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Food Not Bombs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Food Not Bombs is a loose-knit group of independent collectives, serving free vegan and vegetarian food to others. Food Not Bombs ideology claims that myriad corporate and government priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance. To demonstrate this (and to reduce costs), a large amount of the food served by the group is surplus food that would otherwise go to waste from grocery stores, bakeries and markets.
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Food Not Bombs is an effort to feed anyone who is hungry. Each chapter collects surplus food that would otherwise go to waste from grocery stores, bakeries and markets, sometimes incorporating dumpster diving, then prepares it into community meals which are served for free to anyone who is hungry. The central beliefs of the group are:
- If governments and corporations around the world spent as much time and energy on feeding people as they do on war, no one would go hungry.
- There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but so much of it goes to waste needlessly, as a direct result of capitalism and militarism.
- Vegan food is both healthy and nonviolent.
Food Not Bombs also tries to call attention to poverty and homelessness in society by sharing food in public places and facilitating gatherings of poor, homeless and other disenfranchised people. There are four tenets to the Food Not Bombs philosophy:
- Recycling of food
- Decision making by consensus
- Nonviolence
Anyone who wants to cook may cook, and anyone who wants to eat may eat. Food Not Bombs strives to include everyone.
Food Not Bombs began in the early 1980s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, a city adjacent to Boston, when a group of anti-nuclear activists, who were protesting the nearby Seabrook power plant, began spray-painting the slogan "Money for food, not for bombs" around the city. The slogan was shortened to "Food Not Bombs", and it became the name of their group. Soon after, they decided to put their slogan into practice. At a meeting of wealthy bank executives who were financing nuclear projects, the group showed up and started handing out free food outside to a crowd of three hundred homeless people. The action was so successful that the group began doing it on a regular basis, collecting surplus food from grocery stores and preparing it into meals.
In the late 1980s, a second chapter of Food Not Bombs was formed in San Francisco. This chapter soon encountered tension with the police and fought two "Soup Wars" with the city's mayors, Art Agnos and Frank Jordan. Agnos initiated the first confrontation by using riot police to shut down a Food Not Bombs serving. The group was persistent, however, and despite being arrested hundreds of times, managed to continue serving food on the street. Their use of the media's coverage of the altercation allowed them to gain community support. The conservative Mayor Jordan succeeded Agnos and tension continued between Food Not Bombs and the Office of the Mayor. Members of the group were routinely beaten and jailed by police.[citation needed] By this time, however, the group had expanded. With crowds of hundreds of people at each serving, police action was difficult. Members of Food Not Bombs began videotaping police action and using the court system to try and stop police abuse.
During the 1990s the Boston chapter of Food Not Bombs also faced some opposition from local police. However, following demonstrations and offers of solidarity from local churches, the potential bad publicity made carrying out of this opposition impractical.
In the San Francisco election of 1995, candidate Willie Brown promised to stop the attacks on Food Not Bombs. Brown won the election.
In part because of the media attention that Food Not Bombs garnered during their struggles in San Francisco, chapters began springing up all over the world. Food Not Bombs continued to gather strength throughout the 1990s, and held four international gatherings: in San Francisco in 1992 and 1995, in Atlanta in 1996, and in Philadelphia in 2005. Chapters of Food Not Bombs were involved in the rise of the Anti-Globalisation Movement in the late 1990s, leading to the APEC resistance in Vancouver in 1997; the June 18, 1999 International Carnival Against Capitalism; and the "Battle in Seattle" later that year, which shut down the World Trade Organisation meetings.
Food Not Bombs has also been heavily involved in the anti-war movement which arose in 2002-2003 to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
During a presentation to the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, an FBI counter-terrorism official labeled Food Not Bombs and Indymedia as having possible terrorist connections. [1]
Today, there are close to 200 chapters of Food Not Bombs all over the world, though most are concentrated in North America. Food Not Bombs has a loose structure: every chapter of Food Not Bombs embraces a few basic principles, and carries out the same sort of action, but every chapter is free to make its own decisions, based on the needs of its community. Likewise, every chapter of Food Not Bombs operates on consensus: everybody does an equal share of work, and has an equal say in making decisions. Besides collecting and distributing food for free, most chapters of Food Not Bombs are involved in community anti-poverty, anti-war and pro-immigrant organising, as well as many other political causes. Because most Food Not Bombs groups share the same values and because they operate in a generally anarchist fashion, Food Not Bombs is sometimes known as a "franchise anarchistic organization".
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