By Joel Magalnick, JTNews Correspondent
As little as 100 years ago, the Jewish people lived primarily agrarian lives. It’s something that can often be forgotten, said Rabbi Jacob Fine, associate director of Hillel at the University of Washington, to a group of 80 young adults sitting at tables set up on the grassy driveway of Oxbow Farm in rural Carnation.
“It’s important for us to keep in mind that our ancestors would be at home here,” Fine told the attendees at Hillel’s Sukkot Harvest Festival Farm to Table dinner on the evening of Sun., Oct. 4.
But it’s that history that brought so many of the participants, most if not all of them city slickers, to this farm whose business is predicated on sustainable growth practices. Many have, for the past year, participated in Hillel’s Jharvest, the community-supported agriculture program that brings boxes of Oxbow’s organic produce to Hillel each week.
“Today, in our modern society, it’s very easy for us to lose touch with what the farmers inherently understood,” Fine said. “There are so many variables that contribute to the food landing on our plate.”
Participants learned first-hand from farmer Adam McCurdy, who grew much of the meal, and the chef who designed and cooked it, about what they were eating based upon what was ready for picking.
“It’s really easy to cook when you have such beautiful produce to work with,” Chef Linda Lantos told the group.
According to Lantos, 90 percent of the food was sourced locally, from the wild, troll-caught salmon to the cauliflower soup, which had been picked just days earlier, to the lavender atop the tort made from chocolate donated by Seattle-based Theo Chocolate.
Theo was not the only local company to donate its goods. The Pike Brewing Company provided beer, while Dry Fly Distilling of Spokane provided vodka, which set the base for the aperitif that included etrog liqueur and freshly picked pear. The lavender tea that accompanied dessert was provided by Joshua Russert and Becca Campbell, a couple who are active in Seattle’s Jewish community and recently founded B. Fuller’s Mortar & Pestle.
“I have never encountered such generous people in the food world,” Lantos said.
Fine tied the meal’s return to the land to Sukkot as the harvest holiday, noting that in ancient Jerusalem people would make three treks each year to the Temple to give thanks to God for the crops they had grown and to leave an offering. He contrasted this with today, when hundreds of different types of produce can be found at the supermarket, but with no real connection to where the items came from.
“Sukkot is a spiritual challenge, and a wakeup call to get back to our roots and recommit with the most essential elements of life: Food, community, shelter,” Fine said.
McCurdy, who is Jewish, gave a tour of the grounds and wove in connections to Sukkot throughout his explanations of the farm. He talked about not only organic farming practices but the challenges of land stewardship, particularly in a flood plain: The tent in which participants ate dinner, McCurdy said, was under four feet of water last November during the second 500-year flood in two years.
The nature of the farming Oxbow does is to specifically avoid monoculture, the practice of putting the same crops in the same fields year after year. They might do four plantings of lettuce in a season, McCurdy said, but in any given row, “if it’s lettuce the first time it’s not lettuce the second, third or fourth time.”
Even between the rows, the farmers plant different types of crops and move them around. A lot of what they plant are things unknown to most American palates such as cardoon, a relative of the artichoke family popular in Europe and sold to such local restaurants as Tilth in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, or the Ozette fingerling potato that was paired with a creamy herb dip as one of the dinner’s appetizers.
Much of what Oxbow plants is experimental, not only in the variety of the vegetable but in the timing of how, where and when it’s planted. Because of unpredictability of the weather from year to year and the crops’ placement in the farm’s 15 arable acres, there’s as much danger of failure as there is potential for success.
“Trials can be expensive,” McCurdy said. There are “a lot of judgment calls, true to life.”
It doesn’t always work: Oxbow lost two successions of beet plantings due to a noxious weed known as dock. That didn’t prevent the success of three varieties of beet ending up on the plates of the attendees at the dinner, however.
Avoiding a lot of what might be considered tried-and-true farming practices, such as using monoculture and pesticides, requires a lot more management and experimentation in figuring out how to keep out pests and cold while retaining the richness of the soil’s nutrients.
That includes the planting of cover crops, items planted alongside the intended crops as a way to increase the soil’s fertility and usefulness.
“We do a nice thick cover crop and hope it’s a toothbrush for the soil,” McCurdy said.
And Oxbow actually encourages the growth of weeds. Once they have gotten big enough, the farmers turn them over, and they eventually become soil.
Due to some of the timing and laws of supply and demand, not everything the farm grows gets sent to market. While the farm allows gleaning projects — members of the Kavana Cooperative, who also purchase CSA shares from Oxbow, had been doing just that earlier in the day — Oxbow donates 15 CSA boxes each week to local food bank, Food Lifeline. Doing so “keeps local land in farming and gives folks at food banks produce fresh-picked that day,” McCurdy said.
Rabbi Fine, whose wife Julie works for Rotary International’s First Harvest, reminded attendees that while the dinner should be considered a celebration of the land, it should also be a reminder that people do go hungry, something brought to light by many Jewish organizations during the Sukkot holiday.
Julie Fine told the group that 16 million children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night and that in this region alone, the food distribution organization Northwest Harvest saw an increase of 100,000 people per month in need of food from food banks from a year earlier.
Built into the cost of both the Jharvest and Kavana CSAs, she said, is money earmarked specifically for food banks as well.
It was a reminder that hit home as the moon lit up the clear autumn sky and the richness of the evening’s food settled into the participants’ stomachs for their drive back into the city.
For more information on the Jharvest community-supported agriculture program, contact Rabbi Jacob Fine at jacob@jconnectseattle.org or 206-527-1997.