Editor’s note: This weekend we welcome guest blogger Megan Beller of Rochester, NY
Today we begin the fourth book of torah, B’midbar. The portion opens with God speaking to Moses saying “se’u et rosh kol adat b’nei Israel” or lift the heads of the battalions of the people Israel. What follows is a litany of numbers as each tribe records its battle ready men. The translation in most chumashim is “Take a census of the whole Israelite Community” but they are careful to note the literal translation “lift the heads”. When we think of census taking in our own time, of someone coming to the door or filling out our tax forms, it doesn’t seem nearly as inspiring as a command from God to lift your head and be counted. Every Israelite male over the age of 20 is being counted here for the purpose of preparing to enter the land and do battle. How can we lift our heads and be counted for an equally divine purpose?
We make decisions every day that could be seen as a kind of census taking. We can choose a mitzvah with our heads lifted, or take a path we know is less than divine. My husband charley and I have been preparing to move to Baltimore and we’ve been thinking a lot about the opportunity to make changes in our lives. When I look at our attic, which is stuffed with possessions we rarely use I wonder what we should pack up and what we should leave behind. We’re trying to ask the same questions about our habits and our values.
One of the ways we’re trying to make a change is in our food consumption. As vegetarians who cook a lot from scratch, we don’t spend a lot of money on food. Neither, it turns out, do most middle class Americans. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Americans spend an average of 13% of their income on food, down from 30% in 1950, and down from 42% in 1901. The percentage is even lower in households in the top 20% of the income range: those earning more than 120K a year only spend about 7% of their income on food. Many of us take advantage of cheap food, shopping for extra discounts at national chains like BJs or stopping by the fast food restaurants that seem to be on every corner. Are the choices we make about what food to buy important? In the Jewish tradition the answer is a resounding yes. Food is how we nourish and keep holy our God-given bodies. Charley and I keep kosher according to our minhag and we also choose to be vegetarians. We thought we were making responsible and holy choices about what food to buy and eat.
Recently I’ve been reading a book that my father-in-law, Kelly, gave me called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver that has me thinking hard about how our family can go beyond kashrut and use our power of consumption towards Tikkun Olam. Barbara Kingsolver writes about her family’s move from Tucson to West Virginia and the choice they made to eat more locally grown food. She describes their adventures in gardening and eating locally, and writes at length about how much impact just one family can have. I first sat up and took notice as I read her critique of vegetarianism. Kingsolver, a former vegetarian herself, writes:
“…meat, poultry, and eggs raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator trucked soy milk, and pre-washed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty free in the this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path, giving up bananas is another.”
It turns out the growing season in the Northeast is not accurately represented by the produce section at Wegmans. The cost of asparagus in October, strawberries in February, and butternut squash in May is the cost of food grown on corporate farms halfway across the planet and shipped here using a lot of petroleum and packaging. That last one, butternut squash in May, hits close to home for me because I suggested adding a squash dish to the menu for Shavuot. On the flip side there is the cost of local farmers getting bought out, or living on the edge of financial demise because they can’t compete. Eating locally for my family will mean spending more that 7% of our income on food, because we’ll be paying a fair price for our dairy and produce from local farms. Where do we find this amazing Western New York food? At the farmers market, at the coop, and occasionally even at Wegmans. When do we find it? Well, Asparagus and greens are about all the vegetables that are locally available this time of year. But pretty soon the strawberries will be out and come September we’ll be knee deep in apples. Our son Naftali loves the organic milk, eggs, and butter we buy from locally pastured cows and chickens, and we hope that as time passes and we make more changes that he’ll begin to feel the rhythm of the agricultural year and sense the disconnect of red peppers in January.
So am I trading in my chocolate for a locally produced steak? Not quite. But as Kingsolver says, “a hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering” and our family is choosing this way to lift our heads and be counted.