Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
This summer, Andy Kastner and his wife, Leslie Cohen, were hanging out in the community garden around the corner from their Clayton apartment. They were feeding their 2-year-old son, Asher, cherry tomatoes off the vine. Usually, he’d just say Mmmmm. This day, he pointed to the tomato plant. “Abba made this,” he told them matter-of-factly.
“Abba’s the Hebrew word for ‘dad,’” Kastner explains. “So I tried to explain yes, I planted it and I took care of it, but it’s deeper. What my son reminded me of—but I knew all along—is that food is all about relationships. And food has a story.”
Kastner, who grew up outside of Cleveland, moved his family to St. Louis last July to take the post of campus Rabbi at St. Louis Hillel at Washington University, shortly after being ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York. (He says he’s wanted to be a rabbi since the age of 10.) In 2008, while still in rabbinical school, the New York Times Magazine wrote about his work as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, for their food issue. Kaster grew up in a Reform household that didn’t keep kashrut—i.e., observe Jewish dietary laws—but as he told the Times, he sees the ancient laws of manual ritual slaughter as “revolutionary” in a time when obesity rates are sky-high, no one knows where their food comes from, and people are profoundly disconnected from their environments.
But as Kastner discovered, becoming a shochet in the early 21st century is a nearly impossible thing. His school didn’t offer training, so he cold-called shochetim all over New York, only to be turned down over and over again. He finally found a mentor in Rabbi Mitchell Serels of Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Scarsdale, New York. But even sourcing the hallaf, the proper blade, was hard (“It turned out they were made in some guy’s basement in Brooklyn,” Kastner told the Times). This is profound, considering that just a few decades ago, there was a network of small-scale kosher meat producers—with their attendant shochetim—all over the country, even in small communities like Bellingham, Washington and Pensacola, Fla.
“My grandmother grew up in a very traditional, Eastern European Jewish family,” Kastner says. “She was a first-generation American. There was a small, kosher poultry slaughterhouse that they would walk to. They ate meat very infrequently—really, just for the Sabbath. They would pick out the chicken, send it into the dock, and there was a shochet who would prepare it. Even when it was cleaned, they would have to pluck feathers when they got home,” he adds. “She knew where it was coming from. She knew its life story, in a way, and the people behind the scenes—well, there really was no one behind the scenes.” (Kastner adds, chuckling a little, that his grandmother was perplexed by his decision to train as a shochet. “I think from her perspective, it’s just not something a nice Jewish boy would do,” he says. “I tried to give her this whole deep, altruistic, philosophical gloss as to why I was doing it—I don’t think she really bought it.”)
The process of ritual slaughter used to be transparent. Literally. Half a century ago, village shochets worked behind a glass wall. But in the late 1987, Aaron Rubashkin, the proprietor of a kosher butcher shop in Brooklyn, purchased a meat-processing plant in Pottsville, Iowa, and opened it under the name AgriProcessors. That plant eventually supplied more than half of the U.S.’s kosher beef, and 40 percent of its kosher poultry. As the company expanded, smaller producers felt the hurt, though AgriProcessor’s large-scale operations became a factor in its downfall. In 2004, a PETA operative captured footage of calves and cows at Agriprocessors’ plant struggling to stand after shechita, then having their tracheas ripped out. Animal-welfare scientist Temple Grandin, who had visited more than 30 kosher slaughterhouses, called it the worst facility she had ever seen. (Four years later, Agriprocessors became the target of an immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of more than 345 illegal immigrants, and the Iowa attorney general filed 9,000 counts of child-labor violations; the company filed for bankruptcy later that year.)
“Kosher slaughter, if it’s done right—and I’m not just talking about following the letter of the law, but doing it in the spirit of the law, too—it’s very slow,” Kastner says. He also describes shechita as a spiritual practice, one he undertook partly because he wanted to know, first-hand, the real cost of eating meat. What does it mean to take a life out of this world to sustain your own? Every minute detail of the process is a reminder that the shochet is taking a life. Hey prays; he runs his fingernail up and down the blade of the hallaf to make sure it’s smooth and perfectly sharp. He cuts the animal’s throat with a swift, precise action, in order to minimize the animal’s suffering. Its throat cannot be chopped, pressed, pierced or torn. He must not pause, or sink the blade so far in that it disappears. And he must hold the animal in such a way to both restrain and comfort it—which means he feels its life depart, right under his hands. Kastner says that though it’s a physically demanding process, it is the emotional toll that leaves him exhausted. In a blog post for j-carrrot.org, writes about how he wept after slaughtering his first chicken; he and his family still eat very little meat.
“You have no choice but to step into the macabre, and step into the heaviness of the responsibility of what it means to be engaged in this, and to bring a sense of kadusha, of holiness, into this experience that can be dark,” Kastner says. “And to, in some way, delicately balance the line of what it means to be human, and what it means to have power—power over. And to use that very delicately, and to not abuse it.”
Kastner is part of a fairly recent tradition of activists and thinkers, such as Rabbi Arthur Waskow (who originated the term “eco-kashrut”), who approach ecology through the lens of Jewish culture. Kastner is especially passionate about food issues, and is affiliated with what has come to be known as “the New Jewish Food Movement.” Though it’s been around for about 10 years, it really gained steam after the AgriProcessors scandal, and has only grown with the popularity of Michael Pollan, Food, Inc., farmer’s markets and CSAs.
Serendipitously enough, one of Kastner’s peers in the new Jewish Food Movement, natural foods chef Elisheva Margulis (she goes by Eli—pronounced “Elly”) arrived in St. Louis one year before he did, moving up from Chicago after her husband was accepted to medical school here. By that time, she’d studied farming at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center through one of their Adamah Fellowships, and trained at New York’s Natural Gourmet Institute. But when she first met Kastner in the winter of 2007 at a food conference sponsored international Jewish environmental organization Hazon, she was still putting on business suits and going to work at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra every day. She and Kastner later crossed paths during her Adamah fellowship.
“It’s a working farm, with goats,” she says. “Every fall, the boy goats are slaughtered before the winter. Andy, being a shochet, came up for that. I got to know him through that experience. We both had an interest and passion about local, small-scale pasturing of animals that are treated with the utmost of dignity, and leading animal-like lives.”
Margulies says she was one of those kids who grew up “eating yummy Snackwell’s cookies,” which she has sworn off forever, even if they find a way to manufacture them without the hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup. That is because the experience of being on a farm in fall—eating root vegetables, Swiss chard and kale, learning how to make apple butter and jam—forever transformed the way she eats, and thinks. Right now, she’s really into lacto-fermented pickles, which she also learned to make at Adamah.
“I was on Great Day St. Louis, and that’s what we made together.” Margulies says. “The host said ‘Oh, who would have known you could make pickles like this?’ And my response was, ‘Well, our grandmothers. This is their story. My great-grandmother made pickles in her basement in the way that I currently make them.’”
Which bears out what Kastner always tries to teach: food is about relationships. Food is about stories. This fall, he traveled to Immokalee, Fla., where thousands of illegal immigrants toil in chemical-soaked fields to supply grocery stores with winter tomatoes. “I try to bring back people’s stories,” Kastner says, “and use those experiences as a springboard to show that these are the hands that grow our food, these are the people, and this is what’s going on behind the scenes.”
This summer, he traveled to Washington D.C. with a group representing the American Jewish World Service to talk to Jennifer Yezak, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at the USDA, and other government officials about the 2012 Farm Bill. At the top of their list was food aid. “We ship food from America, generally to countries in need,” Kastner says. “It’s good for our business, but ultimately the consequences is that it keeps underprivileged countries dependent on the Western World.”
But if you follow the story of food aid, it is inexorably linked to the larger narrative of the North American industrial food system. From 1995 to 2010, $16.9 billion in federal subsidies went to crops used mainly for processed food—corn, soy, rice, wheat and cotton. (The only fresh produce that receives subsidies is apples, and it is a much smaller percentage.) These crops are then turned into oils, brans, germs and flours by giant processing firms, who sell it to domestic snack food companies, or export it as food aid. The crop subsidies—The Agriculture Department gives out $25 billion of them annually—are set to expire in 2012. And the war over that money has already begun. Tied up in the stories of the larger food producers are smaller stories about how Americans live and eat. And as Kastner points out, “it’s through conversation—not dialogue, but conversation—that we build relationships. I do care deeply about these issues, but I know they can really only be addressed when we know the other. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”
One way that Kastner is building that sense of community is through Sacred Meals, a series of interfaith Shabbat meals sponsored by St. Louis Hillel. At the first meal, in November 2010, vegetables were provided by Burning Kumquat, the student-run campus garden; bread came from the local chapter of Challah for Hunger, a nonprofit that creates challah bread. When the group sat down for salad, butternut squash, and lentil soup, organizers made sure there was a mix of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim students at each table. “I think what emerged from it is that people missed eating together,” says Kastner. “It was really that simple.”
Wash. U. junior Rachel Binstock, who met Kastner when she was attending Jewish high school in Chicago, is involved with Sacred Meals, Burning Kumquat and a yearlong initiative that Kastner is launching, though Hillel, in January, “Takkana Social Justice Initiative: Seeding a Sustainable Future.” Next month, she and another dozen or so students will begin studying Jewish texts to learn what they have to say about ecology and food sovereignty, then study how campus organizations like food services deal with sustainability issues. (Binstock’s already ahead of the game—she is the executive advisor of sustainability for student government.) In the spring, they will travel to Muchucuxca, Mexico, to a Mayan Village that is working to maintain its traditional way of life, including raising its own crops. For about two weeks, they’ll get hands-on experience with farming and gardening. Then, after returning to St. Louis, they’ll help middle schoolers at Yeatman-Lidell set up their school garden.
“Rabbi Andy was telling me that he was trying to decide between being a farmer or being a rabbi,” Binstock says. “For me, those things are really intertwined. I grew up in a very religious home, and I think the reasons I think so much about sustainability have really been rooted in the idea within Judaism called Tikkun olam—repairing the world.” She also associates the concept of kadosh—the Hebrew for holy—with eating and living sustainably. “It means to separate,” she says. “I’ve had non-Jewish friends say to me, you can’t eat cheese and meat together? As if I was really missing out. But I feel like it actually enhances my life. I’m aware when I’m eating. Everything is a conscious decision. It’s about how are you going to make parts of your life holy, or not? Because that is what we really have to do with resources now.”
Kastner agrees: “It’s so easy to be overwhelmed,” he says of the current environmental crisis. “But we cannot afford the luxury of feeling overwhelmed.” What the New Jewish Food Movement shows mainstream secular America is that tradition and community are great bulwarks against feeling overwhelmed, giving up, or sticking your head in the sand. To be a shochet is revolutionary in a culture where eating meat at every meal is seen as an inalienable right; where drinking 72-once sodas on a daily basis is common; where being sick or fat is accepted as normal. What Kastner and the New Jewish Food Movement have also brought to the fore—even more than your average locavore or Slow Foodie—is how profoundly our eating habits affect how we relate to each other. Predictably, when asked about when he became aware of food issues, Kastner doesn’t talk about food; he talks about a person.
“Every August, we would walk about a mile down the street to visit Chuck. Chuck was a corn farmer,” he explains. “He grew this delicious sweet corn, and had this Farmer’s Almanac sensibility about him. I was a kid, so I just didn’t really know anything else. The corn tasted awesome, and it was great to pick it and to shuck it.
“My parents obviously shopped at the grocery store, too, but as far as vegetables go, once I got to college I started spending more time at the farmer’s market, and this whole experience with Chuck really kind of clicked,” he says. “The food tasted good, and you’d see this wild stuff that you would never see in the grocery store. That was great from a foodie perspective. But what I was always really interested in was the relationships—the relationship to natural cycles, the relationship to people, and feeling that sense of connection and community.”
