The New York Times Magazine recently ran an article about the intersections between Jewish kosher laws and the sustainable movement:
Kastner is part of a nascent Jewish food movement that draws upon the vast body of Jewish traditions related to agriculture and farming; Judaism, for all its scholarly abstraction, is a land-based religion. The movement emphasizes the natural intersections between the sustainable-food movement and kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process food goes through before it reaches the table. “The core of kashrut is the idea of limiting oneself, that not everything that we can consume should be consumed,” Kastner said. “I wouldn’t buy a ham sandwich, and I would also refrain from buying an exotic mangosteen imported from China, which wastes fossil fuels and is grown with pesticides.” He told me he studied shechita because he wants to “create food systems outside the industrial model.” He has been trying to set up a grass-fed-kosher-meat co-op in his neighborhood; he says he hopes to travel to a local farm and shecht the animals himself.
Read the entire article, which includes a look at the 20th century industrial kosher foods machine, here.