Community Corner
Talking Food and Politics at the Coop
Friday's Wordsprouts reading at the Park Slope Food Coop brings together three different ways to think about food.
Fran Hawthorne recently gave a reading at of The Overloaded Liberal, her guide to navigating the complex choices involved in ethical living and consumption. As she took the stand, the person introducing her joked, “Obviously she lives in Park Slope.”
The primary locus for the neighborhood’s ethical living notoriety, is, of course, the Park Slope Food Coop, so it’s fitting that Hawthorne should be participating in a there on Friday night. A current Coop member with an off-and-on relationship spanning nearly twenty years, Hawthorne even devoted a whole section in her book to examining the choices the Coop coordinators make to offer products that meet their customers' high standards of both palate and conscience.
“I think half the people I interviewed in the book are from Park Slope,” Hawthorne said.
Hawthorne will be discussing The Overloaded Liberal on Friday night at 7 p.m. as part of a regular series at the Coop called Wordsprouts. This week’s event is called “On Food: Writers Talk Recipes, Politics, and Culinary Delights.” Hawthorne will be joined by Jan Poppendieck reading Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, and Melissa Vaughan discussing The New Brooklyn Cookbook.
“There’s so much to say about food,” Hawthorne marveled. “We’re three authors with three different angles and you could have a dozen more authors with a dozen other angles.”
As part of her reading, Hawthorne will be addressing an issue sure to be on the minds of many Coop members: can an ethical liberal eat meat?
Curated by writers Paula Bernstein and Paola Corso, Wordsprouts is a semi-monthly event that’s free and open to the community.
“The idea of the series is to encourage writing, but even more than that, it’s to encourage community and making connections with fellow Coop members outside of the produce aisle,” said Bernstein. Organizing the events also helps Bernstein and Corso fulfill the dreaded Coop work credit.
But Bernstein, who got involved with the series after conducting a memoir-writing workshop at the Coop, finds the work fulfilling in other ways as well.
“I think you generally get a very inquisitive and intellectually curious audience, and people who support creativity,” she said.
