Center for Jewish Food Ethics Launches “Shalom Begins on Your Plate”

The Center for Jewish Food Ethics (CJFE) is looking to shift Jewish communal food culture. CJFE encourages communities to adopt sustainable food policies, while practical strategies to help them do so.

“Food isn’t just about nourishment and nutrition,” CJFE Co-Executive Director Jonathan Jaffe Bernhard told the Journal. “The food choices that we make have implications beyond just feeding ourselves.”

There are health, ethical and sustainability implications, not to mention overall wellbeing.

Through its inaugural video initiative, “Shalom Begins on Your Plate,” the organization is highlighting the ways in which plant-based eating better aligns with Jewish values. As industrial animal agriculture is a primary driver of environmental threats such as deforestation, pollution, and climate-warming emissions, CJFE said this effort grows more urgent by the day.

The goal of the campaign is to increase awareness and adoption of more sustainable food practices.

“Eating gives us agency in this world to make a difference and to make an impact,” Bernhard said. “Each time we sit down, we can make a difference; each bite we take … gives us power.”

“Shalom Begins on Your Plate” features encouraging words from rabbis Eliot Baskin, Sharon Brous, Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Adam Grossman, Sandra Lawson and Alexandria Shuval-Weiner about the transformative power of food choices. The six of them are part of the more than 200 rabbis and cantors who signed a clergy statement callingupon Jewish institutions to move towards more plant-based eating.

In the video the rabbis talk about three guiding principles, related to a contemporary understanding of kashrut: what is fit and proper to eat. Bal Tashchit is avoiding unnecessary, wasteful destruction of the earth’s resources; Tza’ar Ba’alei Chayim relates to the compassionate treatment of all living creatures; and Shmirat haGuf encourages everyone to care for their bodies and the food they consume.

CJFE is a recently formed merger between Jewish Veg and the Jewish Initiative for Animals, which had similar missions.

“We’re more powerful in alignment,” Bernhard said. “We’re trying to take from those organizations the best elements and really forge something [transformative].”

Jewish Veg started the aforementioned clergy statement campaign, of which they hope to add another 100 signatures by the end of the year.

“It’s not a matter of you can’t eat meat – we’re not saying that,” Bernhard said. “We’re here to help the people at institutions … give people some more choices, some more information, some more awareness … [so they can] figure it out for themselves.”

Encouraging more plant-based options is not about taking things away from your life, it’s adding vegetables, it’s adding knowledge about the impact of what you chose to eat. When you know where your food comes from, and how it fits with Jewish values, you can make informed decisions that are in alignment with who you are and what you believe.

Bernhard said they want people to watch “Shalom Begins on Your Plate,” share it and engage in conversations. The video is available on YouTube and on the CFJE website.

“See what it brings up,” he said. “We want Jewish clergy to take action by also sharing it, but also signing the clergy statement that goes with it, so we can increase the number of clergy [along with] the momentum, the awareness and the conversation.”

If you are involved with a Jewish institution, whether it’s a synagogue, school or summer camp, and are interested in adopting more sustainable food policies, contact CJFE about working with them.

“Our tradition calls us to be stewards of the earth, of the other animals with whom we share it, and of our bodies,” Bernhard said. “Each of these responsibilities resonates in the mitzvot, the sacred opportunities life grants us.”

Learn more at jewishfoodethics.org