Food Fight

Part 3

by Kristen Lombardi

IN CAMBRIDGE IN 1980, another bunch of activists stood outside Bank of Boston's annual stockholders' meeting in protest of a policy banning investment in Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Boston. Activists set up a soup line to feed demonstrators and soon were chatting up stockholders who had stopped to check out the operation.

"Serving food became an effective way to convey our message," recalls Keith McHenry, one of the activists. "We attracted attention, and stockholders even donated a few bucks."

McHenry and seven others eventually became caterers for peace and anti-nuclear activists all over New England. Whenever a protest was staged at the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, they set up all-vegetarian food tables, for instance. They served at rallies in the Boston Common and Cambridge City Hall through the '80s.

The activists became so recognizable they gave themselves a name -- Food Not Bombs. In Food Not Bombs: How To Feed the Hungry and Build Community, a guide on starting FNB chapters, McHenry and founder C.T. Lawrence Butler explain how the phrase encapsulates the group's politics:

Food Not Bombs states our most fundamental principle: society needs to promote life, not death. . . . Food Not Bombs has chosen to take a stand against society's violence and hunger; we are committed to nonviolent social change by giving out free food, thus celebrating and nurturing life.

In the late 1980s, federal cuts in welfare and housing programs took shape in the form of unprecedented homelessness. FNB stopped catering demonstrators and started picking up restaurants' surplus food to give to shelters and as free handouts in Harvard Square and the Boston Common. It gained a reputation as a radical, anti-capitalist group intent on serving free food to hungry people.

"We never intentionally expanded," explains Eric Weinberger, an original Boston FNB member and longtime activist. "We are the beginning of a renewed, nonviolent social movement."

Perhaps so. Howard Zinn, retired Boston University political-science professor, considers FNB an extension of movements in the 1960s and '70s. Today's FNB members, with 70 national and international chapters, are moving beyond civil rights and peace agendas by bluntly calling attention to America's unequal distribution of wealth, he says.

"Food Not Bombs protests a system which fails to give people basic necessities in life," says Zinn, adding that prior movements faded because they couldn't As a movement, Food Not Bombs spread once homeless people became features on metropolitan landscapes. Chapters appeared in New York City and Washington, DC, which caught the attention of activists in Spain, Australia, and Germany.

What catapulted FNB into public spotlight was a 1988 event that now seems an omen of its relationship with authority. In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Labor Day, activists set up tables after police had arrested them for serving food without a permit. McHenry (he moved from Boston) claimed that giving away free food was constitutionally protected and organized a rally attracting 700 people. This prompted 45 officers with nightsticks to confiscate food, dump containers out of people's hands, and beat servers, which a news cameraman filmed -- until an officer pushed him over. Police ended up arresting 54 activists for not having a permit.

"It was almost unimaginable that anyone in this country could be arrested for feeding the poor in a city park," recalls McHenry, who has since been arrested 104 times for "all kinds of funny charges," he says. (He even spent six months in jail in 1995, and faced life imprisonment because of a California law requiring a trial for anyone charged with a felony three times.)

As McHenry describes it, the SF event changed FNB as a movement because "we encountered official repression for the first time."

It wasn't the last time either. Boston police hassled FNB for setting up along the Freedom Trail in the Boston Common. Officers grabbed "our equipment and dumped it in less conspicuous locations," recalls Weinberger, and finally arrested members for serving food on park grounds without a permit in 1990.

In both cases, the public grew outraged at city officials' and law enforcement's handling of FNB operations, which caused officials to back down on regulatory enforcement. Boston officials didn't show up at court; instead, they dropped charges and asked a church to allow FNB members to cook in its licensed kitchen. Now, says Weinberger, 75 members serve about 700 people daily in Copley Plaza and the Boston Common.

The San Francisco battle wasn't as smooth. After seven years of arrests (in the 1000s), FNB members now serve lunch and dinner daily in Golden Gate Park. They still don't have permits but have negotiated a deal with city administrators that allows their operation to continue.

Because of this deal, McHenry claims, "the San Francisco chapter has proven that it's possible to break the backs of government."

This may sound extreme, but FNB chapters are demanding change in the economic system and how government takes care of the needy. Members in general are greatly disturbed by government's failure to feed all people when America is the world's wealthiest country, they say. They deliberately set up operations in public parks so that people can't avoid hunger, homelessness, and poverty.

"We don't share a political perspective with people in power because we believe the government and economics are responsible for homelessness and hunger," McHenry explains.

In other words, Food Not Bombs makes a public display of poverty, and this is exactly why chapters have run-ins with authority, says Betty Zisk, Boston University political-science professor. By feeding hungry people on the streets, FNB points out government's failure "in a very in-your-face way," and this tends to embarrass city officials, she explains.

"Officials are concerned about a city's image. They want it to appear clean and safe. They don't want its problems in plain view," says Zisk.

Food Not Bombs doesn't look to hassle authority, experts say, but chapters are conveying an uncomfortable message -- poor people are victims of American capitalism. It isn't surprising that authority bumps up against FNB activists, since their views undermine the status quo. Nearly every chapter has clashed with officials over regulations, say activists, and Worcester's situation is just another example.

On to Part 4 Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.