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By Caitlin McNamara
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The Brooklyn Food Conference, which began as a seed of an idea last summer within a Park Slope Food Coop committee, has grown into an all-day blockbuster event combining keynote lectures, workshops and hands-on activities for kids.

The conference, on May 2, is designed to speak to a diverse spectrum of interests related to what and how we eat — from sustainability and accessibility to issues of labor, social justice and public policy. More than 200 organizations have signed on to participate.

Kids can be up close with a dairy cow and chickens, while adults can learn from the expert panel of speakers, meet local farmers and Brooklyn restaurateurs or take part in one of 70 workshops. There will be film screenings, cooking demonstrations and a Teen Iron Chef.

Best of all — it’s all free.

Last July, the coop’s Safe Food Committee, which is concerned with educating coop members about the hazards of genetically modified foods, realized that its combined expertise about a range of food-related issues could benefit an audience far beyond the slope. Committee members set about addressing what member Adam Rabiner has called the “broken global food system.�

Nancy Romer, also a coop member, is the conference’s general coordinator. A professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and longtime organizer for labor, public education and other movements, she says the conference is just the beginning of the conversation.

“Our elected officials need to heed our call: start changing legislation so that healthy food producers and providers are supported,� she says. “Right now, agribusiness gets massive subsidies from our tax money and their methods and food are harming our planet and our health.�

Worrisome indicators about the state of the borough’s health highlight serious systemic shortcomings. Conference literature sites a “Supermarket Need Index� created by the Department of City Planning, which determined that three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with a high need for grocery stores. In Brooklyn, those neighborhoods are Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, East New York and Sunset Park.

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has found that 82 percent of all food stores in Bed-Stuy and Bushwick are small corner stores known as bodegas. Supermarkets make up only 6 percent of all food stores in these areas.

Romer says that because everyone has a close relationship to food, it is a “universal organizing issue� to address climate change, the energy and health crises, and poverty. She explains why Brooklyn is the right place to launch a discussion of this magnitude:

“Let’s face it: Brooklyn is awesome! People move to Brooklyn because they want to be with the people who have always lived in Brooklyn: a mix of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, styles. Brooklyn loves the mix and that’s what the Brooklyn Food Conference has as its base — the dynamic mix of Brooklyn.

“Over the last 10 years so many fine people and organizations have been developing interesting and important work around food issues and growing and distributing food, too,� says Romer. “We couldn’t have organized this conference without the many years of work by the people in all those groups.�

Event co-sponsors, in addition to the Park Slope Food Coop, are the Caribbean Women’s Health Association, Brooklyn Rescue Mission, World Hunger Year and Brooklyn’s Bounty.

Featured speakers include Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurant, Anna Lappé, author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and LaDonna Redmond, president and CEO of the Institute of Community Resource Development in Chicago.

The conference is at P.S. 321 and at John Jay High School, on 7th Avenue between 1st and 5th streets in Park Slope. Online sign up is requested at brooklynfoodconference.org. Naturally, food will be available for sale from Brooklyn vendors, and the day will be end with live music and dancing. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend.

“Hey, now’s the time to say ‘Yes we can’ ‘Yes we can change the food system so it provides healthy, sustainable food for all,’� says Romer. “And Brooklyn can do it if we organize. Wouldn’t that be great?�

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