FNB: Cooking for Peace and Social Change

Food Not Bombs is a growing international activist network that is part of the larger movement for social and economic justice. FNB works to challenge militarism and the systems of inequality that create social violence and poverty in the process of generating profit and privilege. There are more than one hundred local FNB groups in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. All are volunteer run, anti-authoritarian collectives that distribute free vegetarian food at open community meals in public spaces. By providing direct services in highly visible areas FNB works to confront economic and political structures that simultaneously create poverty and criminalize those who are poor.

FNB groups collect and recycle donated food that would otherwise be wasted and strive to develop alternative models of how resources should be distributed in society. While we receive no money from the government we organize to generate support for our projects in our communities. FNB groups practice consensus decision making, a process that promotes collective empowerment and strives to replace hierarchy with cooperative structures of organizing. FNB is committed to the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence and believes that we must organize against racism, sexism, classism, authoritarianism, and their root causes if we are to remove the conditions which fuel social and economic injustice.

Day To Day Life of SFFNB

Legendary Civil Rights organizer Ella Baker frequently reminded activists that while there are significant big events and successful actions in a movement, there are also countless days of tedious and mundane work which make the big events and actions happen. Day to day work in FNB often consists of people running around trying to keep things together. "Where is the cook pot?" "Do we have spoons and literature for the meal?" "Who can take the food to the park?" Our weekly meetings frequently consist of asking "how can we get more volunteers?" and "how can we do our work in a more organized and participatory fashion?" We spend countless hours working on issues of collective accountably and responsibility, sexism, and collective empowerment. We try to look at the reality of our group, the goals and philosophy we hold, and recognize how much work we have to do. We often replicate inequality in our group. We are often trying to do too much with too few people. We are frequently unprepared to respond to the latest police sweep against homeless people, let alone seriously challenge institutionalized racism and sexism.

But we also try to prepare meals in our volunteer cookhouses everyday and get hot nutritious food out. We try to support other groups' efforts be taking food to protests and rallies. We regularly use bike-carts to transport food to reduce the use of fossil fuels. We regularly take hundreds of pounds of food scraps to the local community garden and turn what would be waste into nutrient-rich soil through composting. In the community garden there is an FNB garden plot where we grow herbs for the soup. While we often have hard times, and frequently don't have enough volunteers, we keep on cooking and keep struggling to live our politics in our group and implement our politics in society.

Confronting Injustice in Our Own Backyards

FNB groups operate in large cities, suburbs, and rural towns. Through free food giveaways we hope to draw attention to larger economic problems and the political issues that exist locally. Serving in the local park or civic center draws attention to the fact that people are on the streets, in the parks, under highways, in costly temporary hotels, and in unaffordable housing that leaves little to no money for food. FNB community meals aim to draw attention to the local impact the global economy is having on people's lives: that while there may be increasing numbers of millionaires there are millions of people living below the poverty line. While drawing attention to local realities of inequality we also strive to create models of community activism that demonstrate the ways that we can become involved and create positive change.

Our local community activism around poverty and homelessness also aims to highlight and confront politically expedient, yet ineffective ways of addressing poverty through ordinances and bans that criminalize homeless people. Business associations push for and local governments implement bans against panhandling, camping, loitering and various other ordinances under the banner of "quality of life." "Quality of life" for whom you might ask? These laws are generally passed under the auspices of promoting tourism and consumerism, not ensuring the health and safety of poor people. Police sweeps are routinely used by mayors and city councils. Police sweeps generally ticket homeless people for "quality of life" infractions, confiscate people's blankets, shopping carts and other possessions, and force people to move along. Cities also pass these measures and use police sweeps to deter what they call the "magnet effect," where homeless people travel from all around to benefit from a city's "generous aid and overly-compassionate community." The fact is, cities everywhere make this same claim.

FNB groups have been active in opposing local measures that scapegoat poor people as well as putting forward alternative strategies of addressing homelessness such as affordable housing, legalizing squatting, subsidizing rent, stopping evictions, increasing food stamps, increasing services like health care and child care, as well as harm reduction programs like needle exchange, medical marijuana distribution, and decriminalizing drugs and prostitution. In San Francisco, a coalition campaign was initiated by FNB and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). Wobblies and FNBers challenged an anti-panhandling campaign that had been initiated by a neighborhood merchant association. Calling the coalition effort Food Not Bosses, the activists began serving free food in the area as well as fact sheets about poverty. With the influence of the radical unionists in the IWW, the campaign explicitly linked homelessness to the many low-paying service sector jobs in the area and appealed to low-wage workers. Food Not Bosses was able to generate some attention to the larger issues, but what we quickly realized was that similar anti-panhandling campaigns were starting up all over SF and in cities across the US. A Food Not Bosses campaign has recently started up in Gainesville, Florida because of anti-poor laws. At the Food Not Bombs Western Regional Gathering held in SF in July of '98, dozens of FNB groups talked about their local work against camping bans, anti-panhandling ordinances, curfews in public spaces, and the fencing off of entire parks.

While acting in our own 'backyard,' FNB groups also work to connect local issues to larger social structures of power and inequality. We hold to the belief that militarism and profit-oriented economics negatively affects our society, and challenge the basic assumptions and popular notions of why poverty and homelessness exist. Poor people are generally pathologized in the mainstream media and in popular discussions of poverty. Images of "welfare cheats" and "welfare queens" inflame public opinion, and Welfare Reform is packaged as the "Personal Responsibility and Job Opportunity Act." An economy that systematically creates unemployment and poverty is concealed behind rhetoric that people need to "just get a job."

We seek to challenge these popular perceptions of poverty. We try to make the connections between homelessness, US foreign policy, the rising number of poor people and people of color in prison, the negative impact of military spending on social spending, and the rising levels of unemployment in the corporate global economy. Making these connections is part of developing critical analysis to guide movements for radical social change.

Building Movement and Breaking Bread

FNB groups strive to build solidarity between multiple struggles and a wide range of social change groups. We serve free food at protests, rallies, conferences and other community events, as a way of supporting other groups and projects. It is a direct way of saying 'your struggle is our struggle, our struggle is your struggle.' FNB in San Francisco has provided solidarity in the form of free food at tenant's rights rallies, Earth First! protests, union picket lines, community meetings, immigrant rights events, and student activist conferences to name a few.

We do solidarity work like this because we see ourselves as part of a much larger movement for justice. We believe that all of the major systems of oppression are interconnected. Therefore, if we hope to win meaningful social change, then we must develop coalitions and alliances with groups working on many issues and in many communities. Here are a few examples of solidarity work that we have engaged in over the past year.

In early January of 98, word went out in activist communities that the Mexican military was increasing its pressure on the Zapatistas and communities of resistance in Chiapas. Actions took place around the world immediately. In the Bay Area, activists began a twenty-four hour vigil outside of the Mexican Consulate that lasted a week; ending on the day of a large rally (300 people) protesting the December massacre at Acteal in Chiapas. The vigil was small, sometimes only one person and never exceeding more than a dozen, but it generated some attention to the situation in Mexico and helped build support for the Acteal massacre rally. FNB activists slept out all night and handed out flyers during the day, also bringing food and hot drinks to the vigil every night.

During the summer of '97, FNB joined a coalition led by Homes Not Jails to occupy empty housing on a former military base in the Presidio, a national park. The government planned on demolishing the remaining 466 housing units. Homes Not Jails, along with the numerous actions of the interfaith coalition Religious Witness, were able to turn Presidio housing into a politically contested issue through highly visible acts of civil disobedience. In July of '97, about 40 people, organized in five affinity groups, took over Presidio housing. FNB fed the rally of 300, formed two of the five affinity groups, and provided much of the jail support for those committing acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Presidio housing was eventually saved, due also to the largely successful campaign electoral campaign of Religious Witness. However, the housing that was once deemed un-livable is being rented out to students and middle-income tenants. The campaign to win housing for homeless people continues.

In September of this year, a national conference and strategy session on the prison industrial complex, Critical Resistance, was held in Berkeley. The conference brought together hundreds of grassroots groups and organizers from around the country engaged in various aspects of the prison system. 3000 people came out for the weekend. SF and East Bay FNB provided the food for the conference, working for two months to accomplish the task. By preparing thousands of meals FNB was demonstrating not only its opposition to the prison industry, but also its commitment to work in solidarity with the emerging anti-prison movement. Working on Critical Resistance was part of the long-term work FNB groups have done in cities around the continent to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and all political prisoners.

Building community and movement through acts of solidarity is key to FNB's work everywhere.

-Chris Crass, San Francisco FNB