Brooklyn Goes Global ReServist Comes Out of Retirement, Steps Up to the Plate for Food Conference
Gary Langley lists “event planner” among the various facets of his professional life. He is, and has been, responsible for making special occasions, well, special. On Saturday, May 2, it is his job as logistics coordinator to make the Brooklyn Food Conference run as smooth as butter.
Langley has been tending to every detail since January to assure that the day will dawn with volunteers at their stations, guest speakers in place and printed programs at hand so visitors will be entertained, informed and well fed.
Nancy Romer, general coordinator says Langley is “a good match because he’s so skilled at exactly what we need, and he loves the goals of the project.”
The conference is the idea of volunteers at the Park Slope Food Cooperative, where Romer, a longtime social activist, is a member. The co-op, founded in 1973, now claims 15,000 members and is billed as the largest member-worker food coop in the country. The event is to be more than a day-long food festival for families. It is to be a call to area producers for healthful food at affordable prices, an appeal to limit the power of agribusiness and return farming to families, and a forum on how to free the world from the ravages of hunger and obesity.
“Food is a universal organizing issue because it has cultural and personal meaning to all,” Romer says. “Changing the food system is key to addressing climate change, the energy crisis, the health crisis, and poverty.”
The history, she says, is that agribusiness and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) together have bankrupted smaller farms in the United States, Mexico and Central America and made deep cuts in the supply of healthful and affordable food grown closer to home. NAFTA, she says, has allowed U.S. agribusiness to flourish elsewhere as well as undercutting local farmers, forcing farmers off their land in Mexico and Central America. Many of these farmers have fled north, leaving their home countries clueless of best practices regarding soil and climate.
The conference, free to all, is a project of the Brooklyn Food Coalition, an umbrella group of sponsors and partners. It will run along Seventh Avenue in Park Slope between John Jay High School and PS 321.
Featured speakers include Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurant at Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate; LaDonna Redmond, head of Chicago’s Institute of Community Resource Development; and authors Anna Lappe, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, and Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.
Other attractions along the avenue will include an inaugural New Orleans-style parade featuring huge puppets; 70 workshops on a wide range of topics; food demos; activities for children and teens, food and dance.
Sponsors are Brooklyn’s Bounty, Brooklyn Rescue Mission, Caribbean Women’s Health Association (CWHA), Park Slope Food Coop and World Hunger Year (WHY). More than 120 organizations are partners as diverse as the Center for the Urban Environment, Children’s Aid Society and United Food and Commercial Workers.
The Coalition hopes that everyone takes away something positive from the day, whether it is the opportunity to pet farm animals or churn butter, to learn how to shop and better feed a family, or to be inspired to take action as an individual, as a family, or as part of a group..
Langley is taking away memories of an engaging respite from retirement and of CWHA, his ReServe partner. And he learned that “a group of volunteers, when they get their heads together, can do anything.”
www.brooklynfoodconference.org
Tags: Brooklyn Food Conference, Food Co-Op, NAFTA, Park Slope