Three Generations in Brooklyn

This past Saturday, I attended the Brooklyn Food Conference (on Twitter here, hashtag #bfc) to speak on a panel about online organizing for food politics, as reported by Gillian Reagan in the New York Observer.

You can also read writeups by Paula Crossfield at CivilEats and Kim Severson at the New York Times.

While I was generally familiar with the issues that were raised, I was particularly touched by two aspects of the conference.

First, the scale of the hunger problem in New York City. As the economy grinds down, it's becoming an issue everywhere, but New York has a higher rate of hunger than the national average - and most of the people looking for food bank aid have jobs and places to live, they just can't reliably afford food. Need has increased across the board and many have to be turned away. The city is seeing these problems now, when it's lost 100,000 jobs, but another 200,000 are expected to vanish over the course of the recession.

We ain't seen nothin' yet as to how bad things be.

Second, there was Anna Lappé's short but moving speech during the closing session. As Crossfield reported at CivilEats, the pregnant Lappé was stunned by the lack of outrage in the pregnancy books she read that included lists of foods and actions that expectant mothers were supposed to avoid in order to reduce exposure to toxins. "Why do I, as an individual, have to find the fish with no mercury? Why is there mercury in our fish?," she said.

Lappé, who's expecting a daughter, realized while talking to her doctor that her unborn child already carried her full, lifetime complement of eggs. It occurred to her that right now, she's also carrying her grandchildren. What poisons her now poisons her grandchildren before their mother has even been born.

That's really not a state of affairs that one person, alone, is capable of effectively responding to. And that was the real message of the Brooklyn Food Conference.

There's an extent to which the food and agricultural industries are correct, in some measure, our health as it relates to our food is our responsibility. It's just that our responsibility doesn't end at doing our best to feed ourselves and our families healthy food. The more important responsibility is to take the political actions necessary to ensure that it's easy for everyone to access healthy food.

There shouldn't be mercury in our fish from our electricity production. There shouldn't be companies that are allowed to purposely release known toxins for public sale and use or dump toxic waste into our water and air. Yet as an individual, it may often be impossible even to buy alternatives to industrial products that generate all these ills, that force a hapless public to pay for their crimes, and put good food out of reach of all too many households worldwide.

Our actions matter to our grandchildren, and not later, but now. Our votes matter, and not just those votes with our wallets, but most of all, our votes at the ballot box.

Which is handy, because lots of our wallets are damn thin right now.