Sustainable Turkey

Here is a nice JCarrot blog about sustainable kosher turkeys for Thanksgiving with a shout out to KOL Foods...

For those who keep kosher, every meal is an opportunity to connect the physical earth with the mystical God. If there is one time a year that all Americans get a taste of this experience, it is the ritualized meal of Thanksgiving. Enter a growing awareness about the savagery of the modern meat industry, an uncomfortable exposure of assumptions about kosher meat, and most of all, a horror of Tofurky, and kosher consumers everywhere are seeking out new options for the holiday.

As recently as a couple of years ago, the availability of kosher turkey bearing the label “organic” or “pasture-raised” or even “natural” was pretty much zero. Now, it’s a land of plenty out there, relatively speaking. While this type of turkey isn’t something that you can find on the shelves of your kosher grocer, you can order them from companies like KOL Foods. With shipping, these companies will send you an 11-12 lb. turkey for $80-100. This is a lot of money, but perhaps not too exorbitant for a special meal that you can truly be grateful for and comfortable eating.
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/133194/#ixzz15exEj81U.

Pastured Turkeys. Online ordering available now until Nov. 3

KOL Foods' Broad Breasted Whites are not your normal birds. They are raised on the pasture of Jake Zook’s Amish farm in Lancaster Country, PA especially for KOL Foods. While conventional turkeys are fed and bred to have such large breasts that they have trouble walking, KOL Foods’ turkeys are reminiscent of a time before industrialization when poultry was free to roam. Our turkeys live turkey lives. Jake provides them with all the staples: ample food, drink, protection and good old-fashioned freedom. The turkeys live on the farm’s pastureland where a hoop barn provides them with shade but does not keep them contained. Using a technique called Rotational Grazing, Jake moves the hoop barn each morning to a fresh piece of pasture. The birds follow to find fresh grass and grubs – in a bird’s eye view: heaven.


Jake understands what they mean; he also sees his farm as heaven. In the 1980s he farmed conventionally like all his neighbors and friends. Then severe liver illness brought him to his knees. In and out of the hospital for months, Jake had time to discover that the cause of his disease came from the toxic fertilizers he was using. Once well, Jake vowed to work with nature instead of toxins. He converted his farm to raise his animals on pasture. Jake and his soils took a while to recover, but now the land that once was so hard and infertile that most of the pesticides he put on it washed into the creek, is rich and fertile and can absorb rain water again. The earthworms have returned.

In the age of industrial meat production, we have forgotten that the health of our bodies isn’t just in what we eat; it is in what what we eat eats. For our turkeys to be healthy for us, they need to eat healthy grass and healthy grubs grown on healthy soils. In a wonderful synergy of nature, not only are pastured turkeys healthy for us and healthy for the earth, they are deliciously rich in flavor. They taste like turkey was meant to taste.

So let’s have a truly special Thanksgiving. Eat consciously. Know your farmer and where your meal comes from and to be truly thankful in bringing them to your table.

Pastured turkey online ordering is available until Nov. 3rd.
Click here for more information and to order.