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Jewish Contributions to Humanity

#29
#36 in a series

These Three
Conductors
Played Music
To Our Ears.

Hungry Harvest

Company rescues ugly fruits and
veggies from going to waste.

ROB STREIT JN INTERN

C

ommunity-supported
agriculture has grown in
popularity in recent years.
CSAs as they are called, provide
consumers the chance to buy a
“farm share” and, in return, the
farm provides a box of produce
each week.
But Hungry Harvest takes the
idea of farm-to-doorstep boxes
in a different direction. The
Maryland-based company, found-
ed by CEO Evan Lutz, specializes
in bringing produce deemed aes-
thetically unpleasing to custom-
ers in eight regions across the
U.S. Starting last month, Hungry
Harvest began delivering in Metro
Detroit.
“A lot of people requested that
we come to Detroit. We had a
waitlist, so we knew we had poten-
tial customers,” Lutz says.
Hungry Harvest didn’t always
have the wide reach it enjoys
today. Lutz, 25, started his com-
pany as a senior at the University
of Maryland.
“I was working for a nonprofit
that took leftover food from din-
ing halls, and student volunteers
drove it to soup kitchens and
homeless shelters,” Lutz says.
He was approached by a farmer
who was selling about 80 percent
of his product but was plowing
under the remainder of his crops.
The waste came from a lack of
interest from buyers or because
the produce had an odd shape,
size or color.
“But the produce was still unbe-
lievably fresh. To my eyes, it was

the same as the stuff I bought at
the farmers market,” Lutz says.
He decided the solution was to
start a farm stand in his dorm’s
basement, selling five pounds of
produce for $5. The stand went
from 10 customers to 500 in a mat-
ter of months. From that model,
Lutz began Hungry Harvest’s
home delivery service in 2014.
“We started out in Washington,
D.C., with two people doing every-
thing — orders, delivery, market-
ing,” Lutz says.
Soon his brainchild had out-
posts in Baltimore, Philadelphia,
Miami and Raleigh, N.C.
Lutz always had an interest in
social entrepreneurship — the
idea that a business can create
positive social change in a com-
munity.
“It goes back to my upbringing
in a Conservative Jewish house-
hold. We volunteered in soup
kitchens and homeless shelters,”
says Lutz, who attended Beth El
Congregation in Pikesville, Md.,
just outside of Baltimore.
Parents Helene and Randy didn’t
stand for plates with food still on
them. Everything was eaten, saved
as leftovers or composted.
The entrepreneur believes in the
concept of tikkun olam. He says
this guides his work and his desire
to reduce food waste while pro-
viding people with healthy food
options.
Hungry Harvest has partnered
with Oak Park-based Forgotten
Harvest, an organization that res-
cues food that would otherwise

SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY (1874-1951).
b. Vyshny Volochyok, Russia. d. Boston, Massachusetts.
A great of the American orchestra.
Born into a family of professional musicians,
Serge Koussevitzky began learning the violin, cello,
piano and trumpet at a young age. By 20, he joined
the Bolshoi Theater as a bass player. Moving to
Berlin with his wife, Natalie, in the early 1900s,
Koussevitzky made his debut as a conductor in 1908
for the Berlin Philharmonic. Moving back to Moscow,
he then founded his own orchestra and opened a music publishing business. Following
the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Koussevitzky took over the State Philharmonic
Orchestra of Petrograd, but in 1920 left the Soviet Union, resettling in the United States
to become the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924. Over the next
25 years, the orchestra became a gem of American music. Koussevitzky helped lead
the creation of a summer concert and educational series at Tanglewood, which thrives
to this day. He was an enthusiastic supporter of contemporary classical music, and
Leonard Bernstein was one of his students and protégés.

BRUNO WALTER (1876-1962).
b. Berlin Germany, d. Beverly Hills, California.
One of Europe’s and America’s great conductors.

A world-famous conductor known for his interpretation
of the music of the Viennese school of composers,
Bruno Walter made his first public piano performance
at the age of nine. By 1889, a young Walter decided he
was to become a conductor rather than a composer or
pianist. In 1900 he began composing at the State Opera
in Berlin and soon began working with Gustav Mahler at
the Court Opera in Vienna. Within the next decade, Walter
was conducting across Europe, enjoying a prolific career,
much to the chagrin of Adolf Hitler, who complained about Jewish conductors, and
specifically Walter, during some of his speeches in the 1920s. By 1939, Walter had
emigrated to the United States, settling in Beverly Hills. He regularly conducted the
Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, and by the time of his death was
regarded as one of the 20th century’s great conductors.

OTTO KLEMPERER (1885-1973).
b. Breslau, Germany. d. Zurich, Switzerland.
A classical renaissance.
The great conductor Otto Klemperer basically
had two careers—one before and one post-Nazis.
For the first three decades of the 20th century,
Klemperer befriended Gustav Mahler, became
conductor of the German Opera in Prague, and
held positions across Western Europe until 1933, when he moved to the United
States to head the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 1939, after finishing the summer
season at the Hollywood Bowl, Klemperer had surgery in Boston to remove a brain
tumor, which left him partly paralyzed on his right side. Klemperer returned to
Europe after World War II, and he enjoyed a career renaissance after taking over the
London Philharmonic Orchestra for 14 years. One of his final tours, in 1970, brought
Klemperer to the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and he was granted honorary Israeli
citizenship.

Original Research by Walter L. Field Sponsored by Irwin S. Field Written by Jared Sichel

jn

July 26 • 2018

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