As an exhibitionist ex-academic, I was delighted to participate on a Public Humanities panel on Food and Sustainability at Portland State University last week. The panelists were asked to keep their presentations short (6-8 minutes) so that there would be ample time to for the audience to participat...

  “We don’t need that!� My Zaidie glares at my mother and puts the second of two (yes, two) containers of homemade cookies back in the cardboard box from whence they came. This ritual is repeated over and over with a multitude of food products—salad dressings loaded with fat and sugar, pack...

Hi there! Kara here. Just a simple girl who grew up in a Southern Baptist/ evangelical/ Methodist home south of Chicago. Then converted to Judaism through a well-known conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. I never bought that whole Holy Trinity theory. But that’s another story… My first Purim w...

“They were to observe them as days of feasting and merrymaking (y’mei mishteh v’simha) and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor.” -Esther 9:22 Other than reading and/or hearing the Megillah, every mitzvah of Purim is mentioned in this one v...

We live in a world with information overload. Data, facts, statistics and definitive answers to specific questions are immediately available from search engines on the internet. But people want more than facts.  They want understanding.  They want meaning. They want context.  They want stories. C...

I baked bread for the first time a few weeks ago, and it was a life-changing moment. Not just because it was some of the best bread I had ever tasted, but because it also made me think seriously about what bread means. In an age when we have all kinds of grain products at our disposal (rice, noodles...

My father’s all-purpose costume for Halloween and Purim turned him into a five-foot-eight sunflower, a three part transformation that made an American Jew into an American seed into a symbol of Jewish passing in ancient Persia. Essentially, he would put on a green turtleneck and his green cour...

It’s like a religious ritual: before each meal at my mother in law’s house, we act out the same scene. We all stand around the table, goggle eyed and groaning at the sight, and Laura worriedly hunches her shoulders and states, “I don’t think there will be enough food.â€� She’s right: t...

There’s been a ton of buzz about the February 25th NY Times article What’s Eating Our Kids? Fears About ‘Bad’ Foods, by Abby Ellin. The article asserts that parents who are “vigilant about their children’s consumption of sugar, processed foods, and trans fats� and “try to stick to an...

I usually don't see myself as a guilt-ridden person. However, yesterday I learned that old Catholic habits hang around in difficult-to-discern guises. I've got a natural food store checkout clerk to thank for this valuable churchless insight. This was my first visit carrying a Whole Foods re...