Friday, January 21, 2011

Meanwhile, back at the ibex ranch...

From the most-emailed article ever in the NYT:
The Catskills ibex farm is owned by an unlikely pair of friends: Steven Jones, an African-American former police officer from Camden, New Jersey, and Marco Levin, a rabbi from Buenos Aires. Jones is one of the thousands of Americans who have turned to alternate investments after losing his savings in the financial crisis. Rabbi Levin is the founder of the Deuteronomy Diet, which recommends eating only foods available to the Jews of the Old Testament.
Levin believes that the ibex, a wild goat defined as kosher in the Book of Deuteronomy, is one of the healthiest foods in the world. “In Biblical times, men and women regularly lived for hundreds of years,” says Levin. “If we ate as our ancestors did, there’s no reason why modern man cannot do the same.”
Anna Williams first came to Yael Farms (yael is Hebrew for “Nubian ibex”) after her mother read an article by Dr. Walter Andersen, a clinical physician who specializes in adolescent health. Andersen thinks teenagers today are too focused on their minds, often at the expense of their physical well-being. “Their brains are getting plenty of exercise,” Dr. Andersen says. “It’s the rest of their bodies I’m worried about.”
At Yael Farms, Anna gets plenty of exercise. She spends the day herding ibex, drawing water from a well, and moving heavy stones. After a Deuteronomy-friendly dinner of figs, unleavened bread and honey-drizzled ibex, she practices her Mandarin. Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course. [More]
Could my life get any more mundane in comparison?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The increasingly diverse America that so many of us in agriculture have a hard time appreciating and accepting. Times are a changing.