Celebrating Passover Sustainably: Recipe and Tips For a Green Passover

Passover is a time when families get together to share the Seder feast and celebrate the renewal and hope that spring brings. In this article, we’ll share some ideas for how to keep your Passover celebration sustainable and environmentally-friendly.

Celebrating Passover is a treasured family tradition. Coming together to honor the past, celebrate the present, and share the Seder feast is a very special ritual, and something that every Jewish family does in its own way.

Traditions are what bind us together, and sometimes it is difficult to make changes to the way we carry them out, even if those changes are positive ones, like being more environmentally conscious. But being more eco-friendly doesn’t mean you have to change the way your family celebrates. We’ll share some ideas about how you can have a greener Passover celebration without sacrificing important family customs. 

Celebrating Passover: Make Your Own Gefilte Fish

Does your family serve gefilte fish at your Passover celebration? Have you loathed the spongey gray balls floating in goo since childhood? You’re not alone. But by making your own gefilte fish, you will rediscover this primally repugnant jarred food in the best possible way. This will take a bit of work, but it will be so worth it. Plus, by making as many things from scratch as you can, you help reduce your environmental impact. How? 

1. Reducing Pollution: Most of the things in your supermarket have been transported across vast distances to get there – and caused high carbon emissions. Making food from scratch instead of buying ready-made products helps reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.
2. Less support for big food companies: Food and food products in the grocery store are often produced by multinational corporations that own thousands of brands. Some of these companies have been known to employ irresponsible practices, from exploiting farmers and workers, to the mislabeling and promotion of unhealthy and heavily processed food, to polluting with utter impunity. Help take the power away from Big Food by spending your money elsewhere. 
3. Taste: Just like homemade food will always be healthier, it will also always be tastier. 

So, let’s do this. 

Homemade Classic Gefilte Fish: Recipe

Recipe adapted from New York Times Cooking

Ingredients: 

• 2 medium yellow onions, peeled
• 2 celery stalks
• 2 large carrots, peeled
• 1 fennel bulb
• 6 black peppercorns
• 2 ½ teaspoons salt, or to taste
• 1 ½ pounds boneless, skinless salmon, whitefish or striped bass fillets, cut into 2-inch pieces
• ½ pound boneless, skinless trout, pike or carp (or a mixture of two), cut into 2-inch pieces
• 10 chives
• 3 tablespoons chopped parsley, tarragon, dill and/or a combination
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 4 to 6 tablespoons matzo meal
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
•  Prepared horseradish, for serving

Note: Use organic ingredients whenever possible!

Preparation:

1. Fill a large pot with 10 cups of water and bring to a boil. Coarsely chop 1 onion, 1 celery stalk, 1 carrot and the fennel bulb and add to the pot. Add the peppercorns and 1 teaspoon salt. Once the water is boiling, reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, while preparing the fish.
2. Coarsely chop the remaining onion, celery stalk and 1 carrot, then pulse in a food processor until finely chopped. Add fish, chives and 2 tablespoons parsley, tarragon and/or dill, and keep pulsing until the fish is chopped but not mushy.
3. Move the mixture to a bowl and add eggs, oil, matzo meal, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt (or more to taste) and ground black pepper, and mix well with your hands.
4. Using your hands, mold the fish mixture into 3- by 2-inch oval patties and place on a platter.
5. Gently add the patties to the pot. Cover and cook for about 20 minutes until patties are firm.
6. Use a slotted spoon to remove the fish from the poaching liquid and let it cool on a plate.
7. Garnish with the remaining tablespoon of fresh herbs and serve warm or at room temperature with horseradish at your Passover celebration.

Green Passover Celebration: Choose Local 

Choosing local foods helps decrease your carbon footprint, diffuse the market power of big food companies, and supports small businesses in your community. Celebrating Passover will feel even better knowing that you did something good for the place you call home. 

• Many Jewish families serve hard boiled eggs as a first course after the Seder. Choose to buy organic eggs from a local farm rather than the supermarket.
• Buy the meat for your feast and the zeroah (ceremonial shankbone) for your Seder plate from a local butcher that sources their animals responsibly. The more transparency, the better. Also, remember to stay far away from cancer-causing processed meats.
• Many vegetarians choose to use a beet or a yam instead of a shankbone on their Seder plates. In this case, look for a local farm to buy your produce. Also, choose fruits and vegetables for your passover celebration that are not perfect-looking. Huge amounts of produce is thrown out because consumers don’t buy ugly fruits and vegetables. You can help shift the state of things by buying carrots that are not perfectly straight, or apples that are not perfectly round. 
• Try growing your own bitter herbs at home. Horseradish, perhaps the most commonly used maror, takes quite some time to grow, but you can also use romaine lettuce, which is easy to grow in your garden, and you can use it to make healthy springtime salads all season long. 
• Parsley is also easy to grow at home, which can be used as the Karpas on your Seder plate. 

Tip: If you are having trouble sourcing high-quality, cruelty-free meat near your home, try looking into a meat delivery service, like Butcher Box or Mountain Primal.

Sustainable Passover Celebration: More Tips

• Don’t use disposable plates and utensils: Using disposable dinnerware wastes resources. The energy used to make and package them, the energy used to distribute them to supermarkets, and the energy to transport them to landfills can be saved just by using your regular dishes and silverware. If celebrating Passover is not a reason to bring out the good china, what is?
• Washing dishes is not exactly a fun task, but if you do it together with your family, it becomes a part of the festivities in a way, and will get done much more quickly.  Read on: Homemade Dish Soap: DIY Dish Soap and Dishwasher Detergent
• Don’t waste the leftovers: Celebrating Passover means cooking, and when you are preparing a feast for a large family, it can be difficult to figure out just how much food to make. If you do end up making too much, decide how much you can realistically consume in the next few days, and give away the rest to family members to take home. Or you could freeze them: Freeze Foods without Plastic: 6 Sustainable Household Hacks
• Compost: If you don’t already have a compost pile in your garden, start one! Composting is a great way to reduce waste and do something nice for your plants. Vegetable and fruit trimmings, egg shells, used coffee grinds, paper napkins, used tea bags, stale chips, and leftover wine or beer can all be used to make nutrient-rich soil for your garden.