FREE
FOOD
Most Americans suffer from the nagging suspicion that
someone, somewhere is getting something for free. This fear turns positively
phobic when it comes to poor people getting anything, particularly food. When
people actually organize themselves to distribute free food without the benefit
of proper authority, this anxiety is prone to erupt into action.
Food has long been a potent tool for controlling
population, from the Chinese empire with its control of basic foodstuffs,
through England in the early years of the industrial revolution (said the
Anglican Reverend Mr. Townshend: "Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a
pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural
motive for work and industry it also provokes to the most powerful
efforts."), to the current
government manipulation of commodity exchange programs to punish enemies
and reward friends. It still is seen that way, as evidenced by the following
quotes from Salt Lake City businessmen:
"The distribution of free food is a big mistake. You
need to require some kind of exchange, some type of appropriate work. Otherwise
it just becomes an addiction."1
"To continually give free food to able-bodied people
makes them feel worthless, when in fact these people have great worth -- they
need to be working. ... Work would actually do them as much good as the free
food. Simply handing someone a sandwich isn't going to do much good. The very
idea of self-sufficiency, for some reason, has become passé in this
country." 2
This attitude blithely ignores that permanent
unemployment is now admittedly the rule.
It also ignores the fact that there are literally millions of people who
could work, but can't because the system doesn't provide any jobs. Let's not
even mention those so maimed, physically and emotionally, that they can't work
anymore and have to survive on the state's largess.
During times of civil strife, feeding people can be a
subversive act. Consider the following quote from an Appalachian miner about
strike conditions during the Great Depression:
"It finally came down to the poor, if you was tryin'
to feed any of these starving people, you was trying to overthrow the
government. And if they beat you up or
killed you for doing this, that was law and order." 3
In a current case an outfit called Food
Not Bombs has been suffering both persecution and prosecution by San Francisco's
finest, including their ex-chief, Mayor Frank Jordan. Although they are not
formally banned from distributing food in San Francisco, they are limited
to doing so in one park in the extreme south-west corner of the city (an area
not noted for its large homeless population). FNB prefers to bring its food
to where very poor people congregate, such as near City Hall. This incenses
the Mayor, who has made "cleaning up" some of these areas one of
the chief priorities of his "Matrix" anti-homeless campaign. It also provokes hysteria in those simple-witted
souls who believe that such food programs attract homeless people to "their"
city.
FNB originated in Cambridge, MA, in the early '80s. As
Keith McHenry, one of the founder of FNB tells it, there had been a very
intense confrontation at Seabrook, NH, protesting the construction of a nuclear
power plant. Although it was slowed,
overwhelming state force carried the day. The sand-blasting cannons, the mace
and brutality, and the long hours all took their toll, leading to a search for
other ways to work against the nuclear power industry. Protest activities were
planned for a shareholder's meeting, one of which was a street theater
performance of a soup kitchen a la the great depression. The original idea was
to use costumed protesters to portray the denizens of the soup line, but then
someone suggested actually serving food to "real" people. Leaflets
were put in nearby areas advertising the give-away, and on the appointed day
the performance went off marvelously; they even got a donation from a
shareholder!
They discovered real
satisfaction in providing something tangible to people who needed it,
and FNB was born. The group has since inspired a host of fellow-travelers
across the country --a recent FNB newsletter lists more than 40 contact in the
US and Canada -- and these far-flung chapters share many common traits. They
serve vegetarian food both for reasons of politics (objections to killing
animals) and for practical reasons (meat is harder to store and prepare
safely). It is run by volunteers who operate by consensus (i.e. agreement by
all participants, instead of "majority rules").
Food is donated to FNB by local merchants; day-old
bagels, vegetables and fruits that are cosmetically blemished or aged but still
palatable, etc. One FNBer told us that at first he tended to take everything
offered, but with time he became more discriminating and only accepted food
that would be useful: the point is not to provide merchants with free waste
disposal, but to feed people. The food is prepared in someone's kitchen or,
more rarely, an institutional kitchen.
Most of the groups don't have reliable space to store food for very
long, so the work of collecting food and preparing it is endless. When donation
run short or when special items are needed, the group must conjure up the
money.
This attitude and poverty distinguishes FNB form the
government-sanctified food pantries and soup kitchens of the formal charities.
Many food pantries exist to collect unusable "food" (soda pop, meat
tenderizer, etc.), thus giving the grocers and warehouses a free disposal of
stale or unsellable food and a nice tax break. Needless to say, much of this
stuff is inedible and even more is just not usable (how much meat tenderizer
can people living in shelters or houses with no kitchens use?). Much of this
charity is waste; the remainder is doles out to people who are made to suffer
long waits, bureaucratic hassles and the like for food that may actually be
dangerous, like some of the cheese in the US government's hand-outs which was
so high in sodium that it was dangerous for some people.
Partly out of such concerns, FNB is relentlessly
vegetarian; indeed, it is occasionally the scene of debate between vegetarians
and "vegans" who eschew all products from animals, even milk and
eggs. Some time ago, the San Francisco FNB found to its horror that it had been
serving chicken soup, donated by a volunteer who though of it, and presented it
as, "vegetarian." Despite the misgivings of the volunteers, the soup
was wildly popular with the consumers and so it was still served for a
while. Generally, the
"warning" that it contained chicken broth would set off a scramble
for it. Likewise, when given pizzas (ordered but not picked up and donated the
next day) FNB segregates the ones with meat and passes the out surreptitiously.
This raises the issue that recipients are being fed only what their benefactors
think is good for them, but for FNB this concern is outweighed by the fear of
the potential damage possible from spoiled meat. Where a bad bagel can make you feel queasy, tainted meat can
kill.
Indeed, to the best of our knowledge there has never been
a single case of FNB giving someone food poisoning, an occurrence we can be
sure the local press would be fast to publicize. True, some of the food,
especially in places where lots of meals are served, tends towards the
"industrial" (Keith's word), but it is healthy and filling.
Curiously, the sanitation types who dog FNB's efforts seem to be very concerned
with the cleanliness of food (or, more accurately, with proper bureaucratic
obstacles being properly crossed) but not at all concerned with the problem
that food alleviates: hunger. Whether in San Francisco or Salt Lake City, real
hunger is not considered a problem while the change that some food might be
tainted in a problem. Consider the
following example of an officially sanctioned outfit in New York:
"Then there's the problem of feeding operation to
which City Harvest will deliver nothing. One open air kitchen run by homeless
people shacked up in a contemporary Hooverville on the Lower East Side was
rejected by Palit (director of the City Harvest food collection program)as not
clean enough. City Harvest staff were so appalled that they took a collection
and bought 25 pounds of rice to give. 'Health Issues' would be the excuse for
turning down less formal operations Coming from the people who claim prevention
of starvation is the 'health issue' they are addressing, the excuse if flimsy
at best. Then again, encouraging real community-based, grass-roots self-help
has never been the aim of the discard market."
Another FNB hallmark is its attempt to not only treat the
recipients of their food with respect, but to enlist them in the process. Some
people may have skills that can contribute directly (mechanics to keep vehicles
running, etc.) while others may have fewer skills but can still chop vegetable
or wash pots. This shows that the problem is not a lack of work or of workers,
but a lack of opportunity for someone to profit off that labor.
Indeed, the entire issue of scarcity is an odd one, for
there is lots of cheap food in this country. Consider the following
observation:
"Trouble was, the entire food movement was based on
a false set of assumptions. We (Funiciello et al) tried to insert our views. It
was senseless to treat the problem here the way it would be treated in
countries where there simply was no food at all. In the United States food was
and is in everyone's refrigerator (if they aren't poor, that is). It is in
grocery stores everywhere. You cannot go out to dinner an any of thousand of
restaurants and imagine food scarcity has been in any way a problem here. Ours
is not a nation without food but one of vast, embarrassing abundance. The issue
of individual families' poverty could not be solved returning them to the stone
age of breadlines. Establishing institutionalized begging sites was never a
solution. It wasn't food that was missing. Poor people lacked the normal means
of access: money. Anything other than that would become a means of further
separating the haves and have-nots. Anything else would be amoral heist of poor
people and a helluva waste of time and resources."5
Separating the haves from the have-nots became something
of an obsession for Mayor Jordan, who defeated his liberal predecessor by
heavily touting a general "law and order" rhetoric and vaguely
promising to "clean up the city." Just as California Governor Pete
Wilson rode to re-election via his carefully orchestrated crusade against
"illegal immigrants" (e.g. the notorious Proposition 187), so did
Jordan skillfully managed to scapegoat the homeless as convenient, politically
vulnerable bogey people.
The "need" to clear unsightly panhandlers from
touristy areas was used to justify a host of programs and laws intended to
"clean up" the city. The "Matrix" program mentioned above
provided vans to pick up the homeless from the city streets -- but the absence
of shelters meant they really didn't have place to take them. A number of laws were minted to protect
citizens from "aggressive panhandling." Their constitutionality is
still being debated by the courts. These laws are almost moronic exercises in
spite, authoritarianism, and fear-mongering that do more to assuage the guilt
of tight-fisted curmudgeons and win the support of cold-hearted reactionaries
than the do to "solve" any of the underlying problems. The most
recent one, a law that would have made sitting on the pavement illegal in certain
(upper-crust) areas was defeated by a narrow margin in the latest election.
It is not surprising, therefore, that FNB has become a
particular bête noire for the Jordan administration. Jordan tries to clear the
homeless from out in front of City Hall; FNB sets up tables there to distribute
bread and soup.
It is hard to imagine a more striking contradiction of
philosophies. Jordan says these people
have no right to food, to dignity, to even a place to sit on the sidewalk; he
implicitly denies that they need money, housing or nutrition. The
"problem" from his perspective is one of image.
1: David Thomas, president of
Salt Lake Voice Exchange, cited in "Food Fight" by Ben Fulton,
Private Eye Weekly, June 29, 1994, pg. 10.
2: Mike Place, president of
Wesco Development, Inc., in Salt Lake City. In "Food Fight," op cit.
3: Tillman Cadle, a coal
miner, speaking about condition during a National Miners Unions strike in
Kentucky in "Dreadful Memories," a video about Sarah Ogun Gunning
(1910 - 1983), a folk singer. 1988, Appalshop & Headwaters.
4: "Tyranny of
Kindness: Dismantling the welfare system to end poverty in America,"
Theresa Funiciello, 1993, The Atlantic Monthly Press.
5: "Tyranny of Kindness,"
op cit., pg. 127
