When the executive committee for the Hazon Food Conference got together last July to plan the menu for the four-day gathering, everyone agreed that, as much as possible, the food served should be local.
But when it came to meat, the discussion grew heated.
First, should they serve it at all? The Jewish food movement, like the environmental movement in general, is filled with vegetarians.
Second, food activists like to keep things local, and kosher meat — the only kind they would consider — doesn’t always jive with making sure the animals are humanely raised, organically fed and ethically slaughtered.
There are a handful of alternative kosher meat producers based on the East Coast, run by leaders in the new Jewish food movement, but shipping that meat to California would undermine the local focus.
The talk went on for hours.
Finally, the group agreed that the only way to find meat that met their standards was to slaughter and produce it themselves.
Berkeley resident Roger Studley took on the challenge of finding a local turkey farm and convincing the farmer to allow a bunch of Jews with a kashrut overseer and ritual slaughterer to come kill, pluck, eviscerate, soak, salt and package enough turkeys to feed 500 hungry food activists a nice Shabbat meal.
That’s how 20 shivering volunteers found themselves ankle-deep in feathers and mud on a turkey farm 90 miles north of San Francisco on a blustery cold and wet morning Dec. 24.
Andy Kastner, a rabbinical student at New York’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, had flown in to act as the shochet. He would slaughter each bird with a quick cut across its neck, severing the esophagus and trachea in one motion. The turkey would be placed upside-down in a traffic cone to bleed out, and then the hapless helpers would pluck out every last feather.
The brave in attendance would then eviscerate the birds, digging their hands into the dark recesses of the still-warm bodies to remove the internal organs.
Rabbi Seth Mandel, whose day job is supervising kosher slaughterhouses for the Orthodox Union, was on hand to check the lungs and intestines for signs of disease or damage, which would render the bird non-kosher. The kosher birds would be soaked for half an hour and salted for an hour to remove the blood, rinsed three times, and finally sealed and packed on ice for transport to the conference kitchen.
“As Jews, we are required to take these steps to make our meat suitable for eating,” Studley told the group. “We’re doing this old school, hands-on.
“We’re doing it as a community, making meat for the conference we are about to attend. This is a project bringing us closer to the source of the food we are eating, making real the fact that we are taking the lives of animals in order to sustain ourselves.”