Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that people can do cool stuff when they're cool people. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. I'm your host sort of. Usually this time it's a reverse episode that I like to call Ren explains things to me, eh eh, instead of the book men explain things to me.
I mean, yeah, I'll take it. Yeah, I mean I do like explaining things on occasion when I know about them.
Excellent. That's Reren ren or I who is the author of Nourishing Resistance, which is a book available from PM Press, And basically, Ren is the person that whenever I have like food history related questions, is a very strange life that I lead that this comes up regularly, that I have food history related questions and I ask Gren. So Ren has agreed to do a whole reverse episode for us.
Hi Ren, Yes, And I should just mention I'm the editor of Nourishing Resistance, not the author. Okay, just because there's so many different contributors, I want to make sure to highlight that. But yes, thank you.
Yeah cool? So wait, I want to I have to introduce everyone else first too, Yeah yeah cool? Okay, because Sophie Sophie Lichterman, Hey is our uh producer? I forgot your title for a moment, I don't have a title. God King and our audio engineers Ian, everyone say Hi, Ian, Hi, Ian Hienne, Hi, everybody, We're here in a surprise twist. I really love this. Yeah, but bye bye bye. I have a good recording.
I'm honored to be here on the day that that Ian makes a.
And our theme music was written for us by an woman and now Wren, I have no idea what this episode. I have a vague idea because you you tell me things that I'm not allowed to research, because I tell other people when they come on what they're not allowed to research, but I try not to give it away. Totally. Yeah, I don't quite know what's going to happen.
Great love that so I was wondering Margaret and Sophie. First off, a question when you think of revolutionary movements and countercultures in like the nineteen sixties and seventies, what comes to mind?
Hippies?
Yeah, hippies, Yeah, great answer.
Free love, black panthers.
Yes, yeah, you're like naming a lot of things that are going to be in this episode. Community community, yeah, totally. So I'm glad I asked you all this question. Great start, But when you think of these things, do you think of food?
I mean, I'm always thinking about food, but that's just me. But to this specific question, I don't think the first thing I thought of was food totally.
But when you do think about food, like food of the sixties and seventies, what comes to mind?
Okay, Well, I I briefly covered because of a thing you sent me on an episode. I briefly covered whole wheat bread as relates to this, And I also think of soup and those are it? And then like pretending that drugs are food.
Hmmmm, totally, yeah, I think I think fondu.
You know what fondu is not everything else is in this episode, which I think actually probably has more to do with the fact that Margaret and I talk about history too much, so that like, even though you don't know what this is about, you've kind of gotten a little bit of a head start. But everything that you said is going to make an appearance except for fondue. So I'm gonna have to like really go back to the drying board on.
That well, reconvenience.
I also don't know if I've ever had fondue, So maybe I need to go like try it or something. Anyway, this episode is going to be about what I would like loosely call counter cuisine. Counter cuisine is what Warren Blasco, who wrote a book on the subject called Appetite for Change, calls the food of the hippie movement and counterculture of the nineteen sixties and seventies. And we're going to focus on food and the leftist and anarchistrans of the broader counterculture.
But it's still kind of going to be about hippies, and it's a the two parter actually has a different focus on each each side of the part. But we're going to start by talking about the Diggers. Oh so, I'm your response, Sophie made me think you had no.
No, I just got excited.
I want to make over the topic.
I yeah, So I want to start with the San Francisco the English. I'm pretty sure they no, I do. Yeah. I did mention that you have done an episode on the English Jiggers before and that people can go back and listen to it. And then it's with John dar Now from the Mountain Goats. But no, we're going to talk about the San Francisco Diggers and the San Francisco Diggers, they actually were inspired by the original Diggers, And just in case listeners haven't heard that episode, the original Diggers
were seventeenth century English communalists. They occupied a hill outside London and planted it with beans, carrots, and other veggies, and they wrote these really radical pamphlets about how quote unquote the earth should be a common treasury for all. And the San Francisco Diggers named themselves after these original Diggers, and they drew a lot of influence from them. I should say that you could do like an entire episode on the San Francisco Diggers. They did so much in
the three short years they existed. But as a food history nerd, I mostly interested in their outsized impact on food based mutual aid. So this segment is going to focus on that. But I do want to start with a little bit of background so we know, like who the Diggers are and how they showed up on this scene. So the Diggers were first and foremost a theater and they were formed by members of the San Francisco Meme Troop, which apparently is spelled like mime but pronounced like meme and I don't.
Know, well, like mimetic right, No, I don't know how use no eight memetic is spelled like meme, the internet thing.
Yeah, I have no idea, but I've heard it pronounces the San Francisco Meme Troop, which is interesting to me. Okay, but they were but they were like mimean they Yeah, they did other street theater as well.
Okay, they weren't just like putting like captions under photos and then posting them up around places.
I mean no, but they kind of were doing like the nineteen sixties version of those sick Okay, cool, you know, and the Diggers will too, Like they're all about like thinking about how the message gets across. I admittedly don't know as much about the Meme Troop as I do about the Diggers, but from what I can tell, they that is a through line in both of these projects. Okay, So they were formed by members of the Meme Troop in fall nineteen sixty six. The Troops started nineteen fifty nine.
It performed free political satire and it still exists actually and continues to perform around California. Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the Diggers, credits the troupe with introducing him to a way of looking at the world and analyzing it according to inherently Marxist principles. And he said that this education was it wasn't necessarily doctor naire but analysis class capital. Who owned what, who did what, who
worked for what? Okay? So, in the summer of nineteen sixty six, members of the Meme Troop established an organization
working with others called the Artists Liberation Front. The ALF, not to be confused with the ALF, opposed the established art worlds and big art foundations, and they were planning a street art fair and some future Diggers were involved in these planning efforts, and while called the Digger contingent, got really upset when other members of the ALF wanted to let vendors sell things like food at these fairs.
Oh yeah, everything's free.
Yeah. They were like everything should be free. Yeah. They believed in a gift economy where everything should be given away for free. And that was like the line in the sand that they drew. So they split off. And one of the first things they did, is Diggers, was to circulate these mimeograph broadsides. And no one is entirely sure what the first broadside was, but the Digger Archives website argues that it was one called time to Forget, and Time to Forget, Like many of their broadsides, is
pretty snarky and sarcastic. It starts with a list of things that the reader should quote unquote forget, such as forget the war and Vietnam flowers are lovely, and forget police brutality. The cops are your friends. All sarcastic, of course.
Then in all caps it reads You're free to forget, so forget follow the calm business tactics of the Psychedelic Shop, the I Am Thou and all other marketeers of expanded consciousness and dig yourself tech reality only for sex, only to eat, and only to join the Artists Liberation Front for your own.
Okay, so it was all basically like fuck sellout hippies is where it comes from.
Yes, yeah, yeah, So it starts with that as sort of the root. Yeah, and I should mention here that some of the Digger broadsides use what we might cultated language.
I'm not going to share any of it in this episode, but it feels important to acknowledge, and it's also like a broader thing you see within contraculture movements of the sixties and seventies, where largely though not exclusively white, groups like the Diggers would reclaim words in the service of what they saw solidarity, but they weren't really like their words to reclaim right. And there was plenty of misogyny within these movements too. This is kind of my disclaimer section.
We'll talk more about misogyny later. It's something that'll come up more in Part two when we're talking about food co ops. Just a few things to be aware of. And while this doesn't come up directly, there's also just in general, a lot of cultural appropriation happening in the counterculture, especially appropriation of religious practices from South and East Asia, So that feels important to acknowledge too.
Well. Like the guy's name that you started with was like something coyote, and was he a white guy or was he indigenous?
Like he was not? No, And yeah, and you see that a lot of the people who started the Diggers actually were like working class kids from New York City. And I don't go into that too much because one thing I really wanted to do is sort of destabilize this idea of like figureheads around the Diggers because that happens a lot, and it's just like the small handful of men. So I mention a few of them, but
I don't talk about them. But that is where a lot of them, yeah from ok so, yeah, and I believe that was true of Peter Coyote as well, but I would fact check me on that. So. So, around the same time the Diggers started distributing these broadsides, a police officer murdered Matthew Johnson, a black teenager in the
San Francisco neighborhood of Hunter's Point. This led to what's now called the Hunter's Point Uprising, which included six days of revolts, and Hunter's Point is often just decribed as a forgotten uprising, but it did inspire two young radicals to form what would become a very well known organization. Any idea what that might be?
This is the Black Panthers. Yep, yeah, the community college kids, right, totally.
Yeah. So Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seal formed the Black Panthers in October nineteen sixty six, partly in response to the Hunter's Point Uprising pretty much immediately after it, and the Panthers will come up again in this episode. It's basically impossible to talk about nineteen sixties radical politics, especially in the Bay Area, without mentioning them. But I also know that you've done a whole episode on them before,
so listeners can go find that as well. And during the Hunter's Point uprising, the Diggers performed puppet shows on the street making fun of the National Guard, and they also gave way free food.
And they're making fun of the National Guard. I can't remember if this is before or after the Kent stayed upright, it must be before Kent still, yeah, but it's like, yeah, they're making fun of armed people who are going to shoot some people and their move in pretty soon, so it's like, not a it's not nothing when you talk about making fun of like the National Guard in the street.
No, yeah, And I don't know more about this because I found it as like one one thrower wayline in one source. But they yeah, it wasn't nothing, for sure. And while they technically began before Hunter's Point, a lot of people cite this uprising is when the Diggers really started to gain traction and really started to do the work that they would become known for. So soon after two Diggers, Billy Murcott and Emmitt Grogan started daily free meals that they called feeds in the panhandle of Golden
Gate Park. They had both lost their sources of income and they wanted access to food and figured other people might too. It's always nice to have food. They went to the produce market and got donations of chicken, turkey, and leftover vegetables, but didn't have access to a kitchen and they needed to find a place to cook the food, so they went and stole two twenty gallon milk cans from an industrial dairy and cooked a stew right there
in the panhandle. Hell yeah. They also created a flyer to advertise this first feed, which included what's now perhaps the most famous Digger slogan, which is it's free because it's yours.
Okay, okay, Yes, I really like the idea of like, man, we're hungry. I've got an idea, let's feed everyone by getting donations. Like I love that, like can do attitude, and I also love the like instead of it being like other people are hungry, it was like, what are we going to eat today? I know, let's start a movement.
Totally And yeah, it really came from them, you know, not having a source of income and really wanting to eat as well. Right, So it starts in this very true mutual aid based moment, not like a yeah, not this charity kind of model. So at one early feed, some diggers jumped out of a fan and as they distributed meat, produce, and bread, they yelled, food is the medium? Does this phrase or mind you of anything? Uh?
The medium is the mess? No, I don't know.
Oh okay, yes it actually is that. Yeah, okay. So it's an echo of Marshall mclewin's the medium is the message. He was a Canadian media theorist who became really popular within the counterculture, which is funny because he was also this stodgy Catholic dude who is like much older than everyone else. But he argued that, to quote www dot Marshall mcluwin dot com, the message of any medium or technology is the chain of scale or pace of pattern
it introduces into human affairs. So Free Digger Meals used the excess of waste of capitalism to nourish and modeled a slower pace of life and a coming together of community. They also reclaimed anti capitalist patterns of space use by feeding people in a public park outside of the framework of for profit restaurants and grocery stores. So they're really taking these media theory ideas from mc lwin and from
other people and trying to put them into Yeah. Yeah, they're very like they're sort of like relationship between theory and on the groundwork is really it's like firing.
To me, the most cliche word is practice, but this is just like literally it. It is where theory and practice meet. They're not like, oh, we should just do things or we should just think about things. They're like, we should think about things and then do things.
Yeah good, exactly, yeah, yeah yeah, and constantly be thinking and rethinking about them.
Yeah coo.
The Diggers incorporate it, so they incorporate other aspects of their cultural work into the feeds. These included theater. They would screw on stupids really tightly to force diners out of passivity. They'd have to like grapple with them to open the stupids.
Fucking nerds, I know.
And then Emmitt Grogan and Billy Murcott also built a giant frame of reference. So it was this giant doorway painted a golden orange that diners had to walk through before they were able to eat nerds, and the idea is that the feeds, they'd have to leave quote unquote consumer culture at the door and instead fully participate pat in the ideals of the gift economy. Yeah, they were total nervous.
I love it.
Yeah. And Digger papers were also distributed at the feed These Digger papers were made by secretly using the mimeograph machine in the Students for a Democratic Society offices in a building that belonged to the San Francisco Meme troop, which is really funny to me. Did Yeah, It's like, fuck you, dad, we're using the minograph.
Yeah.
So one of my favorite papers is called take a Cop to Dinner, And I'm kind of cheating because it was printed in September nineteen sixty six before the feeds began, but it's food related, so I'm going to talk about it. So the background is the owner of a psychedelic shop in the hate Ashbury posted a take a Cop to Dinner sign in his store window in an attempt to try and build bridges with the cops, which inspired other
neighborhood business owners to do the same. The diggers, Yeah, who understandably hated the cops, and critiqued the local merchants for their continued investment in consumer cap decided to respond, and you can see a scan of this broadside on the Digger's Archive, which is a website that has a ton of Digger materials on it, and it starts with a very strange poem about genitals and hydrogen bombs, which
I'm not going to read because why. But then the broadside lists the boys various people and organizations from racketeers to unions to the Catholic Church and Department of Justice bribe cops to encourage them to turn a blind eye to things that were technically illegal but in the service of upholding power. So the Broadside becomes more and more specific and ultimately calling out Theelin Psychedelic Shop and then nearby I Thou Coffee Shop, before ending the list with
cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots. And this is printed and distributed in the weeks before the Hunter's Point uprising, which seems to gesture the fact that there was, you know, this feeling in the city even before this uprising happened about what was going on with the police. They also distributed leaflets for other events at their feeds, such as is the one for the Intersection game, which
was held on Halloween nineteen sixty six. They invited pedestrians to walk in geometric shapes at the intersection of Hate Nashbury to disrupt the flow of automobile traffic. And this is really successful. Around six hundred people showed up to play. It caused a giant traffic jam, and five diggers were arrested.
Okay, so this is like so they're like writing sigils with their bodies in motion, like in the street. Is that the I think so?
Yeah, it's sort of yeah, walking in these funny shapes in order to, yeah, just to like tie up traffic.
He there's that like kind of meme of like the circle of protection from a self driving car where you like drive the like yellow line, you like paint the yellow line around the car and then the car can't leave because it can't cross the yellow line or whatever.
You know. I haven't seen that, but that's brilliant.
Oh yeah, no, and this just feels like that for the six Yeah, totally.
Okay, Yeah, they really do feel like even though we're talking about food and how their predecessor of you know, spoiler alert things like food, not bombs. They're also kind of a predecessor of meme culture, so that's like an interesting tie in. So I've read a bunch of times that the Digger Feeds inspired the Black Panther breakfast program. It's always felt like a stretch to me, or like
the story was more complicated. And then I found a video of Digger Kent Minnault where he talks about meeting UEP. Newton in fall nineteen sixty six. Newton did tell him he had heard of the Digger Feeds and implied that he found them inspired, but followed that up by taking Minault around Oakland and talking about the Black panthers plans
to serve kids a fortifying breakfast before school. Newton also pointed out the yards of certain houses and mentioned that he'd been talking to the women who own them about using them to grow fresh food. So it's possible that the Black Panthers took some inspiration from the Diggers, but as Minault says in the video, the Panthers' ideas were much more system than those of the Diggers, and the Panthers definitely inspired the Diggers in turn, so it's definitely a two way street.
And you know what else is a two way street that's alts wrongcoming from you. I know, I loved it. Medium is the message as relates to advertising. Help me out here.
It's time for ad breaks unless you have coolers on media.
So yeah, here's ads maybe, and we're back.
So the feats continued regularly until February nineteen sixty seven, when they started to peter off. There are a lot of reasons why this happened. There were population pressures as young people from around the country flocked to the hate Ashbury, which is what would result in the Summer of Love in nineteen sixty seven.
Which I totally knew was nineteen sixty seven. I totally didn't have to completely change my brain to.
Be sixty nine, right, but apparently sixty seven.
I'm a good history I'm not a historian. I'm a pop his history writer. Anyway.
Well, the thing the thing too, is like the thing about doing a lot of food history is often I'll know about the food stuff, but not about everything else. Yeah, so there's actually not too much more I could tell you about the Summer of Love besides the fact that it was in nineteen sixty seven. So yeah, okay, no worried.
Yeah, no, we all knew. Everyone knew that it was sixty seven, not sixty nine. Absolutely, Okay, now that actually makes sense because then it was like, yeah, that's like where it because it kind of, as I'm under the impression, a lot of hipie stuff sort of like really started in the Bay Area and spread out, so it was like probably more generalized by sixty nine or something. This is me talking out of my ass totally.
That is Yeah, that is the impression I get, Yeah, that it spread out, and then you're getting to sixty nine, you're getting a lot of repression, You're getting a lot of breakdown in the Bay Area. But then again, there are like many people in this world who know way more about this than me, So I'm just making it, you know, kind of making an educated guest based on what I know about the Diggers and related projects.
I'm like annoyed because I've done like probably yeah, probably like twenty episodes total, like including like multiple parts or whatever related to late sixties early seventies movements in the US, but I haven't covered this, like the Summer of Love stuff, So I'm like, I don't know, I haven't read those books yet.
Maybe it needs to happen.
Yeah, you know, ye yeah.
I actually had a bunch of places in the script where I was like, you could do a whole episode off, and then I like edited most of them out.
No, because I thought you should pitch it to me.
It's actually just me me pitching other episodes. Yeah. So anyway, another reason that there was a crackdown. City authorities were cracking down on free food distributions and ordered produce suppliers a stop donating to the diggers, whoa classic repression for the city government. But there is another reason that regular feeds stopped. Can you think of what group of people might have done most of the cooking and had to do a disproportionate amount of the labor.
It's probably some group that I wouldn't even be able to think of, because no one ever thinks of, like yeah, like whatever the opposite of men is.
Yeah, I don't even know what that is. No or no, Sophie, do.
You happen to know any of this? Never heard of it?
Okay? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, yes, as we're jokingly gesturing at it was the women who were involved.
Women.
You do say there were women?
Oh wow, so cool?
I know right. Women were responsible for cooking as well as procuring food for the feeds, which at one point were daily and regularly served up to two hundred people, which is a ton of work.
Yeah.
As I was researching this, I was thinking about how I'm part of Autonomous Community Center here in Tucson, the BCC, where we do weekly meals that feed up to forty or fifty people, and every one's in a blue moon. I sign up to cook and it feels like a lot. So I can't imagine doing that every single day.
No, So for like your shitty boyfriend who's just on drugs, who's like, come on, don't you care about the cause?
Totally? Yeah, who's making all the broadsides? And you know, there definitely was this.
Yeah.
Yeah, the men got to be thinkers and the women had to do a lot of the grunt work.
So yeah.
So a great example of this is that even though Emmett Grogan claimed that he got all the food for the feeds, Our Pale Peter Coyote wrote about how the digger women would actually collect the donations because the produce venders were more inclined to give food to them than
to the men. Yeah, and yeah, It's also really funny because a lot of the things that I saw were like these burly Italian men at the produce market only want to give food to the women, which I thought was kind of hilarious in a vague like leaning into ethnic stereotypes way, but it might have happened. I read an oral history with a digger named Judy Goldhoff, who is one of the women who would go down to
the produce market. She also talks about gleaning in nearby agricultural fields, so they would go out and gather produce, yeah, like zucchini and onions that get left behind during the mechanical harvesting process. And she also mentions a number of women who were involved in the feeds, including a group of students either like from Antioch College on break or dropouts that wasn't totally clear to me but had come from Antioch College, as well as someone named Nina Blasenheim.
And Blasenheim comes up a bunch of times in these oral history interviews as bottom lining the feeds, but I haven't been able to find out more about her, but I do want to name her again, Nina Blasenheim, because according to these women, she did really important work making these feeds happen. The poet Dianda Primo was also involved in the Diggers, and I will admit that I wrote more about this in an article for gastro Obscura, but I'm not going to go a ton into it for contractual reasons.
Ah fine, I needed you. You wrote one of my favorite pieces of poetry ever. The it takes all of us pushing on this from every direction.
Yeah, her revolutionary letters are amazing. You should read them. She's one of my favorite poets. I have a tattoo of one of her lines of poetry. So I'm a huge dand a Prima fan. And her involvement with the Diggers was pretty peripheral, but it is interesting and you can find stuff about that online. I was like working on that piece and this at the same time and got into kind of sticky like they need to be different scopes kind of thing.
Is that piece out yet that people can read it is?
Yeah, it's on gastro Obscura, so you should be able to find it just googling like gastro Obscura Diggers.
Or yeah or run awry, Yeah.
You know whatever you want to google. So even after the feed started to wane in spring nineteen sixty seven. The Diggers continue to do mutual aid. In addition to their spectacles, parades, and other theatrical events, they open free stores that offered clothing and products that were procured both
through donation and theft. Oh yeah, and when police would inquire about who was in charge of these stores, the Diggers, in true anarchist fashion, would tell them that if they wanted to see someone in charge, they'd have to be the one in charge. They'd basically be like, there are
no managers, you're the manager. They would also invite people to take turns being the manager of the store, which from what I can tell, mostly meant helping customers find what they were looking for, suggesting clothing, things like that. They also operated at least one crash pad to house the young people pouring into the hate ashbery, so a housing space that people could stay at and living.
So you mentioned because earlier the only specific political ideology you've named with them as like Marxism from the alf the thing they came before. In my research, which was very minimal, but I read about the Diggers as an
explicitly anarchist organization. Do you know like when that shift happened, or if it was like a little bit more loose than that, it was just like whatever, we clearly don't want anyone in charge, and we just use marks for like a way of understanding the way that like economics works.
Or Yeah. So from my reading, which I think once again somebody else could go way more into this side of things. But they were a lot of what they were doing was really rooted in everyday life, right, and so they were very anarchist in their approach. But a lot of the writing they were doing, a lot of the theory and discussions they were having had more to do with what was happening on the ground in San Francisco. Okay, So I would say that from what I can glean,
they were definitely an anarchist project. They were also, like so many radicals at the time, super Marxist influence. I would say that they were they were mostly anarchists. I would define them. That is the label that makes the most sense. Okay, but it does feel a little bit loosey goosey, like I'm not sure if every digger would identify that way, you know.
Yeah, no, that that makes sense to me, And yeah, that that tracks, And this is an interesting I like that everyone's the manager, but I like how it like runs up against this hard wall when you're like you're the manager and like, no, don't make a cop the manager. I have one rule, I know, totally. Yeah, but also it probably like scares that no cop is going to be like, yeah, that's right, I am the manager here now, right, you know.
Yeah. I feel like they had this really like a whole huge thing about disorientation, right, so they're disorienting this guy. Yeah, yeah, you know, just throwing him into confusion.
No, I like it.
Yeah, And they also continued food based projects. A lot of the work that Dan Daprima did was from this later era. She moved after the feeds had ended. Flyers from this era show free distribution of lettuce and information about Digger sponsored spaghetti dinners held at local churches. A lot of the flyers were handwritten on one B yob stands for bring your own bowl, which I thought was pretty funny. And also during their feeds they would often
ask people to bring their own bowl. And there's lots of ideas about why this was. Some people are just like they didn't have bowls, and other people are like they wanted to make sure people were like active participants and not passively eating.
I can tell you why. I think it was. So there's all I used to eat at and cook for a lot of different food up bombs, and the one that I went to that eventually was like, now, whatever, you have to bring your own dish was so that they didn't have to wash all the dishes.
See that makes so much sense, And it's so funny to me because I also have done similar things throughout my life and I was so deep in the history that that never.
Occurred to me. No, No, I mean yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's participatory, yes, participatory doing the fucking dishes. Like yeah. I was like, however, I was like really angry about it. I was like I was probably twenty one, and I was like, this creates a barrier, you know, and like yeah, because you know, not everyone who's going without a house is like carrying around a bowl or whatever. But honestly, most people are.
And in a lot of photos, there's some amazing photos in the Digger archives, the early feeds, and you see people eating out of like soup cans all sorts, of recycled material. I do think they did down the line start providing things for people to eat out of. But yeah, people were very improvisational with what was a bowl.
Cool. I've definitely eaten food ut bombs on a car on a piece of cardboard, oh totally.
Yeah, yeah, or the like empty bean can.
Yeah totally.
So now we're going to get to bread, and we're going to touch a little bit on some whole wheat bread stuff, although I think different from what you went into before. So we're going to talk about digger bread. Have you ever heard of the digger bread recipe?
Is it involved dipping it in melted cheese. This is my attempt to bring spot.
I mean, we're not having a font you were trying to bring up doing to it all.
The only thing I know about digger bread is I have this I have this understanding that could be totally wrong that the reason that like old grain and whole wheat bread is popular in like healthy food in the United States period is because of some weird anarchists in the Bay and the sixties, along with Tide. Those are like the things that I'm like aware of or have been told that they influenced.
I'm so glad you brought that up, because admittedly, when I was writing this script, there were definitely things that had to stay on the cutting room floor. And I have read about the influence of the Diggers and wholl weat bread and then was struggling to like find it again and didn't want to put something in. I couldn't one hundred percent cite.
Okay, well I'll claim it apocryphaly.
But I'm pretty sure that that, Yeah, they had this huge influence on whole wheat bread across the country. The Diggers also had a huge they like popularized tide in within the United States. It did draw on more traditional forms of dying I believe from Southeast Asia, but I'm not totally sure. But yeah, that's also another thing that someone could look into excited about.
I can never be excited about that.
I don't know, well, I know, and.
I feel like so it's like all the like metal heads I know are really into tight I and I'm I'm like just slightly too old because I was around the worst era of hippies, which is the early nineties and like mid nineties hippies, the like yeah, pale end of the Grateful Dead the most like consumerist, burned out, like apolitical, misogynist hippies in the world. It from my point of view, and so I have this like really
deep like fuck that version of hippie. And so the version of hippie that I like is when you like, look and they all look like medieval peasants. I'm like that shit rules. You could be in a cult, you know, I say, with my hood on, I'm wearing all black.
And yeah, I think that from what I can tell, the Diggers look exactly like what we think of as the worst kind of hippie, which is interesting to think about because because they're awesome, that they're awesome. Yeah, and a lot of people, a lot of hippies of that era were awesome.
Yeah.
And you know, like all things, it gets co opted and watered down, yea, all things within the you know, within our like super capitalist United States. Yeah, it gets becomes this other thing totally.
And the fact that I'm angry about what happened when I was fourteen should have no influence on whether or not a doom metal band wants to make a tid eye version of their shirt. And I actually think, I actually think it's cool that it's coming back. I'm just like, it's like not quite for me, even though I love natural dying and all that stuff. Like I have a whole bucket of black walnut rhinds that I'm going to die some of my dresses with next.
Week, but they're not going to be like black walnut tied addresses.
No, although I'm like, what if I just tried to get over it by like, No, I probably won't. I don't think that's going to happen anyway.
Then this is a great time waiting. This is a great time to talk about my boots. I'd like to talk about my boots.
Is that okay, Le's talk about your So.
I have this pair of boots that I originally got because a friend's kid was having her bot mitzvah and she asked everyone to wear like flowery things. And I really really love a clothing assignment from a child. It's
one of my favorite things. And so I went all out and I found at a thrift store these Doc Martin's, except that they have like hippie paisley flower print all over them, and I don't wear them very much because anyone who knows me knows that I mostly wear all black, but I put them on today because it felt appropriate.
Don Are you going to at some point for us, because because.
Yeah I can, I can totally wait, I'm really clumsy, but I'm going to try to do this.
I see the side they do. They look really fucking cool. Enough about it, now, you'll know that I've finally gotten over self consciousness. When my hair is just in a crown braid with flowers in it. That's when you know I'm just like finally just like see, you would look really fucking cool.
I know totally you would. I highly recommend. Anyways, Yeah, we'll support. So back to bread. In June nineteen sixty seven, a few months after the feed stopp happening regularly, some Diggers, who were baking alongside Ruth and Walt Reynolds, who were volunteers at All Saints' Church, turned four hundred pounds of flour and a bunch of other ingredients into a whole wheat bread, which they distributed to residents of they hate Ashbury. The event was super successful, and the Diggers soon opened
a regular free bakery out of the church. It distributed about two hundred loaves each on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
That's amazing.
I've been challenged to do an ad break by my very charming and clever podcaster friends, but I feel like the diggers would just be like, it's free because it's yours. So maybe as you listen to these ads, if they're for anything that you have to pay for, I don't know, maybe you think about how you don't have to pay for them.
You know, yeah, I couldn't.
As somebody who recently can't eat gluten, and all gluten things are more expensive than non gluten things, I think non gluten bread should be free too.
Yeah. Right, this this podcast is brought to you by free bread of glutenous and non glutenous varieties. And if any other ad creeps in and it's not for something free, that was a mistake and we're back. Oh okay, but wait,
so you're talking about all this. I think what's really interesting you talk about how like there was like cross they didn't influence the Black Panther's free breakfast program, but both were aware of each other, right, yes, yeah, and both of them well the feed wasn't, but the both were out of churches. And this is the kind of thing that I feel like sometimes gets left out of history.
Is like when when radicals go over it, it's like, no, that's actually that, that's not nothing, that's not a meaningless detail, you know that. It was totally It was out of this church that was like, sure, you all can come bake four hundred loaves of bread a week here.
Totally. Yeah, And I can't remember what kind of church it was, but it was some kind of I grew up in New York, where there the Protestant population is not huge, and growing up, I used to call them love your neighbor Protestants.
So like instead of the Evangelicals or whatever.
No, but like the you know, social justice oriented like really awesome sort of uh, you know, I don't know that much about it, but like theologies that are centered around liberation of all people's versus like trying to take away everyone's right and that. I don't remember exactly what the All Saints' Church was, but they were certainly of that.
That makes sense, yeah, at.
Least said the time. Yeah. So, but but the kitchen and the church didn't have baking trays. So Reynolds had this idea that they could use coffee cans to bake the bread. Oh and I find this part really interesting because even though it seems like it was just a practical solution to lack of baking trays, and it probably was, it meant that the bread was literally made in packaging for a beverage that played an intrinsic part in the rise of capitalism, the very capitalism that the Diggers so apused.
And so I kind of wanted to do a brief coffee and capitalism.
Okay, let's do it as a non coffee drinker. I'm gonna feel so good at the end of this, or I'm gonna feel really bad. I don't know.
I feel like neither. I feel like we're all the products of history in such complex ways.
No, I don't do anything literally, she said after introducing ads.
Anyway, Sorry, go ahead, this is like the one paragraph version of like books have been written about this. So coffee came to Europe from the Arab world, and it caught on in the seventeenth century in like Western Europe, it started to replace alcohol as the everyday drink, so instead of being slightly drunk all the time, people in Europe were caffeinated and able to work longer hours and also talk really fast. Coffee houses.
Yeah.
Do you like that? I wrote a joke into the script because I was like, Sophie and Margaret are so good at jokes, I'm gonna have to, like, you know, keep up with the Joneses. No, No, it's good, my very very cheesy coffee joke. Yeah. Coffee houses became popular in London under Cromwell and the London Stock Exchange.
No, he's a demon. He comes up as is evil every single time. I'm like, is there something I don't Yeah, just signed Ireland. Well, yeah, anyway, you already do that.
Anyway I already knew that. Yeah, And he became coffee become He didn't become popular in London. Coffee becomes popular in London under Cromwell, the London Stock Exchange, and the contemporary insurance industry grows out of these coffee Do not ask me to tell you more, because I don't remember any of it, but fascinating. And Adam Smith literally wrote
The Wealth of Nations in a coffee house. And then during the Industrial Revolution, coffee allowed workers to grind harder and for things like night shifts to exist because they could drink coffee and stay awake, and the coffee concept of The coffee break comes from a factory owner in Denver in the nineteen fifties who gave his workers two mandatory coffee breaks a day to increase productivity.
So what you're saying is to be anti capitalist, everyone should be drunk all of the time.
I like how you came to this conclusion. I don't know. I'm not going to answer that. This is too big of a question. I wout two cuffs of coffee this morning.
Yeah, No, I'm not actually anti Yeah.
Do what makes you feel good and stand against oppression everyone.
Yeah, and you could be awake while you stand against a You can be productive in a lot of ways, you know, there is good productivity. That is like one thing that people are like, Well, I understand all of the like, don't work so much. Capitalism wants you to work so much. I'm like, but we could also work to fight it too. That'll still work, you know.
Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, and people have different levels of that.
Yeah.
I love getting shit done, So I'm I think we're on a similar wavelength that way. But yeah, So the Diggers baking holy bread and coffee cans really kind of in my mind, fits with their whole using the excess of capitalism for revolutionary means thing both practically and metaphorically. And it also kind of fits with that food as the medium thing, right, because bakers and eaters are thinking about the relationship between capitalism and food by baking coffee cans.
I know that this is a stretch, but like so much of what they did was a stretch too, like trying to convince people of things that I feel okay about making this connected.
Yeah, I mean they literally had people walk through a frame of reference before they like, it's fine, it's good, even total.
And then I should also say I have actually not tried baking the diggerbread recipe. And it's because now a lot of coffee cans are aligned with toxic material. Oh there are some that aren't, and you can do research into it, but I'm like a very anxious person, and I would just like somehow convince myself even if I had like completely checked that it was fine with a certain coffee can, that it somehow was it. So I
haven't actually had a chance to make this bread. You could also just make it not in a coffee can. That's another option. There are recipes out there online.
Okay, see now, I'm like, but we could make like a you could we could make and sell a bespoke coffee can that doesn't have anything bad in it. That's for making your bread.
You can buy that. Oh really is okay, But it just seemed too far. No.
Yeah, and also it yah goes against the concept to some degree. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I wouldn't be mad at myself. I like kitchen gadgets, like totally seen. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
So these free bakries, but around the Bay. This was helped by coverage in the Berkeley Barb, which was an underground newspaper that had a circulation of eighty five thousand readers, which is huge for an underground Yeah.
Yes, that's not so underground. That's amazing. Uh huh.
Yeah. And the Barb covered the free bakers extensively, including one that sprang up at the Olem Poly Ranch commune. I hope I'm saying that correctly. In one article, journalist for the bar Brightes, a bakery owner decided to drop out and lay the ovens, mixers, and other accessories on
the ranch. In turn, the residents of the ranch are baking bread and distributing it free throughout the Bay Area, and the photo that ran with the article, there are topless young people, mostly women, needing bread on a table covered with empty coffee cans. This seems like regular Hippi shit, but I do want to acknowledge there's this really complex intertwining of sexual liberation and the patriarchal male gaze that women in the nineteen sixties and seventies communes faced in
a pretty intense way. So I just want to say that. Speaking of photos, there's a pretty amazing one of kids cutting into Digger bread at the Free Hueye rally in February nineteen sixty eight. The photo was taken by Ruth, Mary and Baruch. It was in support of Huey Pan Newton, whom in Nault had toured Oakland with, as I mentioned earlier, and who was accused of allegedly killing a police officer
in the midst of defending himself from police violence. And based on print materials I've seen, like flyers, it seems like at least some of the Diggers were pretty active in this free hue campaign, so this continued. Sometimes. I think that the relationship between the Diggers, from what I've seen, it seems like the relationship between the Diggers and the Black Panthers was overstated and a bit of wishful thinking on the Digger's part, But there was like actual, real
tangible solidarity that was happening as well. And then in May nineteen sixty eight, Ruth and Walter Reynolds start a free bakery at the Resurrection City encampment. Have you heard of Resurrection City? No?
This sounds amazing, So I.
Hadn't heard about it until I started researching the Digger.
Chris Christian hippie homeless commune, not exactly, although I was just going on the names Resurrection makes me think Christian.
It was Christian. Yeah, so Resurrection City. It was a six week tense city on the National Mall in Washington, d C. That was part of the Poor People's Campaign, which is a multiracial movement for economic justice that in particular brought together to cano black and white Appalachian activists. And there's way more to say about Resurrection City than I can in this episode. This is another one of those you should do an episode about, but here's a
brief snapshot. The Poor People's Campaign was started by Martin Luther King Junior, and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After King was assassinated in April nineteen sixty eight, organizers carried on the campaign and demanded a quote unquote economic bill of rights that included a living wage for all workers and an adequate income for those unable to work.
The camp was ultimately evicted on June twenty fourth of that year, the day after its permit expire, but it did lead to more money for social services, including an expansion of the food Stamps program and more funding for head Start, as well as free and reduced lunch in Mississippi and Alabama, and it was also described by participants as practice for living together in a largely collectively run city.
Residents described it as a city where you didn't have to pay taxes and you didn't experience police brutality or going to so pretty important stuff there. The free bakery at the encampment made fifteen loaves an hour. The brand usually came right out of the oven and was immediately served to camp residents, As residents usually got only one hot meal a day because of funding. Stuff in the kitchen.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference camp organizers were really impressed by the bakery, and they even moved their own coffee shop next door to it. Coffee again, I know, always coffee. Now live in a world where we have to stay awake, you know.
Yeah, I'm awake right now.
I know I'm awake too, But I've also had two cups of coffee. And I actually took my ADHD medicine today because I was like, this is probably the one day we're being really chatty. Is good?
So this is my socializing for the week.
Yeah.
So Digger bread also spread throughout the counterculture and recipe form. The recipe was originally distributed as a Digger leaflet entitled Free Bread. It included a list of where to buy wholesal flower cheaply in the Bay, and instructions for making twelve loaves at once. Since they assumed the people using the recipe would be doing so to open other free bakeries, it also included the stipulation that although anyone was welcome to use the recipe, you always had to give the
bread away for free. Hell yeah, I know, awesome, right, But later versions of the recipe don't even mention the free bakeries. So there's one that's printed in both the underground newspaper Northwest Passage in nineteen sixty nine, and in the first ever nineteen seventy issue of Mother Earth News that makes no mention of the bakeries and it totally relocates the bread just to like the domestic sphere. So the head note. Do you know what a head note is? No?
Wait, is it the main thing that you taste in wine?
No, it's that little paragraph before a recipe that people love to complain about.
You mean, the eighteen pages of.
Okay, well that happens on Google because it has to do with like Google algorithm.
It has to do like copyright stuff, right, because you can't copyright a recipe, but you can so in order to I'm not even mad about it. I just click the skipt a recipe thing.
But headnotes can be really cool in like a formerly, you know, when people are thoughtful about them and are yeah, fair enough information. Yeah, But this headnote just says, every time we make this bread, it's a big hit around the house. Have a big hit around your house. And in a nineteen seventy one Berkeley Barber article that does mention free bakeries, the article says that a small town of weed California would be a great place to open one.
And then it says in fight the local sheriff's deputy over for coffee and show him you have nothing to Oh my.
God, it's gone full circle. Oh my god, that's so heartbreaking. This is this is the encapsulation of what happened to the hippies all in one moment, and it happens with any Just you strip away all of the radicals, create something new, and then other people strip away the then they only take the ephemera, right, because the bread is the yeah, the product that is created by a revolutionary process. And so then people are like, fuck the revolution, we just want the bread.
Yeah. And now, unless you're looking at the Digger Archive, Sight or a few other places that are specifically focused on the Diggers, you can like google around for the Digger bread recipe and you literally just find it as this like fun hippie recipe and it never mentions anything more about the Diggers, which is really disappointing.
Can we put the good version in the show notes?
Yeah? I think I can. Yeah, I can send it to you for sure, with the caveat that This whole coffee camp thing makes me really nervous.
That's a good point. You know what people have to get. Yeah, people google yourself. We told you how to find it.
Do that well, very easy if you just google digger bread recipe. All the recipes themselves are good, they just don't always have information about, right, you know who the diggers were.
Which you are providing right now. So consider that you're.
Note, Yeah, giant head note to a recipe. Yeah, so you know.
This whole transcript. Let's just a head note on it anyway.
Sorry, honestly, like there's a lot of writing projects I thought about that would just be something like that, And uh, it's hilarious and also I've spent more time thinking about it than i'd like to. Yeah, fair enough, so to wrap to wrap up our diggers. While free bakries persisted into the seventies, including in other places across the country, and there were digger groups in other places across the country,
even though San Francisco was the main place. The San Francisco Diggers disbanded as a recognizable group in nineteen sixty nine, So even though they only existed for three years, they had a really profound impact on food based mutual aid in the United States. The same year they disbanded. In nineteen sixty nine, a group occupied an empty lot that became Berkeley's People's Park, which I know more recently has
had some challenges around it. Yeah, and I know that people are like struggling to keep it being a people's park. I don't know what the latest is on that. But at the People's Park, occupants plated a garden and, influenced by the Diggers, shared free community meals, often making stews improvised from whatever people brought that day. The Diggers were also a major inspiration for Food Not Bombs, which you've also done an episode on previously and people should check out.
But in case people didn't catch that one, Food Not Bombs is an international decentralized organization that serves free meals
primarily from donated and dumpstered ingredients in public places. It started in nineteen eighty as part of the anti nuclear movement, and then in Hawaii there's a group called Eating in Public that holds dinners inspired by the Diggers and gay Channon Adiita Sharma, who founded it, wrote about the project sorry for a plug for an anthology I edited called Nurishing Resistance, but it was just like too perfect of
a tie in. I wanted to make sure it made it into this episode, especially because there's this one paragraph that, throughout the entire multi year process of editing this book, would put such a huge smile on my face, Like sometimes when things would get tough with editing, I'd like go read this paragraph to remember why I was doing what I was doing. I want to share it with you as a note to end on. So this is
from the article by Chan and Sharma. Diggers dinners have taken place in small settings among friends, as well as in spaces open to all. The events are basically potlock, but with one rule designed to keep capitalist markets at bay. Each participant's contribution must be primarily made from ingredients that they have either grown, hunted, fished, foraged, gleaned, bartered, found,
been gifted or stolen. At the start of each dinner, participants are invited to explain the backstory of the ingredient and our largest Diggers dinner. Among the last of the participants to speak was a tiny eighty year old woman stepping up onto a stool to reach the microphone. She began by saying, I read about this in the newspaper and realized I've been waiting for this my whole life. So I went to the store and stole these bananas and these apples.
Yeah. No, it's so interesting to me that diggers, because they're obviously the lesser known diggers, right, but there was more of them, and they lasted longer, and they also had more impact the original diggers. I don't think they ever saw a harvest. I don't think they ever actually got any food out of the land. And that's not
to say what they didn't. What they did, I mean, what they did was revolutionary, right, the original seventeenth century diggers or whatever, but it but it didn't actually have as much of a material impact on as many people's lives. And so it's just interesting to me that these are the like, the like, lesser known diggers, right, even though they had this like massive impact on culture, but also just directly fed so many people for so long.
Totally, that is interesting. And yeah, I'm not entirely sure why that is. I do not that the diggers, really, that San Francisco Diggers really resisted this whole like I'll call it the famous man notion because it's almost always a man. But they were like very resistant to giving interviews, to you know, to identifying themselves as individuals, not in like a hiding their identity way, but they were just like really focused on the collective. And I wonder if
not having you know, there's not like a famous digger. Yeah, he's like famous mostly for being a digger in the way that you have with some other movements, and I do wonder if that's part of why they're less.
I also think that just like when you get in first, when you're the first the diggers, and also anything you do in like Renaissance era England is going to have more impact on history than like any other time or place to be a person, you know, to like because colonialism, but.
Especially within like the anglosphere right where we're reading and writing in English.
Yeah, yeah, totally, Well, thank you so much. And what's gonna One what are we going to hear about on Wednesday so people can be excited? And two tell us more about you and plug things cool?
So we're going to talk about food co ops, which doesn't sound very exciting and wouldn't have sounded very exciting to me before I did research, but I promise you it will be exciting. There are some very cool radical roots that have been pretty intensely covered up with food co ops in this country. And then as far as plugs, I did want to mention that anthology I edited, Nourishing Resistance, which is available from PM Press. It has incredible contributors.
People should buy it if you can, or like see
if your library has it. And yeah, I recommend reading it, not because I edited it, but because the contributors are so incredible, and specifically two pieces in that the gay Channon Nandida Sharma article that I quoted remaking the Commons a history of eating in Public and then another essay by Madeline Lane McKinley called notes on Utopian Failure and Commune Kitchens, which while it didn't like directly go into my research, it did influence a lot of the background
thinking around gender in this era. So yeah, those are my plugs. I exist only on the Instagram at at ren Arai, which is my name. You can follow me there, yay.
And that's been part one of Ren explains things to me.
We'll be Backdesday Wednesday. Bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.