Food of love

Meet Nigel Savage, the British visionary behind the American Jewish environmental movement.

By AMY KLEIN
Food of love (photo credit: DAVID GARTNER PHOTOGRAPHY / VERSUSGOLIATH.COM)
Food of love
(photo credit: DAVID GARTNER PHOTOGRAPHY / VERSUSGOLIATH.COM)
Nigel Savage clicks through pictures on his desktop in quick succession as he talks, barely stopping on one before narrating the next slide. He jumps out of his chair to find relevant booklets that cite Jewish sources on protecting the environment, then jumps up again to open the window or close the door.
The founder and executive director of the American Jewish environmental group Hazon (“Vision”) has Attention Deficit Disorder, commonly known as ADD.
The energy is a bit much to absorb, but it is probably one of the main characteristics that has made Savage such a visionary. Yes, a visionary.
It is hard to imagine that there was a time not too long ago when a certain segment of liberal America was not obsessed by issues of sustainability, the environment and food sources. A time when hardly anyone asked questions like: Where does our food come from? How much energy are we consuming? Are we destroying our planet? But in 2000, long before Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, before Michael Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma that changed the ecology of eating, Savage decided to start a Jewish organization devoted to the environment.
Oh, and it wouldn’t be like other major Jewish organizations at the time, which were using the standard Federation model of trying to raise money for a cause. Savage’s would be an experiential organization: Jews would bike ride across America in order to raise money for and awareness about the environment and sustainability.
“You’re not a rabbi, you’re not a PhD, you can’t ride a bike and you’ve never worked in the non-profit world, but you want to launch a non-profit and Jewish bike ride?” Savage, 50, recalls the reaction at the time to his idea.
As someone with ADD, Savage says he did not consider those facts because his disorder is not an “attention” problem, but one of “disinhibition” – or, as psychologists define it, a lack of restraint. “I want it and I want it now,” is how he puts it. Others might call it a laserlike focus.
That focus helped him transform his kernel of an idea into Hazon, a $3-million organization that “creates healthier and more sustainable communities in the Jewish world and beyond.” To date they count 70,000 people on their database, not to mention 200 educational programs a year, and more than 2,000 people who have participated in their various bike rides in the United States and Israel.
Savage grew up in Manchester, England, where his precociousness in high school propelled him into university a couple of years ahead of most contemporaries. A junior year abroad at Georgetown earned him most of a Master’s degree before he even completed his BA in politics at Sussex University. But his major education at Sussex was in Jewish identity. He arrived at university rather uninterested in either Judaism or Israel. Elected to the executive of the student union, Savage became the focus of an intense anti-Zionist campaign that triggered headlines across Britain and ironically sealed his own commitment to Jewish activism. His academic excellence took him to NM Rothschild and Sons, the London branch of the iconic investment house, where a glittering and richly-rewarded career beckoned.
“I come from the nerdy wing of Jewish England,” Savage admits, his thick black glasses, checked blue shirt and orange and blue striped tie attest to that, although in hipster circles that look is nerdy-chic.
But he threw away a looming life of financial luxury at age 32 and moved to Israel where he spent several years in the 1990s studying at Pardes and other liberal religious institutions, and spending a lot of time “outdoors.”
From there, it was a short step to New York and the establishment of Hazon.
“Jewish tradition comes alive outdoors – we didn’t enter Jewish history in a synagogue or JCC,” he says. “I was very frustrated that the Jewish community seemed most united in what they were against – but what were we for? What’s our vision?” His vision came from talking to a friend who had just been on a fundraising bike ride.
So, in 2000, Savage started the first Hazon Cross-USA Ride from Seattle to Washington, D.C. “I felt this was the right thing do to, pedagogically, for the Jewish community.”
Riders
Over the years, there have been bike rides around the US (with an annual one in New York and San Francisco) and the Israel Ride, a five-day, 200-300 mile ride across the country. The riders learn about Hazon’s work and how it relates to Jewish tradition, and educate those they meet along the way.
They also raise money for Hazon’s educational programs, as well as their partners, like the Arava Institute in Israel, and Adamah: The Jewish Farming Fellowship.
This year, Hazon has brought back the Cross-USA Ride, a 10-week odyssey crossing 13 states to raise awareness for sustainable food systems, including The Farm Bill, the US federal government’s primary agricultural and food policy tool. The ride aims to raise more than $100,000.
Back in 2004, after the bike rides had proved popular and successful, Savage says he was “getting miserable.”
“I didn’t intend that Hazon be the ‘Jewish Bike Ride’ organization,” he says.
So he turned his attention to food, and in 2004, the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was started at Anshe Chesed, a Conservative Synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side. A CSA enables consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Members sign up and get a weekly delivery of local produce. Today, Hazon sponsors CSAs with 10,000 members, and donates nearly 18 tons of food to people in need.
In 2006, Hazon started its first Jewish Food conference, which became an annual event for cool, hipster Jews, locavores, vegetarians, Jewish farmers, chefs, foodies, and people interested in Judaism and food. Hazon says the goal of the conference is to “encourage participants to think more deeply and broadly about their food choices, food systems – including issues of food access and affordability – and the connection of contemporary food issues to Jewish tradition and texts.”
Sue Fishkoff, the author of “Kosher Nation” and the editor of J., the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, calls Nigel a “pioneer” who moved Jewish food issues to the top of the American Jewish agenda.
“He actually coined the phrase ‘new Jewish food movement’ nearly eight years ago,” she says. “It’s largely because of him that food issues are such a hot topic of conversation in synagogues, Jewish schools and Hillels nationwide.”
Yosef Abramowitz, now president of the Arava Power Company, Israel’s solar energy pioneer, says he owes his current career to Savage.
“Nigel is a visionary. He is one of the great original characters in Jewish life today and an inspiration to others,” says Abramowitz.
“It was he who pushed me to try and pursue the mission of making the Jewish people the first nation on earth to become carbonneutral.” “Before he came along, there were a bunch of small, scattered Jewish environmental organizations but Nigel was able to tap into that and build something so much more substantial that had real Jewish roots and real community garden roots.”
At the time, people were perplexed: They had finally gotten used to the idea of a Jewish bike-riding organization when Hazon branched out. “I’m glad we called it Hazon – we’re really about vision and inspiration, sustainable communities,” Savage says.
To him, the connection between Jews, food and the environment is obvious.
“For 3,000 years we’ve had a tradition of keeping kosher and of asking, literally, ‘Is this food fit for me to eat?’ Hazon wants Jews to think not only about whether an animal is kosher, but questions like: Was it slaughtered in squalid conditions? Did it eat food that is native to it? Are the workers treated fairly? Do Jewish institutions care about sustainability? What do they serve at events? “The Jewish community is one tiny piece of a mosaic, and we’re a small piece. We’re part of the Jewish community that’s trying to influence in some small way,” he says.
“I’m not here to tell anyone else how to eat,” says Savage, who keeps a kosher home with his wife. “I don’t feel I have standing to do that. Trace down your food choices and think about their consequences.”
Conviction
Jews began taking food issues more seriously, especially after the federal raid on Agriprocessors in 2008, which resulted in the conviction and deportation of some 300 illegal workers and a 27-year prison sentence for CEO Sholom Rubashkin.
Still, it wasn’t enough for Savage. In 2011, Hazon founded Siach: An Environmental and Social Justice Conversation, a conference aimed at uniting Israeli and Diaspora activists on the subject.
All these events were enough to make any executive exhausted. Last summer, Savage decided he wanted to take a sabbatical.
His board said no. In his focused way, he persisted, and they finally agreed on four months. By the time he returned in December 2011, a number of innovative Jewish start-ups, like J-Dub, the Jewish record company that had launched the Hassidic reggae star Matisyahu, closed.
“I came back from sabbatical and said: this isn’t business as usual,” Savage wrote at the time, in a blog post entitled “New Vision at a Dark Moment.” He cited the bad economy, cost-cutting measures at Hazon, and a proliferation of Jewish non-profits interested in food and the environment.
“Non-profits have an obligation to work as effectively as they possibly can. That means thinking about opportunities to share costs, to reduce overhead, to work more efficiently, and to explore a range of partnerships and collaborations.”
What Savage will do with that knowledge is not yet clear, but surely he won’t rest on his laurels.
“I think that running a non-profit is hard, working in the Jewish community is incredibly hard,” he says. “For non-profits there’s always more to do. There’s an endless world of things to do.”
Looking back over the last decade, so many things have changed. Can Savage believe how far his little idea has come? “I am not good at thinking about the future in that way,” he says, again referring to his ADD. “I cannot reconstruct what I was thinking when I founded it – I really believed that the rides were capable of being transformative, and they’ve been transformative in an incredible way for all sorts of people – powerful and profound,” he says.
“I don’t think I fully imagined Hazon.”