Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that sometimes I take a week off and do a rerun episode like this time where it's a rerun instead of a new episode. But it's from a while ago and maybe you haven't heard it. It's about food not Bombs, which is a group that does exactly what it says it does, and about how important mutual aid is and how important taking care of each other is.
So I hope you like it.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that brings you all the cool history and cool people who did I'm your host. I'm tired of saying the word cool one thousand times in every introduction, but that's the way it's going to be. My name is Margaret kilj and with me this week is none other than Andrew T, who is the host of the also does What It Says It Does podcast?
Yo? Is this racist?
Yeah?
Andrew? Are you doing pretty straight up? Yeah? I'm good. Good. Uh, yeah, I've been.
I'm on a merciful hiatus from my day job, so.
I'm still I'm still at the point in.
The like like week where I'm like, I still wake up at six am, even though I don't have anywhere to be and things like that.
So stare at the wall being like, I don't understand. I have so much to do, but how do I do it?
I'm just like so tired.
But yeah, for no good reason, I saw I hung out with a friend's child. I'm gonna just back of the envelope it and say, like a three or four year old, And I was like sitting on the couch and fell asleep while she was talking to me. And apparently she like simply did not stop talking the whole time.
But yeah, I'm at that, just like, why am I so tired? I'm just falling asleep.
Okay, well I will attempt not to put you to sleep.
No, no, I'm awake. I had I had coffee.
And So for anyone's listening who doesn't know it, just I don't know if there's any of you you know, is this racist has been around for?
Was it like ten years now or something?
Yeah?
Than notthing like that?
Oh God, And from my point of view, honestly, it did a lot to shape discussions about race, at least in the subcultures that I'm part of. So thanks for doing that we used to like crowd around a not even laptop and are like weird communal punk house and like laugh at the tumblr.
Good lord.
Yeah, it's been such a like, you know, such a evolution also of just like how people talk about stuff, and you know, I've grown and then I had a co host a couple of years ago with Tawny Newsome, so we've all like, you know, both been part of conversations, but also everyone's talking about this stuff in a in a smarter way, but also.
Not but yeah, it's nice.
It's nice to just have a thing to do that that's a that's you know, more or less my own, our own.
Uh yeah, I don't know.
And the thing that I've always liked about doing Joss Racist is as a person of color in comedy, more often than I would like, wind up in situations where it's like all white folks around, and you know, sometimes people expect you to be the arbiter of this shit simply by virtue of not being white. And now I can offload that stuff to podcast. I can just you know, I'm not on the clock right now.
So yeah, yeah, totally. I'm not going to tell you whether something's racist or not.
I don't want to talk me about this shit. Yeah, I have a time to do this and it's not right now.
Yeah. I hear you have a tour coming up? Is that true? Just a few tour dates.
Yeah, Austin on the twentieth of August and Brooklyn on the tenth of September. I'm realizing the months ago seven, eight nine, and the dates go thirty twenty ten, So that's weird.
Anyway, I'm glad now it is a numerology. I'm just looking at this. Yeah, but uh yeah. Suboptimal pods dot com.
Suboptimal Pods is the little not even network because it's just us, me and my co host Tany Newso we made a little website and a little little thing for when we went independent a couple of years ago. Anyway, please come see us.
It would be lovely. Hopefully I will entertain you all now enough to make a case to see us live.
Yeah, I'm optimistic. We also have our producer, Sophie Lickdhiman on the call. How are you today, Sophie?
I am doing well, Margaret, thank you for asking.
Sophie, did you ever have a tumbler?
I did not.
That was like the one that was like the one subculture thing that I like avoided.
I really think I'm jealous.
Yeah, I mean in retrospect, yes, but it does seem like the kind of shit you would like.
It definitely does.
But I honestly was did not have access to like computers and stuff that much.
Sure, Okay I was.
I was more of like an outside kid, more of a sports team kid.
Yeah, doing doing actual ship.
Yeah I did get I did get my MySpace scrubbed from the internet like a few years back, because there was like because it was it was you can do that, you can do yeah, oh man, Yeah, but you have to like contact them because they because because when you for a while, when you googled me, there was just like awkward like tween age photos of me on the internet.
But yeah, you had had to work really hard to scrub You have to contact my Space still exists, but you have to contact them, and you have to contact them like a lot, and then you can get your my space scrubbed because it was.
Y'all keep talking, I'm gonna go ahead and just see if my Yeah.
I am so grateful for the fact that I was an adult before not before the Internet, but before the like ever present internet.
So much back in my day the Internet.
But I was an adult when I was on MySpace, and so I was posting cringy stuff. But it's like twenty three year old me cringy stuff or something. You know, a lot of old bad bands of mine have like multiple I had multiple MySpace profiles for the same band because you can only have four songs up, and so I just set.
Up more the whole. Oh wow, yeah, yeah, so enterprising.
Yeah, it appears as if I am not on my Space.
I'm so happy for you.
Yeah, because it was.
It was a mission to innermove what was an interesting choice in music?
Okay, so speaking of things that have cringy moments and really beautiful moments, much like Sophie's MySpace. I'm sure I don't know what order we're going to release the episodes, but the last week, last week, we recorded this tier jerker of an episode about the Warsaw ghetto uprising and people fighting against Nazis, and I cried like a million times while I was researching it. So I decided I didn't want to do that this week. So this week
I've got something a little lighter. It doesn't have zero people killed by Nazis, but has so many fewer, so many fewer, all right, And because anywhere there's activists, there's bad stuff they're fighting against and people trying to stop them. Right. But today we're going to talking about how cool it is when people share food with each other, because today we're going to talk about a long standing global mutual aid project. Andrew, how do you feel about mutual aid?
Uh? Yeah, I've been I've been trying to get more involved in the one that I my friend set out this little little outfit on mostly hands stuff out on skid Row and San Pedro for the sweep defenses here in La.
Oh cool.
It's called Solidarity and Snacks, which I guess actually, if there's another plug the last meeting that I missed, apparently we are once again, as perpetually, we are running low on funds. So solidarity and snacks go, go and donate if you feel like contribute, because.
Those are two good things in one title. Yeah.
So today we're going to talk about a story of a mutual aid group that has spent a lot of time on the FBI's domestic Terrorist watch list. It's an international conspiracy. It's present on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. It's present in at least sixty countries. It has somewhere around one thousand autonomous cells, and daily they commit crime.
Since pretty much nineteen eighty, thousands of members of this conspiracy have been arrested, including fifty four of them in one single rate and one of their terror cells in San Francisco in nineteen eighty eight. Because today we're going to talk about food not bombs, Yes, I figure we're going to talk about the group of non violence activists who cook vegetarian meals out of food that would have gone to waste and then feed it for free to people in the park.
Yeah, I was in high school.
I grew up in Annaburm, Michigan, which is a you know, sort of because of college child vibes, like a big food not bombs kind of joint.
Yeah.
It was often like yeah, things like like littering or like you know, serving like unlicensed food prep and things like that.
Yeah, with the crime. Yeah, yeah totally.
And we're going to get into how like it's you know, why they're choosing to come after people with all that stuff. But yeah, wherever there's people trying to serve free food. There's people trying to stop them.
So I mean that's that has been the one thing is in my short like time, like really participating regularly in a mutual laid effort is like, yeah, just like the act of not having of trying to make people's lives slightly less miserable from time to time or like dignified, slightly more dignified from time to time is like an act of violence against the state in a way that is like, all right, well, this is good. This is something like this is the revolution that my personal old body can handle.
Also, yeah, totally, we can just fucking help people. And that's like kind of a revelation I think for me.
Yeah, like realizing that it actually Yeah, the fact that they are mad and try and stop it is how you like realize you're getting something done. You're kind of like, I mean, I want to feed people. That rules, but you're like, oh, this actually means something more, and you know, because they're trying to stop you from doing it.
Yeah, they're really pissed about it. Yeah.
So anthropologist David Giles called food nut Bomb's tongue in cheek. He calls it a mass conspiracy to feed people or a network of anarchist soup kitchens. And importantly, Food not Bombs tries for a mutual aid model rather than a charity model. It's basically attempting to create horizont care rather than something that denies people agency. Right, You're trying to increase our collective agency rather than say well I've got some stuff and you can have it, you peasant or whatever.
Yeah, you know. Yeah.
It's a mass, leaderless movement of autonomous groups that just share a few basic concepts in the name. All you've got to do to be Food notut Bombs is call yourself food notut Bombs and then go out and do it. Get food donations or just pull stuff out of the trash, and then follow three basic principles of the non group. And the three principles are the food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to everyone without restriction, rich or poor, stoned or sober. You can tell this was written a
couple decades ago. Food Not Bombs has no formal leaders or headquarters, and every group is autonomous and makes decisions using consensus process. Food not Bombs is dedicated to nonviolent direct action and works for non violent social change. So
those are the three rules. But even these three rules on the ground, this gets messy, right because not everyone follows these three rules right right, right, Like, theoretically, the one that I've run across the most, you know, theoretically, a group should not call it self food not bombs if it serves meat, for example, And I might get flack for suggesting that I have observed people doing otherwise, right, you know, usually it's on the side, but you know,
and then I know another group that just didn't call itself food not bombs because they were like, well, we're going to do the exact same thing, but we're going to serve meat. And their reasoning was sound. The reasoning was, we eat meat. The people who were serving.
Eat meat, so let's just serve them meat.
Yeah, And you know, and they're getting the same donations of meat from the same place they get all the rest of the produce.
Who fuck it? Yeah?
Yeah, but oh go ahead, Oh no, I was just gonna say, yeah, we recently had a thing with solidarting stecks where we got, yeah, like a hot food donation. And it really was a thing where it was like, man, you know, because our normal thing, it's like packaged like snacks and PB and stuff like that, and it was just like, oh right, the transition between like surfing plates.
Of is so many layers more difficult.
And then like, the vegan thing does have a extremely I guess there's practical elements that sort of cut both ways. One is like it's a little while too. It does feel like, look, if there is food that is not vegan that is going to waste, it makes sense to get it back out into the community, I think. But also it does it creates layers of food safety that
are so many, so many magnitudes more complex. Just like, you know, the thing with the vegan stuff is that it is almost certainly never going to go bad, and if it goes bad, it's not going to kill someone.
That is literally the next sense of my script. That is so true.
Yeah, in all likely, yeah, you know, caveat, but yeah, it really is. I was just like, because, yeah, I think the first time I came across the vegan thing, I was like, people don't necessarily want vegan.
Stuff, yeah, but it's so much easier.
Yeah, I mean, I've been vegan for a very long time, right, But I have no problem with the people who are like figuring out ways to serve other people meet and all that. But one of the reasons I stayed vegan for so long was because I ate food out of the trash for a very long time, and I was like, the worst I'm facing is a stomach ache, you know. I mean, I'm sure that there's a way that I could eat vegan trash and kill myself if I really worked at it.
But yeah, you know, like way easier.
I think it's significantly less, Like yeah, yeah, I think that that truly is like the strongest case for it.
Yeah, it was a little hilarious.
I forgot like at one point we were getting oh shoot, I feel bad. I don't remember the name of the organization, but it was it was some organization in South central had vegan burritos. How they were like contributing, and it was a like the chickpea curry burrito. It's like such a staple of Yeah. I was just like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
this is what's going out the door right now. I was like, damn, I have I have like held this very burrito in my hand across like different decades, like different states, different cities.
It's always the same thing.
Yeah, I love foodut bombs. But I I didn't eat eggplant for a very long time after eating a lot of foodnut bombs because I was convinced you just was impossible to cook it well. But the truth was random people who don't know how to cook yeah, don't cook it well.
It is it is that, like, God, we feel like someone should just do like like the updated Mutual Aid cookbook. Yeah, just like still shit that you can get frequently in donations, but really just got to like change the proportions a little bit and like to figure out some way to or not. But I was just like, God, damn it, this fucking yeah, like p curry Burrito had it so many times.
Totally okay.
And the other rule that people I think break are not break, but is like complicated to a lot of people who set up these groups is the third rule, the fact that it is committed to non violent direct action. I would say food not bombs itself is a non violent direct action, and people get very excited about as
a non violent direct action. But I will say that, yeah, a lot of the the activist world has changed dramatically since the eighties, and the threat models that we face have changed dramatically since the eighties, and I would say that a lot of people who cook and participate in food not bombs on an organizational level are not themselves committed to non violence resistance.
Sure, yeah, I mean I think I think rightfully. It's a multiar thing.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that has been. That has been like.
The an interesting thing about more actively participating in something like this too, which is like again something not the food not bombs, but I'm mutually more more like regular mutual aid thing is like yeah, just like like because part of me was like people here seemed really paranoid, and then like after hanging out with them for a couple of years, I'm like, I understand why people here are because I was like, I don't know, I feel like we put a lot of secrecy in like you
know how many granola of ours.
Were getting this week? And like yeah, you know, but I was like, Okay, I'm sorry to understand what's happening here.
One time this hasn't been I'm going off script. Whoa, Okay, So this one time I was in it was like two thousand and two or two thousand and three, and we're having this demonstration in Chicago and I remember, I don't even remember what we were demonstrating against these to demonstrate against a lot of things. And we're meeting up in the basement of the inbo shop and we're like, everyone's being really careful and like speaking about anonymous things,
and everyone's like it's this top secret thing. And the city has spent tens of millions of dollars on the security, and we're all.
Like, all right, what are we going to cook? What? What is the food? Not bombs?
And I remember because we had to drive past police lines with our like tables strapped to the top of a minivan in order to serve food, and and we picked. I was considered the most arrestable person. So I was the one who carried the knife so that we could cut the cable. Why eh, I had nowhere else to be and I wasn't out as trans yet, you know, the.
Most arrestable person low key off flex.
That's right. Yeah, I was the one with no responsibilities, and so so I carried the knife so that we could cut the rope to get the table off of the top of the minivan, so that the minivan could get away before they would be like pulled over and ticketed, and it was like, Okay, how are we gonna you know, And I just remember I had this moment where I was like, they think we're down here plotting like murder, you know, yeah, and we are definitely like how do we go feed people downtown tomorrow?
Yeah?
I mean, like the other way to look at it though, a little bit, I think, and the feeling I've been having, and this might be a little not like self serving but self justifying, is like, you know, like like any effort, it's it's that like logistical support is actually like how you run a resistance, run an army, like you know, even just like recently, you know, I'm not like a military person, but just watch you know this, this this shit in Ukraine, Like half of it is really just
like yeah, you you make it so the food trucks take two days longer to get there and the army stops.
Yeah.
Yeah, It's really like I think that that is maybe the other side of it is like they realized that like this level of organization and like just truly mass logistical support is the thing that turns into whatever resistance is most needed at the time, or at least can turn into those are the pieces.
Oh, you're right, and it's part of and now I'm cheating and we'll have to skip this when I get to it later in the script. It's part of what makes it mutual aid instead of just a charity organization, right, because you're creating the infrastructure by which we can feed ourselves and others.
Yeah, I know, absolutely, it's one of those things because I you know, I'm now just like I've just aged into I'm too old to throw a brick.
That I ever threw a brick, but I.
Was certainly not at least ready ready in theory to throw a brick, and if I know, absolutely had to and I was just like all my brick throwing days are over. But like I don't even remember who this is something I've repeated multiple places, and I should look up.
But this pair phrase, which is like, you know, it's not the sexiest thing, but someone needs to wash the dishes during their revolution too, like totally, you know, that's like just you know, not like just as important maybe, but like those things are all like part of, you know, both an active resistance and an active good society.
It's part of the invisibilized labor too, right, like, yeah.
Yeah, right, I mean it's definitely like, I'm sure there's an element to it where the reason it's not glorious is because it's quote unquote with does work.
Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah.
Okay, So the first time I wrote in some of you know, the whole thing isn't just Margaret Nostalgia Hour, but but I I wrote in part of this the first time I ate food ut Bombs. I've been a traveling activist for like three days. I had just dropped out of college. I'm in Richmond, Virginia, and I'm hanging out by the river with these like super scary train riding people with like there's like a woman with like face tattoos of like tiger stripes and stuff. And they're like,
all right, we're going to food ut Bombs. So I go to food nut Bombs and I show up in the park and a couple minivans full of crustpunks, which is at the time is a very important distinction in between the crustpunks who live in houses and the krusties who don't. All the terminology has changed since then. There's no point in me telling anyone this. They come out and they have all these trays of food. It's a three course meal. It's actually the best food nut bombs
meal I've ever eaten. They had like made dessert. They made this like raspberry cobbler, and it was hundreds of people in the park from a lot not all walks of life, right, but a lot of different walks of life of people are in this park eating this food it And that was kind of when I learned that there was almost this like and I when I say was was because my own knowledge of food out bombs tapers off, my own direct involvement in food nut bombs
tapers off. But at least at the time, there was this kind of like network of all of the different East Coast cities were kind of competing to see who had the best food, the most food, the most servings, and the feed the most people. And it ruled like it just you know, that's the competition I'm really excited about, is the like super friendly competition when we all just get better at everything, you know.
So yeah, yeah, that that that's sort of like exactly the best version of this sort of thing.
I guess.
It's also like having not as close but witness sort of these things. Also like It is remarkable how that what should be friendly competition can then also turn to like Bonker's hierarchical bullshit.
Yeah, I'm just like, come on totally, but any power, I guess is always dangerous.
Yep okay. So the history of food out bombs. So it started as a bit of it was a prank, kind of a bit of street theater. And one of the problems doing the history of food not bombs, we mostly have one guy's word for it. The guy's still around who still cooks food ut bombs, mostly in Santa Cruz. His name's Keith McHenry, and I don't agree with most of his takes on current events. He's kind of gone anti vax oh sure, but but we mostly have his word.
We also have a word from our sponsors. Yeah. So, one of the things that's very important to know about cool People did cool stuff is that we are only sponsored by very positive things and also things that you can't buy. So, for example, we are our perpetual, longest running sponsor is the concept of potatoes. No individual potato vendor or even style, but just the concept of potatoes.
And I'm wondering if you have anything particularly positive that you would like Sophie to do the work to get to sponsor this particular episode.
Previous sponsors have been the concept of tap water, the concept of meal.
I see, well, yeah, just a little of the dogs. I'm using a toothpick to point to the dogs.
Concept of dogs.
Dogs like a sleepy dog, a sleepy dog.
Yes.
My absolute worst thing that I've done in the last two years is I have trained the dogs to go into the crate by saying go to.
And they go. They hop right in the crate and it's funny to me, but not awesome.
I love that.
My friend had a header dog trained to put his paws on the wall. If you said cops, he would go up and put his paws.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it's really you know, your relationship with your dogs is interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's give give it up for these little for the snooze and dogs.
Sleeping dogs and whatever whoever else paid us the money and put ads on the show. Okay, and we are back from those excellent advertisements about sleeping dogs. If there were any other advertisements at all, please complain to Sophie.
You can find her on Twitter at irate okay and so Keith McHenry, one of the founders of food nut Bombs and the primary historian of food ut bombs, and I'm I don't think he has any particular reason to lie about any of this, but it's just sort of frustrating that I can't check against other things very effectively. And he sometimes centers himself a little bit in the history, but.
Maybe it's completely accurate. I don't know.
So he seems to be the one who runs the food out Bombs website.
Anyway.
I like food nut bombs as a mass movement, is what I'm trying to say, and no offense to this particular person who I disagree with on some stuff, so sure it grows out of the anti nuclear movement. On May twenty fourth in nineteen eighty there's this big civil disobedience protest at a nuclear power plant construction site in
New Hampshire. And I know that nuclear power is kind of more of a complex issue in the current context of global warming and as we try and figure out what the how we're going to do, But at the time, nuclear power especially was understood as a pretty clear danger, right the anti nuke movement spent its time drawing attention to that danger and especially nuclear disarmament, and the fact that they were all expecting to die in like a
nuclear war at any given moment. And they were also did all this six years before Chernobyl, so they clearly weren't entirely wrong about the dangers of nuclear power plants. So they decided to try and stop this place from being built, and they do it through mass CIVI disobedience, and the way they go about it is really fucking cool. Four Thousand people show up, and that's not huge for
a protest, but it's really big for direct action. Four Thousand people with construction helmets and diy padded armor and grappline hooks and shit show up and they are all set to tear down the fence, storm the place, and put their bodies in front of bulldozers in nonviolence of disobedience form the government, though the government doesn't actually want them to do this for some odd reas I wasn't able to find the government's reasoning for stopping them, But
they go about working trying to stop them. The National Guard shows up, They wade in with batons to beat the shit out of everyone. They pepper spray everyone, helicopters dropped hear gas on them from helicopters.
I guess the helicopters are the helicopters.
And the spokesperson for the protesters, a guy named Brian Figenbaum. May or may not have hit a cop with a grappling hook. That is what he got arrested for, anyhow, and I would argue that he deserves support even if he didn't do it. So so his support team, thanks, thanks for laughing at my joke.
I appreciate it. It took me a second. I was like, I got it. Yeah, yeah, I wrote it.
And I was like, this is gonna work. I don't know anyway, So his support team goes about trying to raise money for his legal defense. And so they're like, all right, it's nineteen eighty and you're how would what's the first non crime method that you would use to try and raised money?
I'm curious in the eighties and nineteen eighties. God, I don't know. It's okay, there's kind of there's got to be some some like securities.
So I said, non crime, non crime crime.
I think those guys were not charged with them, all right.
All right, I like mine, Dan Pathon.
Yeah, there it is and the world will be a very different place if they had gone with dancethon. They did not, No, they went with a bake sale. Cute, and a bake sale is a very cute way to have people have muffins and brownies, but it is not a particular effective way to raise money on the scale that they're attempting to raise money, so it doesn't work very well. And so they're like, Okay, you know that cliche.
It'll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a b one b Okay. So my theory is that in the eighties, everyone in the United States was mailed a poster that says this, and that's how it became a cliche, much like how I believe it was two thousand and five where the government mailed everyone a co Exists sticker so that they could put it on their car.
Yeah.
Yeah, so they're look, I mean, I feel like I having grown up in like a kind of hippie college town, I'm just like, I feel like I know the exact person who probably had to be making those fucking coexists.
Oh yeah, totally Yeah, they're also anti vaccine.
Yeah, hippies hippies when anti boomers hippies.
When I guess no, that's just the way, Like we don't trust the government, and I'm like, I don't either, but I trust scientists sometimes.
Yeah.
Well it's also like I mean, obviously we don't, you know, go go down this road. But it's like, that's not how the government is going to fuck It's so weird. It's like they're going to fuck you by not giving you a vaccine, you lunatic, or charging your money for them. If you think they have goddamn terminator style nanobots.
Then like it's over. It's over at that point. The vaccine.
Yeah, the vaccine is by far the least of your work. Bill Gates can't even get you to buy a fucking telephone.
You think you could control people's minds?
Oh, if he did, it would just be through advertising, and like yeah, yeah.
It's they are control of your mind in a different way. I'm so dumb.
Sorry, they would be buying advertising and politically radical shows.
Oh no, this is.
Like twenty twenty yeah, uh level of discourse.
I apologize for being so far behind it.
All right, I live under a rock, So okay, So they look at this poster. They have a copy. They apparently they got one because they were like they also like a moving company. They just had a bunch of different odd jobs and someone like gave them a poster and they look at the post like, oh, that's a good idea. So they have another bake sale, but this time they dress up like generals and they just say
we're here to raise money by a bomber. And this once again does not raise much money for their friend. But what it does is it shows them that street theater is a very effective means to communicate with people and talk to people, because the first bake sale is kind of a wash. Second bake sale they don't make any money, but they talk to people and people get are like, oh, what's this about. And they get to like talk about all their politics and stuff with passerby,
and people are into it. So they're like, all right, street theater, that's the thing. And so the next thing they do, they're not even trying to raise money anymore. They just want to protest some banks that are funding nuclear nonsense. And so there's a big stockholder meeting. It's March twenty sixth, nineteen eighty one, and the activists decide
to stag just okay, this part's actually really cringey. They decide to stage a soup kitchen in front, which is okay, and they're like, these policies are what led us to the Great Depression. We don't want to go back. I'm like, okay, I'm with you. And then they're like, so let's dress
up like homeless people. I'm no longer with them. And then sure, they're like, and let's go to a homeless shelter the night before and recruit people to come be extras in our street theater at this protest by telling them that we'll give them some soup if they come. And I don't want to like deny the people who came their agency, but like, I don't know, I don't I don't love this.
Yeah, I mean, any anything conditional is always like yeah, yeah, you sort of like see exactly like the origins of this, Yeah, this like kind of type of movement.
In a way, you're like, okay, well.
But that is actually why it's nice that you know, there's I think the emphasis on a non hierarchical kind of thing. At least it's like good there's no there's no gods, there's no founding fathers that we have to give a shit about you in this mutual aid.
Yeah exactly, which is like so yeah, yeah, and you know, and I could be like super grateful that you know, they what they set up and like, and so they staged this protest. They set up a soup kitchen and like fifty people from the shelter come and they show up for lunch and everyone was happy and everything was good based on what we know of it. And the fifty folks were like, there's no one really feeding people downtown is Boston, No one really feeding downtown. You should
do this every day. And I would argue that these fifty anonymous people are the true founders of food, not bombs. But that's just my own yeah yeah, And they're like, okay, we're actually onto something here. So all these activists, they're like, food matters, Food brings people together. People also need food. People seem to be addicted to it for some odd reason. And so they all quit their jobs. And depending on who you ask, they either rented a house or squatted
a house. And now I would argue, quit your job and rent a house is a sort of contradictory statement. So my money is on squad of house, Oh yeah, you know, or you know, or one of them had a bunch of money from somewhere, which is totally fine, and if so, they just if so, they use their parents' money incredibly well, but my money is on squad at a house. And they just go about doing this, and they start soliciting donations of food that would be going
to waste from bakeries and food co ops. One of them worked at a food co op and was like used to throwing away all this food and was like this sucks, you know. And they start cooking all this food and they start bringing it to shelters, to rehabs, to immigrant support centers, to housing projects. Basically, they're like, anywhere someone needs food, we're showing up with food. We're good at finding food, and we will bring it to people.
And then with the like kind of leftovers, they start having this feed in Harvard Square and they set up Food for All Commerce and these feeds turn into events and people are bringing puppets and drums and all that shit that eighties activists were super into, and people are sharing radical literature, and then they're running around graffeiti and everything with like peace graffiti. I've totally met this kind of person before, and I love them, even though I'm
not one of them, you know. And one of the slogans that they use in their tag is money for Food not Bombs, and eventually this gets shortened to food not Bombs, and that's how the whole project gets its name, or Keith Henry coined, it depends on who you ask, sure, And I'm going to take one more swife at this particular weird history stuff. Soon they had a logo too,
which is a purple fist holding a carrot. That's the Food not Bomb's logo, and Keith McHenry drew that, but the Food co Op movement had been using a fist holding a carrot as a logo since the nineteen seventies. So anyway, whatever, like yeah, I actually kind of don't care, like, go ahead.
Yeah, it's that era, Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's just sort of that era and that type of folks. And there's a kind of limit to how much different graphic design you can that's.
A good point, yeah, totally. And so culturally this group grows out of the anti nuke movement. Which was a a fun mix of anarchists and Quaker who are both.
Friends of the pod.
They seem to show up constantly, well, the anarchists because I'm one, so I keep throwing them in. But the Quakers said no idea when I started this podcast. How fucking radical the Quakers are throughout everything in history. And then also radical Catholics are part of the anti nuke movement, and and I know some of the founders of the of Funabombs or anarchists.
I don't know if all of them were.
It's possible because they like they seem to practice a lot of the cultural norms of like anarchist activism throughout this time. But it's also possible that they just set those norms.
So I don't know.
But the anti nuke movement, it's drawing from these three sources. And as far as I can tell, you get direct action, protest, and youthful vigor from the anarchists. You get consensus decision making from the Quakers, and from the Catholics. You get this you do what is right, whether it's safe or not.
And then you also get this idea that I had no idea about, but I got kind of excited about when I learned about this idea called personalism, this theological concept, and this segues us into me explaining the different ways that people talk and look at homelessness.
So I want to do that. Yeah, all right, uh huh?
Are you to go into personal But it's going to come back around. Oh do you know do you know about personalism? Because if so?
No?
No, yeah, I really am just like yeah.
Okay, No, it's going to come back around to it.
So amazing.
Okay, So this I'm going to contrast two theories about homelessness and extreme poverty, as a named by sociologist Teresa Gowen. And I hate a good versus bad dichotomy, but this is a good versus bad dichotomy because one of these ideas is good and one of these ideas is bad. The first theory Gowan called sick talk, and this theory claims that people are homeless because of mental health, addiction, and criminality. Do you want to guess whether this is
the good theory or the bad theory? By my standard, I'm comfortable saying.
Yes, surprise, I love this one. I'm just kidding.
So sick talk goes back centuries. Everyone always wants to blame individuals for social problems. I don't know if you've run a trust this before.
Yes.
In contrast, you've got system talk, and I think that they use these terms to be like the way people talk about it, right, So you can either talk about people as sick or you can talk about systems. And during the Great Depression, future friends of the pod industrial workers of the world, the Wobblies, they push this sort of theory. This theory is basically that homelessness is driven by the boom and bus cycles of capitalism and the
economy's need for a huge reserve of workers. And for a good forty years or so after the Depression, even the US government is on system talk, kind of a watered down one compared to what the labor unions want.
And this is where you get like the New Deal and all that shit from, which is like trying to moderate out the worst bad stuff about capitalism in a lot of ways, as far as I understand, basically to be like, well, we either do this or people start thinking that the USSRS looks like a good idea.
You know.
Then Reagan came in and dismantled all that shit. In the eighties, with this free market bullshit, which caused a spike in homelessness, which then got blamed on people getting out of mental institutions, right, even though actually there were more people going into mental institutions, not the other way around. But right, right, Siktok isn't a totally fuck them approach. It's not just a like I don't care, let them
die in the streets. Instead it's like, yeah, like system talk is like, well, let's provide everyone what they need, or at least let's set up like work programs and help everyone deal with shit, where siktok solutions are like, oh no, everyone who's homeless is sick and needs treatment, and they treat homelessness as this individual problem.
Yeah.
Well, it's also that you know that the thing the charity versus mutual aid thing, as you talked about earlier, which is like which is also a vocabulary I'm like not good at. But yeah, this idea that it's like like sick sick talks as we were, as you were, is sort of like leads to this like pity. Yeah you do this out of pity, which.
Is not like a fact.
I mean you see the ways that is totally no that's such a good point. And so even though it's Reagan who brings all this stuff up is bipartisan. Bill Clinton is entirely on this page, and everyone since then has pretty much been on this page. Because if we can see homelessness as a personal failing instead of an economic crisis, then we can avoid paying essential to the economic crisis. Although I would argue that we will not be able to avoid talking about the economic crisis much longer.
Yeah, but I don't know. So.
I don't like siktok very much. I like system talk. But what does this have to do with Food Not Bombs and Catholics and personalism? You ask? Glad you asked. So these problems they have to get addressed on a system wide level, but that doesn't mean there aren't individuals who are suffering from it. And so I want to quote the author Sean Parson, who wrote a book called
Cooking Up a Revolution about Food not Bombs. What makes the radical homelessness politics of groups like Food Not Bombs and the Catholic Workers unique is not that they embrace a system's talk, but that they fuse systems talk with a radical personalism, personalism which has its roots in Catholic theology and the writings of Threau and Tolstoy. Front of the pod Tolstoy and every fucking episode.
Along in incredible. I did not think we were getting a Tolstoy in this one.
Wow. Nope.
Unbelievable is a European religious ethical philosophy developed by Emmanuel Manie. I think, Hu Manye, Each and every person was modeled in the image of God, and therefore was uniquely beautiful and valuable. Therefore, no person is worth more than another, and no person is expendable, and so is no longer quote. Personalism is really interesting to me. It springs up in the early twentieth century, and then it influences this inter
war movement in France. I love falling down these rabbit holes is one of my favorite parts about this podcast. So there's this inter war movement in France called the nonconformists, who do what a lot of my favorite people do. They like They're influenced by a bunch of French socialists, including Prudalin the anarchist, And they hate capitalism because reasonably obvious why. And they hate fascism because it's even more
obvious why. And they hate the USSR because reasonably obvious why And actually one of the reasons that they hate the USSR though, is that they're mostly religious and they are not materialists. They believe in spirituality, and so they're like left with, like, well, what the hell do we believe if we come up with this like spiritual socialism and it's very heavily influenced by personalism And.
I don't know a ton.
About these folks yet, I'm just like kind of starting to learn about them. Also, they kind of didn't get a chance to do anything cool because then World War two happened, and then like half of them became collaborationists with the Nazis and then the other half joined the French Resistance, I think, right, So, which I guess.
They'll make sense. It's sort of those are sort of the two sides. I just even as you're talking. The interesting thing is like, I mean, like any philosophy obviously, like anything can be used in a different way, but I hadn't really like heard this phrase or this concept personalism. But that also is the direct line to if you truly believe that a fucking embryo is a person, then why why is you know, a real person more valuable than these cells.
Yeah, totally, like yep, and you know what else is more valuable than some cells?
Advertisements?
Yes, once again debatable.
Yeah, fair enough.
Unfortunately, based on the aforementioned economic system that we live under, we are sponsored by advertisers and you can listen to them if you want, or to get fast forward.
I don't care, neither do I. And we are back.
Yeah, and we're talking about personalism and all that stuff. And one of the reasons I like how it ties into taking care of people is that it's kind of this exploding brain meme.
Right.
You get the smallest brain is the sick talk, where it's like, homelessness is an individual person's fault. And then you get systems talk, which is like, actually, there's all systems that needs to be addressed on a systemic level. And then you get the big exploding brain thing where it's like, yeah, it's totally the system's fault and needs to be addressed on a systemic level. But this also affects individuals and we need to address it on an
individual level as well. Even though the blame isn't on the individual, the care also needs to happen on an individual level.
So I like it. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's probably right.
I mean, it's it's the two sides of that, which is like it's a systemic problem, but systems are just groups of people doing shit to other.
Groups of people.
And like one way to help fix that as an individual is to just try to undo some of that.
No totally, and like like I don't know if you'd like walk into your house and it's trashed totally, wasn't you, I swear, And like you just got to start cleaning, you know.
It's like all right, just pick up one thing and then the next thing, and then the next thing.
Yeah exactly, you know, and then you also have to figure out the systems that we're allowing your yeah exactly.
Yeah.
So uh, anyway, the anti nude movement, all these things coming together. I really like when different different groups with different ideologies get together and figure out what they can do together and where their strength overlap. And so that's and and how you get food not bombs, this global movement out of this melting pot or you know whatever, this chemical pit, mortar and pestle. I'm not very good at alchemy. I have not successfully turned lead into stone,
lead into gold. I don't even know what I'm supposed to turn lead into. I'm gonna continue with the script gold gold, Yes.
That's it. Yeah, you don't need that lead, Oh my god.
Okay, but when we start our work around AMMO Factory and we use it to fund food for everyone, we can have the slogan turning lead into gold because we make money off the AMMO.
Yeah.
I thought you were going the other way. We're turning gold into lead.
Ah No, yeah, but it does go both ways. Okay, that's actually a better direction.
All right.
Well you can be in charge of that part, the figuring out what we're doing. Okay, So yeah, yeah, I guess I have other stuff to do.
Okay, I wouldn't be you don't want to, all right.
All right, fine, we'll find someone else. Sophie, all right Anderson maybe Sophie.
Shaking my head.
And person, I mean, she doesn't have thumbs, but she would give it her best.
Ever.
Well, that's our Our logo is just Anderson's face. Anderson is a dog. For anyone who's listening.
She just gave me the best side eye a dog could give. Like, I was like, is that true, you're doing on your free time.
And she was like, uh huh, so I guess it's true.
Yeah, all right, so back to honestly seems right back to bombs.
It really does.
In the early eighties, Fodnut Bombs is at every protest, including anti nuclear activism, against the war on drugs. They're working against all the fuckery that the US is getting up to in Central America. Basically they're part of like every movement that anyone who's paying attention in the nineteen eighties would be part of. And and this part is
important too, right that they fed protests. You know, we talked about this a bit before, right that like it's mutual aid is this act of solidarity because it's it's sharing things, because sharing things is good because we should take care of each other. And there's like this reciprocity implied in mutual aid. And actually a lot of the older definitions of mutual aid are actually like mutual aid societies where everyone like pools their money take care of
each other. It's actually where like modern insurance comes from and all this shit.
Like, yeah, basically like you you join a society, Yeah that makes sense.
Yeah, but but this mutual aid. It's it doesn't necessarily imply a one to one. It's not I scratch your back and you scratch mine. And so the mutual aid of food not bombs is I'm human, you're human. Let's take care of each other. I got all this extra food. I cooked it up for me and my friends. You can come too, you know. And a lot of the people, more than other organizations that I've seen, that do this.
It's not perfect or utopian. Then it's never always right, but it's like a lot of the people who come to eat end up whining, wind up cooking and organizing as well, because it's so participatory. And they've done two things intertwined for forty plus years. First it feeds hungry people, and second it's fed a movement and just basically allows these social movements to exist. You know, like when I was a full time activist, when I was sick, I
would go to activist doctors. When I needed shelter, I would squat buildings, or I would stay in people's backyards or basements or wherever people could find shelter for me while it's in town for a protest or whatever. And
when we needed food, there's food not Bombs. Sometimes in some cities there'll be four or five days a week that you could go to Food not Bombs and get a hot meal and groceries to take home, and anyone who comes you're treated like a person instead of like the sort of like lots of other groups feed and that's cool, but there's like a scale of how inclusive
it feels. Like when you show up and they're like, here's your number, make sure you sit at least thirty feet away from me because I don't like looking at you, you know.
Yeah, uh yeah, that's like, oh god, I mean that's that's like it's so like I'm just I mean, I can't even like figure out like the what I say. But it is just the thing where you're like, yeah, you see that, and yeah, I maybe this is again me me now having spent more time on sket road than I had, you know, prior in the last like two years. But it is like, and I'm sure every every bit of like you know, eye roll I feel and watching some other groups, I'm like, I have been
that person. So I'm totally not to just be like like you know, gate keeping or a dick about it. Yeah, it is though, you're just like, oh my god, yeah, all those things that you see, it's like almost and not always without malice, but often it's like not.
Even with malice.
It's just like, you know, you don't know how to if you're not sort of comfortable or fluent in in what folks need and want, you know, you know there and there's elements too of just like what I'm giving you something, Yeah, you know, I think you see like you should be great. Yeah that is like so.
Like yeah, yeah, and it's like and sometimes it sucks, right you Like you give someone something and they're like, well I want another one, and I'm like, I wish.
You appreciated that I had made this for.
You, you know, and like because like sometimes it's like, well, you also want to be seen as human And now I walk through my life and I'm seen as human on a fairly regular basis as compared to the person who I'm offering this thing too. But yeah, like it you know, yeah, it's it's it's all a scale and like I'm not trying to knock people who you know, it's like and even the like the line between charity and mutual aid is not this like impassable Gulf with
who completely different ideas on each side. It's like it's a spectrum and like we should all look at trying to increase other people's agencies and create mutual aid, you know. But it's like but also just like fucking go out there and try and help people have better yeah, lives, and then figure it out. I don't know, like whatever.
Yeah, yeah, I think hopefully the good version of this is people get there no matter what.
So yeah.
And then another another thing that sort of ties into this like movement building version of mutual aid really quickly that I is not really including this episode will have his own episode, I'm sure, is the Black Panthers breakfast program that they did, you know.
And there's this famous thing that the Black Panthers.
One of the most radical things they did and actually one of the things that, if I believe even the FBI said was one of the most dangerous things they did, was that they fed people. They fed kids before they went to school, and like, and that's a movement feeding itself, you know, even though it's like, I mean, the kids aren't the activist, but like whatever, Like I don't know, So this is what they're doing in Boston at this point,
this is not spread yet. And there's one little tiny anecdote that I think is just like cute and funny about them. Okay, so this is the Pepsi challenge, right And I thought this is this thing that only exists in the eighties, but I was like looking it up for this episode. Apparently it's like still ongoing.
I don't know.
Okay, So there's a pepsi challenge where you're like supposed to drink pepsi versus coke and a blind taste test. Sophie's looking at the scripting like where's this shit going?
Yeah, because this is a thing again. This is a thing again.
It's all over you.
You would that you would not know this, Margaret, because it is very pop cul tree. But it's a whole thing right now, TikTok no. I had no idea, yep, where there's a bunch of people and they take, you know, diet coke, diet pepsi, coke, pepsi cokes here, all those things and they put it, they put all the cans or whatever, and then the person drinking it can't take it, and people are like trying to be like, no, I know what the real one is and like most of
the time they get it wrong. Yeah, so it's yeah, no, that's like a viral trend right now, TikTok.
And I'm on trend by accident.
For some reason, I get those, which is like why okay, Like apparently that's something I'm super into and now we're talking about it on cool People did.
Yeah, maybe maybe the algorithm wrote this episode. Maybe I'm the algorithm. I'm the machine.
Are you the algorithm? I'm the machine?
It?
Yeah, that's where you're so angry against me. It's a raging as machine joke. That's a band I've heard of, even though their pop culture I'm joking.
I'm joking. Okay.
So the Pepsi challenge has been going on since the seventies. It's the least important thing that's ever happened in the history of the universe. You get the cola Wars between
coke and pepsi. So Pepsi is setting up tents and doing this blind taste test and they they probably there's like different ideas of how they like make it so that they win all the time, you know, And one one claim is that they basically put out like fizzy pepsi and flat coke, and they they set up right next to the Food Not Bombs tent in Harvard Square and so and they keep doing this, and the Food Not Bombs is like, oh my god, we hate this
so much. This is the fucking nineteen eighties. Like anti corporate branding is like their thing, right, and and so they hate this so much. So what they do is they go home and then they come back and they have the Tofu Challenge where they make smoothies with tofu in them, and they offer.
People free smoothies with tofu in them.
And I hope they made them taste okay, because you can have a tasty tofu smoothie.
It's just that sounds like some shit. So my brother has was like plant based for about ten years. When he started medical school, he stopped being it. I'm just airing out his life. He stopped being able to digest meat. Yeah, he can digest meat again. He kept trying to trick me into eating tofu, like he would be like, isn't that delicious? And then and then could he'd be like it's tofu and like I wouldn't know. So I had like major like trust issues a vegans for a minute
because he'd be like, isn't that delicious? It's not actually cheese.
It's like, yeah, I know, yeah, you wouldn't have given cheese.
You sprinkled it from like a little container. Like I'm a very aware that that is not cheese on the thing you're calling pizza anyways. But yeah, tofu smoothie, delicious, hot, Okay, I'm not believing not believing you.
Here's my pitch.
Half a block of tofu, a tablespoon or two of cocoa, some protein powder if you feel like you want protein powder, and then a bunch of maple syrup and so some almond milk if you need to.
You kind of just kind of make it. Make it. Yeah, it's like.
No for textive still no, all right, well I don't believe you.
I drank on earlier. Try it.
I'll try it because you're telling me what it is before giving it to me, and you're not going hot tofu or whatever the but uh yeah, so it's a smoothie with no fruit.
What's happening?
Yeah, So it's actually more of like like the first time I did it, it's like chocolatea it's actually if you have a if you have a food processor, and I don't. You don't have to add the almond milk and then it's like a moose texture and you just have to add enough sugar. So it tastes good because the texture is fine.
Mine are a little bit more smooth. You can also, I.
Mean it's just a I think you might be thinking of a different tofu sofi. It's more like that very silken stuff. Yeah, yeah, a B C D type place. So once that's fair, well, well you can go like with it's just.
Been you know, tricked into eating tofu won too many times.
I didn't eat tofu for the first like two years I was vegan because when I was a teenager, I went to a salad bar and was like, I will try tofu and it was just a block of unseasoned tofu. Yeah, it's horrible. It was one of the worst things I've ever eaten.
If you don't know how to take tofu, and that's that's what you think.
Tofu is it tastes horrible. But cooke tofu done correctly and marriage and seasoned, and you know, actually it's delightful, especially in.
A soup or a stew.
And so what I wonder and I think the most important decision before we can decide whether the Fun Not Bomb's original crew was good or bad was whether or not they made good tofu and fed it to people or whether they made bad tofu and fed it to people, because they could go either way.
Yeah, it was definitely.
I'm gonna say that I would find it bad pretty confident.
I think you're probably right, especially when you're right next to fucking Like. I don't drink, so this is no like purity thing. I do all kinds of bad things for my body. But like, but if someone was like does this taste better? Does this taste better? And one of them is soda, and one of them is like random tofu smoothie, I bet my money's on the soda.
There's no. Yeah, it's pretty unlikely.
But and they scared away the Pepsi people, and I suspect it was more to do with the fact that they were probably like cussing Adam and yelling at him all the time than the tofu.
Yeah. Yeah, that's so.
Yeah, that's I mean, that's like kind of.
A nice victory exactly.
And that's what I want to end today's today's episode, where we can you know, there's hippies feeding Boston healthy food and I hope it's tasty, but who knows. And you know, they get more and more interesting to me as they spread, And that's what we're gonna talk about next time. The and the massive and sort of unfammable repression that they face for giving out free food to all takers.
That's yeah, this is a good a good place to put a pause and then hear the other side.
Sophie, do you have any plugs?
Uh?
Yeah, listen to Okay, listen to hood Politics with Prop on the Cool Zone Media network wherever you get your podcasts. That's that's the podcast of my choice to plug right now, and just like follow Prop in general because he's the best at prop hip hop. That is all I would like to plug at this time.
Andrew, oh god.
I mean, you know, if you've enjoyed even this amount, come out austin August twentieth and Brooklyn September tenth doing that with Yosi's Racist Me and Tawny Knew. So we're going to be there.
So far.
We just did one show in Boston and I ate a lobster roll on stage. In Many people in the audience said it was one of the worst things they'd ever seen.
So get a lobster role challenge.
You just stilled that for me.
The way I did it was, Margot, you have a book coming out, don't you.
I do on September twentieth, My book of short fiction Cool People Who Did That's my podcast Live like that.
That's the other podcast.
We won't be here tomorrow.
There it is.
We'll be out from.
Akpress on September twentieth, and you can pre order it now and if you pre order through different independent bookstores. If you just google we won't be here tomorrow, Margaret kildre pre order or whatever, or you probably don't even need that many words, it'll come up. If you order it through different independent bookstores, including several cooperatives. Oh, this wasn't an episode about cooperatives, but they're cool. Anyway, you will get an art print from the book, which is also cool.
That's the end.
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