oven was opened; the lump of lemon bar and fractured glass was removed from the oven and set on the oven door to salvage some of the dessert from the wreckage.  The manouche was unharmed by the explosion and I continued to place batch after batch, some with zaatar and cheese and some with cheese.  After removing the manouche we added fresh mint and tomatoes and stacked the manouches on top of each other and wrapped them up in tin foil.

When we got to the waterfall there was no one else there.  There were three different falls pouring into a simmering lagoon.  We sat around on the rocks and the jaraneros pulled out their Jaranas and began to strum while we set about preparing the food.  When Anna reached into the bag to pull out the wrapped maouches she looked up and beamed at me.  “They’re still hot!”

Still life with Jarana Player and Manouche

The basic dough recipe that I used is one from Cooksillustrated.com which makes for good grilling pizza.  This is great for barbeques, especially when you have a vegetable garden and are able to pick fresh spearmint and tomatoes and plop them on the pizza.  Just make sure that you mix the tomatoes with salt and let them drain so you don’t get a soggy pizza.

Here is the dough recipe:

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup water (8 ounces), room temperature

2 cups bread flour (11 ounces), plus more for work surface

1 tablespoon whole wheat flour (optional)

2 teaspoons sugar

1 ¼ teaspoons table salt

1 teaspoon instant yeast

A Hummus without People for a People without Hummus

In the fall, I wrote a post about why I support boycotting Israeli goods at the Park Slope Food Coop. Since then, I’ve read many articles about the campaign. Including this one, which refers to the shared passion within the Park Slope Food Coop and the state of Israel, for “hummus and couscous.”  And a blog post in which the author opposes boycott, demanding “more hummus, please” – exhibiting an interest in expanding the cuisine they can consume, and no concern for who it’s being taken from.

This casual reference to such historic and common Arab foods, without acknowledging them as such, relates to a much larger process that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time- unabashed Israeli and Jewish-American appropriation of Arab foods.

This can also be seen within the description of a class that took place at the Coop last night about Jewish foods from around the world, in which the (unacknowledged) politically charged inclusion of hummus, falafel, and tabbouleh is par for the course in these kinds of multicultural Jewish food programs.  I wrote the chef inviting her to consider the bigger context her class will be taking place in and hoping she will be open to making the connections between good food and good politics:

I am writing to reach out from one social justice conscious cook to another. We know that food is inherently cultural, inherently political. As people who have studied and immersed ourselves in the amazingly rich and diverse range of cuisines developed by Jews living in different parts of the world, we can actually use hummus as an important opportunity to open up dialogue about how Jews live amongst and are influenced by other cultures…that there are foods and lands (i.e. Israel/Palestine) that do not belong exclusively to us, and we can give respect to Arab cultural contributions to the world.

She didn’t respond.

This issue goes way back, of course- before Chickpea, Mimi’s Hummus, or The Hummus Place all popped up in NYC…

A large part of the creation of a Jewish state was the rejection of the “weak” culture of Jews living in exile and the attempt to create a native Israeli culture, a culture that was not European. This project has involved the expropriation of many aspects of Palestinian culture as well as Mizrahi (Arab Jewish) cultures. Traditional Middle Eastern foods like falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, and cucumber-tomato salad have been appropriated and presented as typically Israeli foods, with no acknowledgement of the origins of these foods.(much like the state itself and the treatment of the towns and buildings Israelis now reside in).

Student Exhibit at University of Maryland Global Communities

The fascination that the early Jewish settlers in Palestine had with the native Arab population’s agriculture, clothing, and food is apparent in the literary and artistic representations of these Zionist settlers- wearing kuffiyehs, eating olives and Arabic bread- associating themselves with agricultural work and Mediterranean ways of life far from the shtetl back in Europe.

Yael Raviv has analyzed how the falafel became a perfect icon of Israeli national culture because it came to represent a proud, ethnically mixed society rooted in that area of the world. Claiming a traditional and common food of the Middle East was a part of claiming the historic connection and ownership of that land that Israel asserts for itself.  

Political scientist Ahmad Sa’di nails this process for what it is. He observes how the local herbs Palestinians use for cooking and healing, such as Za’atar, have “become a part of an Israeli ‘nativist’ approach…Palestinian culture has thus become a pool from which Israelis pick and choose in order to build an ‘authentic’ Israeli culture.”

In thinking about this piece, I solicited the opinion of my dear friend and fellow Big Ceci contributor, Zein El-Amine, who was born and raised in Lebanon.  I wanted to hear what he has to say as someone whose culture is being breached by this culinary cooptation.

Here is what Zein shared with me:

Many years ago I noticed an increase of the acquisition of unquestionably Arab foods by Israelis and American Zionists.  I noticed this in restaurants where foods such as Fattoush and tabbouleh, distinctly Arab salads, were being referred to as Israeli Salads. In the same period a comedic short film was released mocking the falafel wars between Israelis and Palestinians.  American liberals thought it was funny how something as “silly” as Falafel would be a point of contention. This is consistent with the liberal “balanced” view that gives equates the morality of the cultural domination of an occupier with that of the Arab resistance to the acquisition of its culture.

In the case of Hummus, a food with a long, well documented history of being part of Arab culture, Zionists have not even bothered to change its Arab name to claim as their own.  The word Hummus means chickpeas in Arabic. The actual name for Hummus in most Arab countries is Hummus Bi Tahini which means chickpeas with tahini, to distinguish it from plain chickpeas (note to the colonizers: tahini comes from the Arabic word Tahana, “that which is ground,” because it is made from ground sesame seed.)

Israel has gone to great lengths to claim hummus, at one point breaking the world record for the biggest batch of hummus.  The Lebanese were disgusted at this brazen incursion on Arab culture and answered by breaking the Israeli record and in turn breaking record batches for several Arab and Lebanese dishes that were being claimed by Israel.

To any Arab and any person of conscience, this attempt to occupy Arab food is the same as the occupation of land and displacement of people. Just as there was the Zionist claim that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land,” Israel is trying to now claim a food without people for a people without food.  I do not say this to denigrate the rich Jewish culture that can be tapped to establish an identity, on the contrary, the question becomes: if you have such a rich culture then why are you taking such desperate measures to claim foreign foods (Palestinian in this case) as your own?  And the answer is quite simply that the folks who are engaged in such a project know that in order to complete the colonial project of ethnic cleansing, you need to dilute the identity of the people that you are displacing.

Hooked on Aquaponics

Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish these days and he may get mercury poisoning. Teach a man to do aquaponics and he will eat fresh fish and veggies for a damn long time!

I’ve been working on an urban agriculture project in Cincinnati over the past year with three friends. The big idea: to grow fish and vegetables, together. The fish poop provides the nutrients for the plants and the plants filter the water for the fish. It’s a closed loop system, so the water is recirculated over and over again. Welcome to the wonderful world of aquaponics! I’ll walk you through our basic system design.

Our tour starts in the corner of a garage that some generous friends allowed us to use for our fish tank. It was an old dome-lidded water tank that farmers use to haul water out to the pasture. We cut the lid off, patched the leaky spots, and voila! A 600-gallon home for our 300 tilapia. Isn’t that amazing? Tilapia can be grown at about 1/2 pound per gallon of water. Most of them will grow to a pound or so, meaning one fish for every two gallons.

Matt and the 600-gallon tank with biofilter barrel perched (pun intended) above.

Blue tilapia after two months of growth.

From the tank, the water flows out through a pipe, through the back wall of the garage, and into a greenhouse that we built in the back yard. The pipe distributes the water into three vegetable beds. These are basically wood frames that we lined with rubber so that they would hold water. On top of the water-filled beds are sheets of styrofoam insulation that are gridded with holes for our veggies. The vegetables are held in little slotted cups that allow their roots free access to the nutrient-rich water below. Because we aerate the water for our fish, the plant roots are able to thrive in this underwater environment without rotting. In the coming months, we hope to include freshwater prawns beneath the veggies. These creatures like similar water temperatures as tilapia and will act as muck-cleaners for the system, eating algae off the plant roots (which will improve their nutrient uptake) and cleaning up any fish gunk that gets into the growing beds.

Greenhouse with 3 planting beds. Distribution pipe from garage against the far wall.

In the foreground of the above picture, there’s a small experimental wetland that occupies a third of one of our beds. This wetland is multifunctional. It gives us an area to experiment with growing plants in gravel instead of floating rafts. It acts as a supplemental filter because it is full of plants that will remain in place. It looks beautiful. And it allows us to experiment with different crops. In this small 3×5 foot area, we have a papaya tree, passion fruit, irises, canna lilies, turmeric, strawberries, gotu kola, lemongrass, taro root, horsetail, oregano, duckweed, watercress, mint, chives, peace lilies, papyrus, cattails, water hyacinth, water lettuce, water celery, sweet potato, nasturtium, basil and philodendron! Matt and I actually ate the first ripe strawberry three days ago, on the 20th of January!

Mmmm. Strawberries!

After the water passes through the vegetable beds, it collects in a 55-gallon drum and is pumped back into the garage. It passes through a simple filtration system, where bacteria turn the ammonia into nitrates, before landing back in the tank.

So that’s the basic tour. Not so complicated. It’s a really fresh experiment for us and we’ve got a lot of learning to do, but we’re excited about the possibilities of using aquaponic systems to grow healthy food in the urban environment. The beauty is that you don’t have to have soil to make these systems go. You can do it on a contaminated site. You can use old buildings. Abandoned urban industrial sites could be brought back from the brink of decay and turned into lush oases of year-round food production, creating jobs and making healthy foods available to neighborhoods that typically don’t have that “luxury.”

Aquaponics can also be put to tremendous use in other parts of the world, where resources are limited and sunshine is bountiful. From deserts to more lush environments, aquaponics systems can be much more efficient in the tropical and sub-tropical latitudes because there is no need to heat the water. There are possibilities for northern climates with coldwater fish as well, but these fish tend to be less resilient than the tilapia and using cold water is likely to make for a less productive system in general.

Imagine an agricultural renaissance in our urban areas and other typically marginal agricultural lands, our communities bursting to life with elegant food-producing ecosystems on properties that had been left for a slow deterioration! We’ll keep working on things from our end and with any luck, the next aquaponics blog post will be on herb-crusted tilapia filets with boiled taro root and passion fruit marmalade!

FDA Bails on Animal Antibiotics Hearings

(Article originally posted on Tablespooning.com, by Sowjanya Kudva)

On December 22, 2011 the Food and Drug Administration announced in the Federal Register that they were “withdrawing two 1977 notices of opportunity for a hearing (NOOH), which proposed to withdraw certain approved uses of penicillin and tetracyclines intended for use in feeds for food-producing animals.” So what does this mean?

To fully understand the implications of this withdrawal, one must first look at the intricacies of the FDA’s relationship with antibiotics. Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug, recently published a fantastic timeline in Wired Magazine that revealed all the pertinent milestones of this relationship, which you can read at the bottom of this post.

In the 1950′s the FDA approved the use of antibiotics in feed for livestock. Over the years, researchers around the world have linked the emergence of “superbugs” or antibiotic-resistant bacteria with the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. The superbug Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococus Aureus (MRSA) “kills something close to 20,000 Americans every year — more than AIDS.” In 1977, the FDA acknowledged evidence connecting drug use and antibiotic resistant bacteria, by issuing “notices of opportunity for a hearing” (NOOH) that would recall the use of penicillian and tetracyclines in animal feed. However, in 35 years, nothing’s happened. Antibiotics use is at an all time high and, now, the FDA has withdrawn its own notices for hearings.

The FDA claims it still cares about the issue, creating guidelines for “The Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals,” which outlines ways to end non-theraputic antibiotic use. However they don’t establish any legally enforceable responsibilities, which allows farmers to voluntarily opt in or out of the guidelines.

In 2009 Representative Louise Slaughter took action by proposing a bill called The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), which would “phase out the non-therapeutic use in livestock of medically important antibiotics.” The Obama Administration backed this bill, but lobbyists for the meat industry prevented the bill from passing. Along with the meat industry’s opposition to PAMTA, the FDA showed no interest in ever phasing out non-therapeutic antibiotics. In their Federal Registar entry, they claimed it would take too many years and too much money to withdraw the use of antibiotics.

“FDA’s experience with contested, formal withdrawal proceedings is that the process can consume extensive periods of time and significant amounts of Agency resources. For example, when FDA withdrew a class of animal drugs called nitrofurans in 1991, the proceedings took nearly 20 years. In another proceeding, the withdrawal of diethylstilbestrol (“DES”) in animals became final in 1979, 7 years after issuance of an NOOH. More recently, the withdrawal of enrofloxacin for use in poultry took almost 5 years and cost FDA approximately $3.3 million.”

Yet, according to PAMTA,

“Antibiotic resistant bacterial infections increase health care costs by over $20 billion each year and increase societal costs by $35 billion.”

Regardless, the FDA moved forward with their new strategy of voluntary reform, claiming that they would pursue withdrawal only if their “judicious use” guidelines didn’t produce sufficient results.

However, how will the FDA analyze the results of their “reform” if they aren’t engaged in doing substantial research into MRSA? The FDA and the USDA don’t even test for MRSA in imported and domestic meat. The first ever test of MRSA in pigs was completed independently by Tara Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of Epidemiology, along with her graduate students. “They swabbed the noses of 209 pigs from 10 farms in Iowa and Illinois and found MRSA in 70 percent of the porkers.” If that’s not enough proof, maybe the workers at Batesville Hatchery can convince them. Suffering numerous and regular outbreaks of painful MRSA related infections, the workers at Batesville miss weeks of work at a time. Calls to the USDA, the CDC and the Arkansas Dept of Health produced no response, leaving the workers at Batesville wondering who’s accountable for their health and safety.

With these studies and empirical evidence linking antibiotics to superbugs, it boggles my mind that the FDA won’t remove the use of the very antibiotics it approved. The FDA is at the forefront of food security and has no issue raiding small organic dairy farms in the name of food safety, but they refuse to delve deeply into the links between MRSA and animal antibiotics. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “the FDA’s paralysis isn’t just irresponsible. It’s illegal.” They filed a lawsuit against the FDA on May 25, 2011. To help make their case, they point to Denmark, the world’s largest exporter of pork. Denmark “banned antibiotics in animal feed more than a decade ago. Since then, Danish government and industry data have shown a sustained decrease in both overall antibiotic use and in the amount of drug-resistant bacteria found on livestock and meat products. At the same time, livestock production has grown and prices have remained stable.”

Denmark provides an important example of a huge industry successfully phasing out antibiotics. Yet, the FDA refuses to do anything but take baby steps. In a January 4th, 2011 press release they “issued an order that prohibits certain uses of the cephalosporin class of antimicrobial drugs in cattle, swine, chickens and turkeys effective April 5, 2012.” Though this makes a great headline, further research shows that Cephalosporin accounts for only 0.3% of all antibiotics used in livestock, which is essentially negligible in context of the full issue.

In the face of our government’s paralysis, there is something you can do. You can boycott meat processed by big agriculture and purchase local, organic meat from farms who believe in transparency, clean meat, sanitary living conditions for animals and safe conditions for workers. However, this kind of meat is very expensive and if you can’t live a vegetarian lifestyle, you can at least voice your opinion. The FDA is taking public comment on their guidelines, which you can fill out here.

Maryn McKenna’s Timeline

• 1951 & 1954: The FDA approves penicillin, chlortetracycline and oxytetracycline as feed additives.
• 1969: The UK government’s “Swann Report,” formally the Joint Committee on the Use of Antibiotics in Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine (headed by Dr. M. M. Swann), proposes that rising rates of multi-drug resistant bacteria are due to agricultural use.
• 1970: The FDA becomes concerned about the human health effects of subtherapeutic use of the drugs in animals, and convenes a task force, which concludes the drugs’ use fosters the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
• 1973: On the basis of the task force’s findings, the FDA proposes to withdraw its 1951 and 1954 approvals, unless industry can prove they are safe.
• 1976: In the first influential US research, Tufts University researchers establish an experimental farm, give tetracycline-laced feed to chickens on it, and recover tetracycline-resistant bacteria from the farm workers.
• 1977: The FDA issues the “notices of opportunity for a hearing” that were withdrawn December 22, 2011.
• 1978: The House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations orders the FDA to put a hold on its actions and conduct more research. The FDA asks the National Academy of Sciences to perform the research.
• 1980: The National Academy report says it cannot prove subtherapeutic use is safe. The House Committee asks for another round of research.
• 1981: The Senate Committee on Appropriations also asks for more research. The FDA asks the health department in Seattle and the surrounding county to perform it.
• 1983: Pharmaceutical companies ask the FDA to withdraw the 1977 hearings notices. The FDA refuses.
• 1984: The Seattle-King County Health Department finds that bacteria in chickens on farms using tetracycline, and the same bacteria in humans locally, have the same resistance fingerprints, and raises the possibility that the resistance DNA is moving into other bacterial species.
• 1988: The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy issues a report that resistance from subtherapeutic use of antibiotics is a “potential human health hazard.” The FDA tells the House and Senate committees that it has all the research it needs.
• 2001: The American Medical Association passes a resolution opposing growth-promoter drug dosing.
• 2003: The Institute of Medicine says in a second report: “Mounting evidence suggests a relationship between antimicrobial use in animal husbandry and an increase in bacterial resistance in humans.”
• 2004: The FDA tells feed manufacturers that it considers putting subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics into feed to be “high risk.”
• 2010: The FDA issues its draft voluntary guidance on limiting subtherapeutic dosing.
• 2011: After putting 34 years into pushing for removal of two of the main drug categories used for subtherapeutic dosing, the FDA backs off.

(Photo credit: Naturally Yours Blog)

ROC National Diners’ Guide: The People’s Zagat’s!

I’ve talked before on The Big Ceci about my obsession with restaurants. I worked in the industry for most of college, and that experience left me with a deep, unshakeable love for restaurants. I love the celebration and specialness inherent to the ritual of going out to eat. I love the anticipation of walking into a new spot and taking in the scene for the first time. And when I used to work at a restaurant, I loved that, too–the pace; the way, on a good night, you built momentum until eventually you were flying around the floor like the Energizer Bunny; the camaraderie you built with the other people in the building who were crazy enough to be doing it with you.

But the restaurant industry is also deeply complicated, and there is nothing simple about loving it. Issues run the gamut from class and accessibility to questions about what it means that people in the U.S. are eating out more than ever. And close to the top of the list of those issues is worker exploitation. “Loving restaurants” starts to get real murky when the person on the other side of the kitchen door has worked 30 hours so far and is only two days into their week–and is getting paid less than minimum wage.

Which is why I’m excited to take this opportunity to spread the word on The Big Ceci about a free new publication to keep you informed about what’s going on behind the kitchen doors at the restaurants you visit - the ROC National Diners’ Guide 2012!

In ROC‘s own words:

“WE ALL ENJOY EATING OUT.

“Unfortunately, the workers who cook, prepare, and serve our food suffer from poverty wages, no benefits like paid sick days, and little or no chance to move up to better positions. When the people who serve us food can’t afford to pay the rent or take a day off when they’re sick, our dining experience suffers.

“The newly released ROC National Diners’ Guide 2012 provides information on the wage, benefits, and promotion practices of the 150 most popular restaurants in America. The Guide lists responsible restaurants where you can eat knowing that your server can afford to pay the rent and your cook isn’t working while sick.”

The guide is available for free download here.