Jewish Group Hopes to Expand 'Eco-Kosher' to Other Faiths

[Ian David]

Many Christians say grace at mealtime, but that shouldn’t be the extent of the relationship between their faith and their food.

So says Debra Kolodny, executive director of ALEPH, a Jewish Renewal group that recently launched an interfaith Sacred Foods Project with a $200,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Twenty-five years ago, Kolodny said, the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, coined the term “eco-kashrut” or echo-kosher. It describes the practice of evaluating food and production from a spiritual perspective for its healthfulness, its environmental impact, and its treatment of animals and workers.

The Sacred Foods Project, she said, takes the idea and expands it from Judaism to all faith traditions.

The project aims to encourage people of various faiths to study what their own scriptures and traditions say about eating, Kolodny told EthicsDaily.com in an interview.

“The idea is we want to get some kind of shared understanding about what good food is,” she said. The hope is that when people are educated, their purchasing and consumption habits will change.

“There’s so much mindlessness about eating,” she said.

“As people of faith we have a moral obligation to be good stewards of the earth,” Kolodny said in a . “We must make sure that the way we grow and distribute food honors the land, the water, the air, our bodies and our souls.”

She said the Sacred Foods Project is an outgrowth of the growing interest in sustainable agriculture—methods of food production that are able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs—and the increasing importance of faith in the marketplace.

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