This is an excerpt from The Sacred Table, Creating a Jewish Food Ethic, edited by Rabbi Mary Zamore of Temple B’Nai Or in Morristown. She will be speaking about the book on April 15 at the temple’s 7:30 pm Shabbat service, with a reception afterward. On April 17, she will talk at 9 am and 11:30 am, also at the temple. The talks are free and open to the public.
REAL LIFE / REAL FOOD, Let Your Table Be to You a Temple
JOSEPH AARON SKLOOT
At the edge of the Costa Rican rainforest, a group of American Reform Jewish high school students encountered bags marked “Toxic” and “Flammable” and signs painted “Danger.” A stone’s throw away, there were one-room ramshackle brick and corrugated metal homes with mud floors and wood fire pits. A few steps to the right, in- side a large hanger-like building, were bananas. Heaped in dumpsters, on conveyer belts, piled on the ground—bananas were everywhere.
The students—having chosen to spend their spring break doing mitzvot in Costa Rica—were surprised to learn about the troubling complexity of banana cultivation. Bananas—those ordinary staples of the American breakfast table—don’t come cheap. That day, the students 
learned that bananas are a natural wonder, scarcely found in the wild. To get those sugary, golden-hued fruit to our supermarkets, the U.S.-based companies that control banana cultivation the world over employ a cocktail of toxic fertilizers and pesticides known to harm human beings and animals. They clear acres of virgin forest and replace vibrant tropical ecosystems with banana monocultures. They burn remarkable amounts of fossil fuel to transport their product over vast distances—far more than producers of other crops. They drive down wages by snuffing out competition; they deny their workers health care and education, and they prohibit unionization.1 The bottom line: transforming this wondrous and rare plant into an everyday breakfast item takes a tremendous ethical and ecological toll.
I love bananas as much as anyone, but the ubiquity of this fruit is an example of a larger trend in American life—the desecration of the nourishing plants and animals God commanded us to “protect and nurture” in the Book of Genesis (2:15). Banana producers have transformed a rare and fragile fruit into an utterly ordinary breakfast staple. They have accomplished this feat through various nefarious technological, political, and economic practices—along the way damaging the earth and the lives of its inhabitants. By contrast, we Jews have an ancient system of mitzvot regulating agriculture, diet, and food preparation. A striking passage in the Babylonian Talmud encapsulates this system in a single sentence: “Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Eliezer taught: As long as the Temple stood, its altar atoned for Israel’s sins, but now a person’s table atones for him” (B’rachot 55a).
For the Rabbis of the Talmud, food—the proper foods cultivated and prepared in the proper manner—could be as holy as the sacrifices offered on the altar of the Temple long ago. After my experience in Costa Rica, it was difficult to imagine how bananas could continue to appear on my home’s modern stand-in for the ancient Temple’s altar, the kitchen table. The ecological and social harm wrought by banana production has besmirched this fruit’s golden reputation; as a con- sequence, I decided to replace bananas in my diet with other, locally grown, organic fruits. In other words, there may be no better place to start redressing the errors of agribusiness than with those bananas on the breakfast table.
NOTE
1. Organic bananas are certainly an all-around better choice than conventional bananas. Grown without pesticides, they are safer for the agricultural laborers and for surrounding ecosystems. However, growing them in quantity is difficult and requires the deforestation of virgin forests at high altitudes (where banana-loving diseases are scarce). Moreover, they do little to increase the quality of life of the laborers who grow and harvest them or to decrease quantities of fossil fuel burned in transportation to our markets. See Dan Koeppel’s excellent discussion of the topic in Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (New York: Plume, 2008), 232–35.
