It was only 10½ hours after the close of this year’s Hazon Food Conference that I was faced with a new food justice-related challenge. In a moment of optimism several weeks earlier, I had agreed to write a review of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland for my CSA’s newsletter during the same weekend of the conference. Unsurprisingly, in the battle between well-intentioned optimism and an active conference, the conference won. In between a standing room only discussion on the 2012 Farm Bill, a community-wide beit midrash in which my chevruta and I tackled Maimonides and Mark Bittman, and a session on learning how to brew beer (with samples generously provided and enthusiastically consumed), the review went unwritten.
But a commitment is still a commitment, even if it meant I had to write the review hunched over in a middle seat on a red-eye flight home to Brooklyn. In fact, I reasoned, maybe it was even a good thing that I waited to write the review until after the conference. Tomatoland takes on food (bet you can guess which one) and examines how and why it makes it to our tables. The extensively researched explanations are occasionally horrifying and always enlightening. And the issues of how food arrives to our tables, who is impacted in the process, and why people eat certain kinds of food are the same issues that led many of us to attend the conference initially.
Pursue, which worked with Hazon to create an engaging track of food justice-related programming, ensured that these topics received plenty of attention at the conference. Those of us in Pursue’s inaugural food justice cohort had the added benefit of networking with our fellow cohort members, a group of people also interested in the intersection between Judaism, food, and social justice, and who probably also spend their free time reading books about tomatoes.
My fellow cohort member Sasha has written an excellent piece about some of the food justice programming. Rather than repeat her descriptions of the conference’s great food justice sessions, I’ll tell you instead about a few of the food justice activities our cohort has been up to recently and how the conference has impacted us. In our Facebook group, we’ve debated the merits of CSAs vs. food cooperatives vs. community gardens, argued over whether it was beneficial for SNAP (the federal food stamp program) to ban purchases of soda, and swapped our food /social justice/Judaism reading lists. We’ve learned more about the inspiring campaigns and issues that make up our day jobs and side activities and shared resources for getting existing and future ideas connected to the larger Jewish food movement. Many of us are now starting to think about Global Hunger Shabbat and how we can use what we learned at the conference to bring these issues to our larger communities.
All of us in the cohort are optimistic that the knowledge and connections we gained as a result of the conference will inform our future work in the Jewish food justice community and the world at large. I’m so grateful for Hazon and Pursue for giving us the opportunity to learn more about the relationship between Judaism, food, and social justice, and for giving me so much to think about on the plane ride home.
Katy Schwalbe is a labor union researcher, a co-chair of this year’s Limmud NY conference, and an unabashed foodie. You can read her review of Tomatoland here and learn what spices she’s running low on here.
