The Alaska Food Policy Council is holding its annual Food Festival and Conference this weekend. And Robbi Mixon, executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council and the local foods director with Cook Inletkeeper, said everyone is invited.
“We’re hoping anyone that eats attends our conference," she said.
Mixon said the conference is a chance each year to bring people together to talk about local food and food security in Alaska.
In 2019, the conference was in Homer. This year, it’s online. Meghan Geary, the local foods coordinator with the Alaska Farmers Market Association, said the 2020 virtual conference brought a lot of people out.
“We reached 59 unique communities and 43 percent of those communities were rural," she said. "So we did have a much larger reach than we wouldn’t have had had we had the conference in Anchorage and required travel and that sort of thing."
There's a long agendaof workshops and seminars on agriculture and sustainability. Some presenters hail from the Kenai Peninsula, including the team from Solarize the Kenai and the Kenai Local Food Connection.
Mixon said she’s excited that all the keynote speakers are indigenous women. Geary said she hopes it’ll be a space to talk about some big issues and opportunities Alaska communities are facing.
“While we have kind of those zoomed in sessions in our conference that are really specific, we do zoom out and have the broad session as well that talk about these topics – on food security, preservation, fermentation, waste, to be more food security individually and as communities," she said.
You can sign up and see the agenda at akfoodpolicycouncil.org
