Meat lady

I blame my family. One of my relatives gifted Gabriella the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan for Chanukah last year, and she read it. Mid way, Gabriella says to me, “We have to become vegetarians.” Gabriella is not one to be rash, and she does love a good steak, so I had to take her seriously. After everything she had read about the industrial farming industry in the U.S. since the 1950s, she had come to the conclusion that we were poisoning our bodies and wreaking havoc upon the earth by eating meat. I’m not about to go into the details. There are plenty of blogs, articles and books out there that can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the evils of industrial farming. This blog is not one of them. I like to keep it light. That’s just the kind of superficial gal I am. I did need to lay the foundation for the next bit, however, so you’ll have to put up with the toe-in-the-water do-gooder scene-setting.

Days passed, and Gabriella continued reading that damn book that would change the path of my life for better or worse. The conclusion she reached was that we could still eat meat but that we would have to scale back and the animals we did eat had to be locally raised on a sustainable farm where they are grass-fed in pastures as opposed to feed lots. Hmm, I wonder which aisle at Whole Foods carries the organic, grass-fed, pasteurized beef from New Jersey. We started talking about splitting a cow from a local farm with friends of ours and keeping it in our chest freezer. Whole Foods was no longer an option.

Meanwhile, back at the proverbial ranch, I had not yet let go of the notion that we would one day have a kosher kitchen. I’m not actually into the following the rules bit, but I think that keeping kosher would allow me to connect to my religion and have a Jewish home without outing myself as religious. I’m a tattoo-on-hip Jew. It’s there for those who are invited to see, but I’m not waving the flag. FYI, I do not have a tattoo on my hip. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have a tattoo elsewhere.

I was raised in a kosher home with loopholes. My mother wanted our home to be Jewish. She didn’t care if our intestines were kosher. We could eat whatever we wanted when we went out to restaurants, but our home was strictly kosher. As we got older, my parents eased up at home, too. We ordered in, but we could only eat the treif food on paper plates in the dining room. The kitchen remained pure. It wasn’t difficult to stick to the rules especially because I wasn’t the one grocery shopping or cooking. Now that we, well Gabriella is cooking, we need to figure out if we can really sustain a kosher kitchen. You can’t just say a few prayers and BAM, you’ve got a kosher kitchen. Keeping kosher requires thought before, during and after every meal. Conceptually, I wanted it, but I was concerned that the task would be too much to take on. Truth be told, I was looking for a way out. Ah ha! Sustainable farms!! Here’s my way out of kosher, I thought.

I went to talk to our Rabbi. I explained that if I had to choose between kosher meat and meat that has been butchered from animals on sustainable farms, the choice was easy. I could not in good conscience keep kosher and deny the evils of industrial farming. And shouldn’t kosher meat be everything that sustainable farming supports, anyway? I preached on my soap box as my Rabbi listened intently to my rant. “Well,” she said, “perhaps you would like to speak with someone at the forefront of the eco-kosher movement.” Eco-kosher? Really? Rats! A way in.

Sure enough, Devora Kimelman-Block founded KOL Foods in Maryland for the very reason that all animal farming – kosher or not – should be ethical. I called Devora and asked her when KOL Foods was coming to New Jersey. She told me she’d be happy to expand as long as there was someone who would be the New Jersey representative. What was I supposed to say? I invited Devora to speak at our synagogue. The New Jersey Jewish News ran a couple of articles about it. Our synagogue became the New Jersey distribution center for KOL Foods, and I became the contact. And then, the October 12 edition of The New York Times Magazine – the same one that ran Michael Pollan’s letter to the President - published an article about the eco-kosher movement and featured KOL Foods as one of the more established sources of ethical, kosher meat.

When you go to the KOL Foods website and select the contact person for New York and New Jersey-yup, yours truly is the email contact. Since that article in The New York Times Magazine ran, I’ve been receiving emails from every Channa, Rifka and Shlomo in the tri-state area with questions and holiday wishes.

Takes me right back to university. My Orthodox Jewish roommate showed up with her suitcase in one hand and a mezuzah in the other. She had requested a Jewish roommate, and I’m sure the folks in the admissions office saw “Deborah Goldstein” on their list and thought, “A shidduch for sure!” Who knew that they were pairing up the Orthodox Jew with an angry, militant feminist lesbian? Note: I am no longer angry and not nearly as militant as I should be.

I’m the Jewish mother version of the phone sex operator. Instead of a 20 year old playmate in a string bikini sucking on a cherry lollipop, they’re imagining that I’m a 20 year old woman with a hat covering the wig on my head, basting my brisket while my 5 children tug at my skirt. If they only knew.

So I’m the meat lady at my synagogue AND I’m leading the children’s Shabbat morning services. I guess I’m coming to terms with my inner Deborah Goldstein. Such a nice girl. With a name like mine, I couldn’t have avoided it. It’s definitely not the name of a surfer or a rock star, but I’m rockin’ the Jew world with my meat, baby! Jewtastic!!