My name’s Nigel Savage, and I’m an Englishman in New York—actually an English Jew in New York, where I run an organization called Hazon. The word “hazon” means vision. We’re working to create a healthier and a more sustainable Jewish community, and a healthier and more sustainable world for all. So, naturally, we spend a lot of time thinking about food.

In days gone by, people didn’t have many choices around food. I was on a plane one time and the stewardess said, “Would you like dinner?” and I said “What are my choices?” She looked at me and she said, “Yes or no.”

But nowadays we have a lot of choices, and a lot of issues. Which fish can I eat? Should I be concerned about eating genetically modified foods or not? What should we do about teenage obesity? Should I be vegetarian or vegan? But then what if I eat too much soy? Should I cut down on sugar, but maybe artificial sweeteners are even worse? If 300 million eggs are recalled, does that mean I shouldn't eat eggs? Or some particular sort of eggs? Is it better to eat local but not organic, or organic but not local? And so on.

Jewish people, of course, have been asking questions about food for a long time. For three thousand years, Jewish people have had the tradition of "keeping kosher," of asking, in plain English, "Is this particular food fit for me to eat?” The word “kosher” literally means fit. In the last twenty years in this country, the kosher food market has grown dramatically. It’s way larger than the number of Jewish people who actually keep kosher. The evidence at the checkout counter seems to be that large numbers of Americans choose a food product that has a kosher certification on it, over one that does not, in the hope or belief that the kosher food is, well, more kosher, one way or another.

Hazon’s been at the forefront of what’s become known as the Jewish Food Movement, a growing number of Jewish people who are interested in Jewish tradition, on the one hand, and a wide range of contemporary food issues on the other. The Jewish Food Movement includes rabbis and writers, restaurateurs, chefs, owners of small food businesses, parents and kids, and students; and also a growing number of young Jewish farmers and ethical kosher meat businesses, enterprises that are providing people with kosher meat from animals that have lived animal-like lives. So I’ve been thinking about what light Jewish tradition, and the new Jewish Food Movement, can shed on a range of contemporary food issues, whether you’re Jewish or not.

The first lesson is to be in direct relationship with your food. Grow some of your own, and if you can’t grow your own, join a community-supported agriculture program—a CSA—and start to have a direct, ongoing relationship with a farmer. The Torah is the record of an agrarian tradition and for much of Jewish history, as for much of human history, people were in fairly direct relationship with the sources of their food.  In the last few years, many people have read Omnivore’s Dilemma, or Fast Food Nation or seen SuperSize Me, and each of them has helped reveal something about our food, and where it comes from. But reading is still one step removed—it’s learning about somebody else’s inquiries into where food comes from. Having a relationship with a farmer is profound in a way I can’t fully explain: experiencing the miracle of growth; understanding how much food one little piece of land can produce; seeing the interactions between plants and creatures in countless ways; and experiencing, from the farmer’s side, the vicissitudes of weather, understanding that producing food isn’t like producing cars or computer chips, that it’s a living process and subject to circumstances beyond our control.

One very special example of knowing where your food comes from is knowing where your meat comes from. Two years ago, federal authorities closed down the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa, for a wide series of infractions. But eight years before that, in the summer of 2000, I led a Jewish environmental bike ride across America, and we stopped off in Postville and asked if we could see a cow being slaughtered and have a look around the plant. Very graciously they let us do so. Five of us went in that afternoon and of those five, two became vegetarian, and are still vegetarian to this day, ten years on. If you see the production of industrial meat, kosher or not, it’s very hard to eat it.

The second lesson, connected to the first, is what the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory, called “radical amazement.” Radical amazement, for Heschel, was a necessary intermediate step between routine daily existence on one side, and prayer on the other. You can be radically amazed without praying, and you can pray without being radically amazed. But if you choose to open yourself to a sense of radical amazement then you’re more likely to want to express that as gratitude. Doing so will be good for you and good for the world. Radical amazement for me is eating a banana, and thinking that a million dollars of corporate R and D couldn’t possibly create better packaging for a banana than a banana skin. Radical amazement is eating a chocolate bar and thinking about the cocoa beans, the tree, the people who picked them, the invisible processes that others invented and created so I can eat my little piece of chocolate. I have a friend, Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, who says a bracha, a blessing,  of his own creation when he eats chocolate: “Blessed are you, Creator of the universe, borei minei shokolad”– who creates many different kinds of chocolate. It’s a bracha I say myself, and rather enjoy. If you take a moment before you eat to express gratitude and to think about where your food came from, then slowly but surely, it may change what and how you eat. Rabbi, what’s the bracha for smoking a cigarette? Of course there isn’t one, because how could we possibly say a blessing for something that harms us? Radical amazement is a great way to turn towards what really nourishes us and away from what does not.
 
The third lesson is about food in relation to other people. If I start to be in relation with farmers, if I’m thinking about where my food comes from, if I’m expressing gratitude, how can I fail to be aware that there are people in great need – people who can’t take for granted the food choices I enjoy? This season, Hazon’s CSAs will donate more than 30,000 pounds of produce to people in need around the country. Each of us, in however small a way, should do something to alleviate hunger around the world and food insecurity in our own country.

The fourth lesson is about feasting and fasting. In London in a previous career I was rather lavishly entertained. I ate great lunches three or four days a week. I know, I know, a hardship I bore with fortitude! Today, most days I eat a salad at my desk, and strive—and mostly fail—to linger over my food and not dash it down. But I still wouldn’t choose to go back to my big daily lunches, even if I could, because nowadays I feel more in tune with older Jewish rhythms about fasting and feasting. “Six days you should work,” says the Torah, “and on the seventh you rest.” From that one injunction—the introduction of Shabbat, the Sabbath, into human history—the Jewish people inaugurated a tradition of eating lightly and simply, six days a week, and much more lavishly and slowly, in meals with friends and family punctuated with singing and humor and prayers, on the seventh.

The modern world of 24/7 has flattened many older distinctions of time and so one of my gifts to you from the new Jewish Food Movement, but a gift that is as old as the Jewish people itself, is to bring back food tradition into your life. Eat more simply during the week; cut out dessert, or have less sugar, or drink less booze; but then at the weekend, on the Shabbat of your tradition, whether it’s Saturday or Sunday or Friday, slow it down, cook a great meal, and have over your friends and neighbors. Your ancestors of whatever faith or none will smile down on you.

And my last lesson is one from my late Grandma, may her memory be a blessing. “Everything in moderation,” that was how she lived her life. Be curious about your food, but don’t be crazy and don’t drive other people crazy. Try to establish healthy rhythms, but don’t beat yourself up if you have too much ice cream one day. Jewish tradition is rigorous in many ways, but it is also deeply humane. I leave you with this story:

Little Shlomo and his family were having dinner at his bubbe's house, his grandma’s. When everyone was seated the food was served, and as soon as little Shlomo got his plate he started eating from it right away. "Shlomo, please wait until we say our prayer!" said his father. 

"I don't have to," Shlomo replied. 

"Of course you have to," said his mother. "Don’t we always say a prayer before eating at our house?" 

"Yes, but that's our house," Shlomo explained. "This is bubbe's house and she knows how to cook!"

Conversation with Nigel Savage

Daniel Pawlus: Nigel, thank you for joining us today.

Nigel Savage: A great pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Daniel Pawlus: It’s pleasure to hear about Hazon and your movement. I guess one of the first questions I’d like to ask you, and Lillian and I were talking about this, the food movement and environmentalism seem like such an “Oh, duh!” kind of thing, but how does it connect in modern day faith traditions, the Jewish tradition and others? How do we make this real for people so that the tradition aspect that you so beautifully talked about is current to people?

Nigel Savage: I think one answer to that is just that we’ve often lived very bifurcated lives. One thing is religion, which is in church or synagogue, and it’s the weekend and it’s very formal; and then there’s the rest of our lives where we’re at work and school and so on. I think one of the lessons of contemporary religious environmentalism—I think all of the faith traditions have this—is that religion isn’t about how you behave in church or synagogue, it’s about how we hold ourselves in our lives. As soon as you do that you suddenly start to think, for example, about food and a whole range of things where in general we’ve become disconnected from tradition. When you reconnect to it, it starts to be interesting both in relationship to faith tradition and the world around us.

Lillian Daniel: I think that living out of your religion in the home and around the table is one of the great gifts that the Jewish tradition gives to the rest of us in the interfaith conversation. But I think of in my own Christian tradition the seven deadly sins and the sin of gluttony. It seems that Americans right now are really struggling with this sin of gluttony. I love what the Jewish tradition might bring into that conversation.

Nigel Savage: Well, starting with the fact that we don’t necessarily quite have the sin of gluttony under control, and some of us therefore have enjoyed gluttonous rhythms without having somebody beating us up directly for it; I think it’s about balance. I really do think it is about balance and thinking about all of the jokes about food in Jewish history and all of that kind of stuff, you can see that the Jewish people have been a little bit obsessed about food. And since we are now a generation where everybody is obsessed about food, it seems worthwhile to look back and say, well okay, what value is there, as well.

Daniel Pawlus: So there is a cultural aspect to the work that you do, obviously. I’m wondering what are some of the most common misperceptions you must run up against when people think about the limitations of keeping kosher and if it’s as difficult or challenging as a non-Jewish person may think it is?

Nigel Pawlus: An interesting question. I think in general almost every Jewish person today who keeps kosher does so in a slightly different way. So I think there isn’t a single answer to that question. What I think is interesting for me, my wife and I have a strictly kosher kitchen at home because we wouldn’t want anybody whom we know not to be able to eat in it, and we keep a slightly different standard of kosher when we eat out. One of the things that’s interesting is that for quite a number of years now, we’ve only had eggs that are from free-range chickens. Now the rules of kashrut strictly understood don’t necessarily define which egg you pick out of the box at the supermarket. They’re all, on the face of it, okay. I think what represents the contemporary twist is saying in the process of keeping kosher I’m asking questions about the fitness of food to come into my kitchen. Once I start asking that question, it leads on to a whole series of other questions. That’s a place where having an egg from a factory farm chicken that had been in a little cage started to feel not kosher to us even if in a traditional nominative sense perhaps it was.

Lillian Daniel: I was fascinated when you said that the number of people who are buying kosher meats and kosher products are much higher than the number of people keeping kosher. And I thought, oh my goodness, I’m one of those people! I always go for the kosher hot dogs and kosher meats. What do you think is going on with the American consumer who has no Jewish connection but is making that consumer choice?

Nigel Savage: Well, Lillian, I want to ask you that question! What’s the answer?

Lillian Daniel: I guess what I’m hoping is that because it’s associated with a religious tradition that it would be more ethical in how the animals are treated or less preservatives or healthier. I think I’m sort of counting on that.

Nigel Savage: I think it’s really complicated, to be honest, because I think many of us are really proud of the Jewish tradition of keeping kosher and there is one place where we’re really proud that non-Jews are choosing to buy kosher food because they believe that it is more ethical or healthy or whatever. And yet at the same time, I’m sad to say in certain instances, and Agriprocessors was a clear instance of this, kosher didn’t necessarily mean better. Part of what the new Jewish food movement is about is, in a sense, is cleaning up our act within the Jewish community in relationship to this kind of stuff.

Daniel Pawlus: The other interesting thing you said was the local component. Bill McKibben has written about this quite often. You’re probably familiar with his writing. Talk about that trend coming back a little bit more. It’s not only farmer’s markets and things like that, but people seem to be more generally interested in trying to make a connection locally with their food, perhaps than they have been in the past. Do you sense that? I know you live in New York City.

Nigel Savage: I’m a very urban and suburban person. I did not grow up around farming. A few years ago I was with a friend of mine and was visiting his new farm. He bent over the ground and pulled something up and starting wiping dirt off it. I’m like, “What’s that?” And he says, “It’s a beet. Here, have a bite of it.” I’m like, “A, I don’t like beets; and, B, you have to boil them for an hour before you can eat them.” And he says, “Nige, this is a fresh beet. Here try this.” I took a bite of this beet and there are photos of me looking like Dracula, with beet juice coming down my face. It was a really interesting moment, to understand that the food that comes out of the ground is different than food that’s been packed and picked and canned and processed and traveled huge distances. It isn’t always possible to eat local food and many of us don’t have the space or the time or the knowledge, but the process of growing more of our food locally is profound. I think it’s also particularly important in cities. I think there are many parts of our cities where it is not at all easy to get good, healthy, fresh local produce. The process of taking derelict or unused lots and starting to turn them into local urban farms, which has really started to gather steam in the last few years, we think that that’s one of the front edges of religious environmentalism in this country.

Lillian Daniel: Let’s take it into the sort of social justice aspect of your work because in some ways, I think, many of us feel like the obsession with food and “I can’t eat this” has become a tedious preoccupation of the well-off or the privileged. And then we have these areas in cities that are food deserts. How are you guys addressing that?

Nigel Savage: I think one wants to do…there are two different sides to what you just said, Lillian. The first one is to address the question of is it middle class privilege, or upper middle class privilege to eat local produce in the first place. I think truthfully most of us exercise a lot of choices in our lives and we don’t have necessarily the cheapest pair of jeans or the cheapest shirt or the cheapest car. I think that many of us exercise many of our purchasing choices in ways that aren’t terribly healthy. So I don’t think anybody should feel guilty about local organic produce. It is good for you and good for the farmer and good for sustainable food systems. And then the second piece is, how do we change food systems in this country? Two years from now the farm bill is going to be coming through Congress again and in years past it was really only the producers states that paid attention to it. In 2012, for the first time I think there is going to be a real rumpus because I think people are starting to understand that food policy affects everybody in this country. We should all be working towards ethical food systems.

Daniel Pawlus: If any of our viewers want to know a little bit more about Hazon they can check out the website.

Nigel Savage: Hazon.org. H-A-Z-O-N.

Lillian Daniel: Well, thank you for being with us today. We’ve enjoyed feasting on your words.