The day after Yom Kippur two East Bay men went to Dixon, right outside of Davis, to build a sukkah.
Why build it in a place an hour’s drive away rather than in their own backyards?
Since Sukkot is a harvest festival, Adam Edell of Oakland thought it was the perfect time for people to get to know where their food comes from. The site of the sukkah was Eatwell Farm — www.eatwell.com — which has been providing members and affiliates of Chochmat HaLev, the Berkeley Jewish meditation center, with boxes of organic produce since May.
And Friday, Sept. 28 before sundown about 25 people — mostly 20-somethings but a few children and boomers as well — began to descend on the farm, hanging tapestries in the sukkah and setting up their own tents in the plum tree orchards.
A potluck dinner followed a kabbalat Shabbat service in the sukkah. The next morning, participants toured the farm. Molly Bloom oversees Eatwell’s CSA, or community-supported agriculture, which has some 650 households purchasing shares that amount to a box of organic produce delivered to a drop-off point near them each week by vegetable-oil fueled truck.
While participants were happy to see where the food they’ve been enjoying comes from, it was also heartbreaking to see rows upon rows of beautiful heirloom tomatoes and gypsy peppers rotting on their vines.
A Mediterranean fruit fly brought back to the Dixon area by a vacationer in Hawaii has put the entire farming community there under quarantine, and any produce that can play host to the larvae of the Medfly cannot leave the farm unless it’s cooked for 30 minutes. This means the heirloom tomatoes that Eatwell is known for, as well as eggplants, peppers, tomatillos and tree fruit cannot be sold at farmers markets or given to CSA members.
While Eatwell’s owner Nigel Walker supports the quarantine, the farm is “losing $8,000 a week,’ Bloom said. Furthermore, because the federal government does not give subsidies to organic farmers, they will probably not receive any help. On the positive side, it has brought out the best in Eatwell’s members. “You don’t know how supportive people are until a crisis happens,” she said. “We haven’t lost a single member because of it.”
Because the organic farming community is small and non-competitive, other organic farms have stepped in with their own produce to help Eatwell fill its boxes, saying the farm can pay them back whenever they have the money.
Bloom notes that 80 percent of the farm’s financing comes from its CSA and new members are always welcome.
Although the Medfly scare gave campout participants a lesson in the risks faced by small organic farms, it didn’t derail their Sukkot activities. Shabbat afternoon was spent in Torah study, a workshop on how to identify bird calls, playing backgammon or napping.
After Havdalah in the sukkah, a drum circle began. One woman did a Burning Man-style poi, or fire dance, that she ended by dropping her flames into the bonfire to light it. Meanwhile, some watched the proceedings from the farm’s wooden hot tub.
As the light and heat of the bonfire rose to the crescendo of the drums Doug Chermak of Oakland broke the intensity by saying, “Now, let’s go do something tribal.”
Before camp was broken down the next morning participants held a closing circle where Zelig Golden of Oakland told everyone, “We hope that you’ll take away the energy of the earth, the knowledge of where our food comes from and the call to come back as a community.”
Some left shortly afterward, while others stayed to rescue some of the tomatoes and cook them on camping stoves for the requisite 30 minutes. They took them home as souvenirs from the weekend in the form of Ball jars filled with a base for tomato sauce, gypsy peppers and eggplant.