Local Peace Economy Gathering on 9 16 26 | Keith McHenry, Founder of Food Not Bombs

Marie, take it away. Gota start that recording. Good evening, everyone. Um, the poem I picked for tonight is called The Declaration of Interdependence by Richard Blanco. Such has been the patient sufference. We're a mother's bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We're her three children pleading for bubblegum and their father. We're the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars lives are as joyful and bruised. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We're her second job serving an executive absorbed into his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk cafe shadowed by skyscrapers. We're the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We are his loss and the lost. We're a father in a cold town who can't mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened for too long. A history of repeated injuries and usurppations. We're the grit of his main streets, blackout windows, and graffiti truths. We're a street in another town lined with royal palms at home with a Peacecore couple, a Peacecore couple who collect African art. We're their dinner party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We're what they know. It's time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair trade coffee, and organic corn. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petition for redress. We're the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We're his TV set blaring news, having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes, or his son nested in the arms, in the ache of his arms. We're his son. We're a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly but not quick enough. We're the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. Where the guilt and the grief of the cop who wish he hadn't shot. We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. We're the dead. We're the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We're in a dim cell with an inmate reading dstayi. We're his crime, his sentence, his amends. We're the mending of ourselves and others. We're a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter along a stock broker alongside a stock broker. We're each other's shelter and hope, a widow's 50 cents in a collection plate and a golfer's $10,000 pledge for a cure. We hold these truths to be self-evident. We're the cure for hatred caused by despair. We're the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name. The tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We're every door held open with a smile when we look into each other's eyes the way we behold the moon. We are the moon. We're the promise of one people, one breath, declaring to one another, I see you. I need you. I am you. Thank you, Marie. Beautiful poem to read today. So, I'm very excited. I love hearts exploding. [laughter] I'm very excited to introduce you to our special guest today. And I, you know, I've just been a fan of Keith for decades and decades. And he he's such a great example of um the local peace economy, but you know, everybody says how does it scale and he's also an example of how it scales about how good ideas spread and how structure that someone else can pick up matters. Like having it put together in a way that oh I can pick that up and I can do that not from a space of control but a space of support. Um and that um both what he's created is a way for people to learn, to share, to be and also to be a stand against war. And each in their own way they carry the thread of this commitment, but it holds it all together. And so he's really a like a a seasoned example of the local peace economy and how it matures. Um, and so Keith Mckenry is the founder of Food, Not Bombs. Um, he's a longtime local peace economy innovator. He's worked for 46 years to end the exploitive systems of the war economy. He has watched in amazement as his simple aim to feed people has taken on a life of its own with over a thousand autonomous chapters providing nourishment all over the world. Um he's uh got a a blog you can follow that Marie will put in the chat and he's also um the author of the book Soup Street. Um Keith, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for giving us your time and sharing the treasure of your lives um with your story. So I just wanted to start with um can you tell uh our community gathered what what was happening that you would start this um what who were you and what what where did the idea come from? Where was the inspiration come from? >> Yeah. Well, [clears throat] I I um I had a yin-yang uh grandfathers. One grandfather was in the trenches of Belgium during World War I as a medic. The other grandfather led the most deadly bombing campaign in world history, Operation Meeting House. And uh they both influenced me uh hugely. And I saw and and I watched my my mother's father who was in the OSS Office of Strategic Services and was actually in the uh military intelligence before World War II and helped plan Pearl Harbor and uh he I saw him argue with uh McNamer and Lame to drop over the phone to drop the atomic bomb on Hanoi to send a message to the communists. And uh he was teaching me about the real politics and and white man's burden and how you know it would be you know the people we kill um you know have no moral ambiguity. They just die. It's we're the ones have to be strong to kill them. Then the other uh my father's father was a national park service ranger and uh and uh my dad was a ranger. I was a ranger. So, you know, I'm one of the few third generation national park naturalists. Um, but so that influenced me quite a bit. And my uh my when my grandfather on my dad's side was going to be the one of the first junior park rangers at the Grand Canyon on the south rim, he uh drove off the dirt this dirt road. Um he was coming from Stillwater, Oklahoma to where he had been a professor of of uh natural sciences sciences and he uh got found injured by some Hopi farmers who took him to older and uh he conileles there and became really close friends with the Hopi. So he I was blessed. He took me out to see the the snake dances and the green corn dances. And I got to my family drove around uh the canyons uh before they flooded Lake Pal. And so we saw that beautiful sacred land as it had been for thousands of years. And then I was like so upset when I was 16 years old and saw the desecration of those lands when Peabody Cole came in and they started strip mining Black Mesa and they flooded Lake Pal and so on that I decided I would do whatever it took to end any political system that would and an economic system that would allow such desecration. So then um I act um I accidentally uh uh found myself at one point becoming a student at Boston University in painting and sculpture. Um just completely not a plan. I happened to be talking to one of my father's co-workers and he asked me what I was going to do since I just graduated from high school. I thought I don't know maybe I'll be an artist and I'll get you into the art school. So he did. And another teacher there uh I took American history with Howard Zinn and uh he inspired me to participate in in the Clamshell Alliance and so I used started going up to the protest at Sebrook, New Hampshire. He was part of the 1414 that was held in the uh National Guard Armory after a civil disobedience action up there. And uh that's when I became friends with uh um a number of clamshell activists and my uh our affinity groups would go up. I went in October 6th uh to the October 6th, 1979 occupation attempt which was an amazingly intense experience. Anybody that survived that was like changed for life because we, you know, we were being teargassed from helicopters, pepper-sprayed. Um we were attempting to take over the uh construction site and then um and then in May 24th we came back and a friend of mine got arrested uh at that and and back in those days you would just call yourself Emma Goldman or Alexander Burkeman. You didn't need to prove who you were. But Brian unfortunately had his name underneath him uh when he was interviewing with the media. he was chosen to be the media spokesperson and uh so he got charged with felony and we found somebody with some money that bailed him out and on the way back to Boston we're going oh we better pay him back you know he was such a nice guy let's do what we can to raise the money and our idea was to do uh uh bake sales which turned out to be a very failed way to make money so uh then we uh end up uh we had a an old van that we called Emma after Emma Goldman and uh Sue's van, Sue Eaton's van, and we had a company called uh uh Smooth Move. And we're moving a family and they had a poster that said, "Wouldn't it be a beautiful day if the schools had all the money they needed?" And the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. So, we thought, well, that's really cool idea. So, we bought some Army Navy s went to Army Navy surplus store in Central Square and bought some military uniforms and we started doing our bake sales selling people were trying to buy a bomber. At the same time, my job was a produce worker at Bread and Circus. And I would do that in which is now the smallest Whole Foods in the world in Central Square, Cambridge. And uh uh somebody came by and they asked if I was throwing out any food. Um that person became was Chris Worthington who became a city counselor in Berkeley years later. But he was living at the Catholic worker house and he wanted to get some free produce. And so I said, "Take a box." And that gave me the idea to take the rest of the boxes of discarded food to public housing project. And uh the public housing project was across the street. It was on Portland A and there's this vast empty lot behind MIT with this one building being built. And one day the mothers that were getting the food were saying, "Oh, they finally opened that building. It's Draper Lab and they're uh designing nuclear weapons." So that's where he got the idea for the name Food Not Bombs. and uh because they'd been complaining about public, you know, the their public housing not being taken care of and stuff. And here's a brand new building across the street, the sevenstory glass tower. So anyway, then and so uh then we were uh because of the theater stuff we were doing dressed as soldiers, we thought, well, here why don't we confront the Bank of Boston by uh dressing up as hobos and we'll do a soup line outside their stockholders meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank and say, "Hey, the policies of this bank could lead to a future where people will have to stand in line to eat at soup kitchens." And also Reagan had just gotten uh uh inaugurated as president 30 days before. So uh the night uh uh we're making all this food, we realized we didn't recruit enough friends to be a supine and to have that emotional impact one would have if you saw a soupline for the first time. So uh I went to the Pine Street in shelter and gave a little speech to the guys there and they're this is great a protest like the 60s. And so, uh, they show up and it was like so moving cuz every person would give them their styrofoam cup of soup and they would go, "God bless you." And God, it was an incredibly emotional experience. And then some of the, uh, people walking by would go, "Oh my god, Reagan's only in office 30 days. There's already zip lines in America." And so, uh, at the end of it, the guys were saying, "Why don't you do this every day? There's no food for homeless people." This is, uh, March 26, 1981. And um so that night we said, "Let's give two weeks notice at our jobs and do nothing but this." So my boss at Bread and Circus was cool with me continuing to get the food and I organized the delivery [clears throat] of of of uh tofu uh to the loading dock in the back. And and uh so we started this little thing where we pick up the food every day in the morning from all these grocery stores and bakeries and so on. And then we would take the food to uh to public housing. uh uh places like community centers of public housing or to daycare center we had or Ros's place the uh uh uh domestic uh woman's shelter and then the afternoon we do street theater at Harvard Square the Boston Commons uh uh with our food and we were we also building trying to build a uh get people in our area to go to the uh June 12th 1982 uh march for nuclear disarmament in New York City. So, we had a lot of focus with that. We organized our own concerts to build support. We actually sailed a bunch of food on the Greenpeace uh Rainbow Warrior before it was blown up to Portsouth, New Hampshire to feed a protest up there as part of the effort to build for this movement. So, we had like this amazing uh fun time in in Boston for and I was there for eight years and then I ended up in a confrontation over uh getting rid of the homeless out of Kenmore Square and uh and other issues with the local mafia and I had to move. So, I moved to uh San Francisco and I started a second group and I'm figuring well this is the most liberal city in in America. I was friends with the people of Boston City Council and Cambridge City Council and the mayor of Cambridge just loved us, Al Valuchcci. And so I assumed the same thing in the America's most uh um liberal city. So um we set up at Golden Gate Park at the entrance at the end of Hate Street and you could see our sign food not bombs for like almost two blocks walking down Hate Street towards the park. and uh the Grateful Dead was touring and there's a big concert at the Oakland Coliseum that was coming up and so we're feeding dead heads and the people living in Golden Gate Park and we chose Monday because it was the only day that there wasn't food in the hate Ashbury and then this hippie came by and said oh you can get a permit for this and uh just write the parks department and my assumption it was going to be like a street performance permit my letter in fact to the parks department said oh yeah you know yeah the street performance permit in Cambridge I'm sure you'll you know you'll be very happy with our work here in in San Francisco. And then the police would come by every Monday and go, "Where's your permit?" And I go, "Oh, let I forgot about that." And so I'd go over to the parks department. Every Monday after our meal, they had no idea what was going on. And then on August 15th of 88, riot police came out of the park and arrested nine of us for serving food without a permit. And then the next so people there was a a friend of ours Greg Gar had taken a black and white photo of the riot police guarding the food. And if you've seen anything any publications of food on bombs that image is all over the place. But so the anyway that ended up on the page three of the San Francisco Chronicle at the very top and a story about what happened and people like started calling me and we've got to protest this. So, we had a march down hate street the next Monday, banging pots and pans and and carrying the food. And uh then the police arrest 24 of us. And oddly enough, the FBI joint terrorism task force had appeared at that same uh protest and they filed a memo on August 29th to the FBI field office in San Francisco saying that we were a credible national security threat, >> which is pretty funny when you consider there's 30 of us in the world. So there's like 10 in Boston. There is the 10 of us in San Francisco. And a group that had called themselves bread knot bombs in Long Beach because they thought maybe food not bombs was copyritten. And remember this is before the internet. So they we met them at the Nevada test site when we were feeding the protest there and said no change your name to food not bombs and there'll be three groups. So suddenly there was 30 food not bombs people which were now a national uh was a credible national security threat. So then uh that Thanksgiving people went off to celebrate Thanksgiving and then while they're waiting for their plane flights back, National Guard people would come up and say, "Oh, they'd see the fruit up bombs button on their coat and they go, "Oh, we studied them. That's America's most hardcore terrorist group and uh our workshop this uh uh Thanksgiving." So the great thing is so also I had taken notes on how I started the San Francisco group because the first one was like by uh just random and so I uh um people started to call us from all over the world particularly on the uh I think the same uh on on August 22nd CNN actually videotaped the arrests and we made the London Times the the the New York Times the times of India and so on. So then people were outraged at what they were seeing and they would uh call me or write a letter uh saying that they wanted to start a chapter in defiance of what happened with us in San Francisco. So we uh uh I made a flyer called seven steps to starting of food not bombs. And the very first flyer I had they had just invented the answering machine and so I had a section on where you would have get a mailbox and a phone number and you could even get an answering machine. so you never miss an important call for your food not bombs chapter. Eventually I started communicating with uh Johannesburg food not bombs years later on MySpace. So then I added MySpace as something you could your chapter could sign up for and then eventually it became social media in general like it this flyer is today. And then um so all these chapters started up and uh we kept getting arrested although but Labor Day about 2,000 people showed up to get arrested. They arrested 54 people and the mayor freaked out and I ended up I've been trying to meet with him at that time to try to resolve things and it turned out there was no permit to do what we were doing. So we're being arrested for a non-existent permit. So anyway, me and Art Agnos and the chief of police Frank Jordan and uh and so on, we all ended up creating a permit process and then uh almost immediately after part of that was getting environmental health permit and then they uh the uh um Alchin from environmental health intentionally gave us new goals to meet each Monday. Eventually, this uh person eating with us who had just gotten out of the San Quinton said, "Man, you should sue the city in a civil rights lawsuit and forced them to uh to stop jerking you around." So, he and I wrote a lawsuit out. And I typed it up on my performer Mac and then uh I went to I went in we I went to negotiate with uh you know before a federal judge uh um Judge Peekham and the city attorney. And when I give him the pleading paper, the the the the complaint, you know, he's reading the complaint and he's looking at, "Where'd you get this pleading paper?" I said, "Well, I went to Hastings Law School and found some uh pleading paper in the trash and I just cut off the numbers on the side and taped them on and I made Xeroxes. That's how I made this pleading paper. I had no idea where you bought it." And he was [clears throat] very impressed. And he ordered the city to give us one last list. Uh and he did, but then they had a a plan on how to how to sabotage us. They had paid somebody to deliver a cake and put it on our table while I was setting up uh all the equipment. And then they paid a homeless guy to take a slice of the cake. And since I wasn't already set up and I didn't have my health permit on my food facility, as a result, they immediately shut us down and said we couldn't serve anymore. So, but we kept serving. Uh we ignored them ultimately. Uh so so then we would we had uh end up uh the the second we got more arrests uh for misdemeanor u during that time but then the new mayor Frank Jordan came in he deleted the pro permit process completely and got a court order against us serving food without a permit. So from then on the next 750 arrests of fa bombs were for um felony conspiracy to serve food in violation of a court order which meant you had to go before a judge to get out. you couldn't get cited and we had a whole cool so then we had a system because it was uh really hard to do this. We had to sneak the food in. So what we do is we take we learned from the very first arrest that the near riot happened on August 15th of 88. There were people talking about uh sacking the cow foods across the street. They were so upset. So to tone that down we came up with a policy of dividing the food into thirds. So there'd be a little bit of food. The cops would arrest those people with that food. we'd have like a little cardboard sign that said food on bombs because the first thing they take is the sign and then uh or the banners and stuff. And so then we uh the second group would come in with a little bit more food. they'd get arrested and then people learned that the next wave of food would be the entire meal and everybody get to eat and so people were like more relaxed and and then we had a new another campaign called risk arrest one day a month with food not bombs and then church groups would come and get arrested with us and then and we do that same pattern with them and and uh then the national lawyers guild they come out with their banner and the cops look at that and they're like oh my goodness national lawyers guild I don't think we want to arrest them so they arrested the people came to eat instead. And this is how we kind of kept this going for eight years. And then we heard about uh uh there's a little article in the chronicle about uh Native Americans going to protest the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus coming to the Americas. and Pelosi was able to get um San Francisco to be the official city because Columbus Avenue parade was the oldest continually um you know uh Columbus Day celebration in in the United States. So they had the native people had their protest. So we thought well why don't we have our first world gathering right before that and then we'll feed the protest. And so for two days we met at this place called the Cauliflower Collective and we came up with three principles. That the food would always be vegan and vegetarian and free to anyone, rich or poor, drunk or sober. That there would be no president's headquarters uh uh you know that any uh each group would be autonomous and make decisions by consensus and that we would not be a charity but that we would be dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society. So no one had to live in the streets or eat at a soup kitchen. So that became our our our three principles that connected us. And then more and more either be more every time there's a waiver of arrest or eventually like in January um 4th of of 94 I get um framed on a felony that was turned out to be a three- strike felony. And then that May I get two more three strike felonies. Uh my third one was possession of stolen property. 24 Berkeley Farms dairy b uh milk crates which we use for our tables because the cops kept taking our tables every every day. And so we just learned to go to the vegetarian restaurant and market and set up. And uh the news from that ended up starting even more chapters, more food on bombs groups and p we were very uh involved. I was involved in the punk movement even before I started food on bombs. I did the Nature article for a first punk magazine in Boston called Sub uh Platform News. I wrote about rats and concrete and stuff like that. And then um anyway, so the uh punk band started touring on our behalf and raising money for food not bombs. And some punk groups even started um like the uh um the group A Veale in Richmond, Virginia started the Richmond Food Not Bombs. And then in DC, Bad Brains was our house band. And then in San Francisco, we had MDC would raise money for us uh to buy we had an informant that kept losing our vans and so we had to buy vans all the time and they would do another concert to get another van and uh and slowly this started to uh to build as a as a as a worldwide movement. Then the other things was all natural because of the uh ideology of food not bombs of being decentralized and and uh and a non- hierarchal system and you know I designed the food bombs logo and I never copy wrote any of my paintings any of my uh my logo or anything. it was just free use. So that's like all all over the uh the internet now and um all over the web and uh and uh so that it becomes kind of a corporate identity which is the carrot and the fist and uh but then when you're in like the the kids in uh um you know in Indonesia they have like stocks of rice in the fist or you know um I remember one of the first German chapters had it looked like Albert Dur wood block of the woodcut of the fist and carrot, you know, and then uh uh in Latin America a lot of times they would use the a corn on the cob for their, you know, instead of the carrot. So all this just started taking off. Then in in ' 95 we had our second world gathering in San Francisco which was in the anniversary uh the founding of of the United Nations and Frank Jordan was going to dedicate a monument to the universal declaration of human rights. Um, one of article 27 was the right to food, but he was arresting us every day, twice a day at UN Plaza. So, we organized a 10-day gathering and we rent like uh an office which became our convergence space. We started this project called Indie Media so that we could uh broadcast what was happening at the uh at the gathering. We had already started in '92 a project against savings and loan u uh crisis called um homes not jails where we uh would take locks off of abandoned buildings that were owned by mortgage companies and then put our own locks on them. And at one point we had 400 uh keys to 400 buildings in San Francisco. And then at dinner we would ask if anybody would like a new place to live. And then we would choose some people the, you know, the most uh uh vulnerable individuals and we say, "Meet us at this address at 9:00 tomorrow and we'll let you in." And we'd have the key and the neighbors would go, "Oh, this is so cool. They finally rented that old place next door." And we'd fix it up. And according to um the book, No Trespassing, we had uh at least 100 houses was inhabited at any one time, and we had keys for 400 houses. We also started a project called um free radio. And so uh you know my free radio station was called free radio uh San Francisco liberation radio and uh so we broadcast we were up on Sutra Heights and we would broadcast to the San Francisco area like uh stories you would never heard. In fact on New Year's uh eve we read the uh the announcement from the Zapatistas when when the uprising happened against NAFTA. In fact, just before I was arrested for my first strike, I was wearing a chef's hat and a chef's coat with the Fab Bombs logos on them and I had a sign that said Viva Appatista, no NAFTA. So, you know, how would I be doing, you know, stealing a beeper is what they accused me of doing. And the evidence was that the guy that attacked me in a phone booth uh bought a $99 beeper. Had he bought a $98 beeper, it wouldn't have been a strike felony. But so that all helped create this uh you know uh ability to have this like global movement. Every time there were arrests like in Tampa gets arrested uh then more people are outraged by that and then they start their own food not bombs chapters. They start ticketing Houston food not bombs every night and so they that encourages more chapters. Um so it always backfired. All this repression ended up just creating news stories and then outraging people because it's insane in a country which is spending all of its money on war to uh arrest people for trying to feed people. And uh and it's interesting too is I was on a tour I was spo speaking at um one of the things I did after I settled my three strikes case where um I got credit for time served 500 days and uh and uh my probation was that I couldn't uh I couldn't be violated unless I was charged with bombing or murder. But still I didn't trust the San Francisco police. So I just went on tours for years after that. And I was on a tour in uh uh I was speaking in at Princeton and afterwards I go to the house that they get let you stay at at Princeton, you know, like where George Washington stayed there for example, apparently. And uh and the Condisa Rice had the same room as I had the week before room seven. And I uh did they had all these like rich people have a lot often will have lots of remote controls apparently because they had a lot of them in this room. one for the heater, one for something else, one one for the bed that moved the bed up and down or something. And I found the one figured out the one with the TV and I got C-SPAN. And on C-SPAN, there was this lecture from Tus University by this Obama State Department official comparing the people serving the vegan meals in the park and al-Qaeda. Who's more dangerous? And the conclusion was that uh um that the people that did the vegan meals were local people indigenous to their community were loved and people really enjoyed their company and attending their meals and that they were uh um whereas al-Qaeda was like not very popular. Who wants to put bombs on themselves and die? So they um uh they said so the reason that the vegan meals are more dangerous is because they might convince the American public that money should be diverted from military spending to health care, education and other social services. And I would have just thought nothing of that. But uh after I spoke at Harvard Law, the two days later, I went to my dad's place and hanging him and I turned on his little uh an analog TV or whatever it was in his guest room and the same lectures happening. And I'm like, "Oh my god, that was a real lecture. They really do think that we could change society so that money would be diverted from military spending to healthcare, education, and other social services." and what that would undermine as the State Department official said their ability to fund a military to fight against al-Qaeda. So, um that so now it's like like I said, like you had said in the introduction, we're like in at least a thousand cities. We might be like when when SNAP got shut down, the government was shut down. and I happen to be touring Mexico at the time and I was overwhelmed with phone calls every day from little tiny towns in America wanting to start a food not bombs chapter sometimes three or four groups at a time and one of my volunteer things is to update the food not bombs map on fnupbombs.net net and so some you know all through my tour of Mexico I was down there 45 days I was like updating the map two or three times a day from uh new people wanting and that's still I get maybe one or two requests for either updates or or a new chapter just started u and so on so um you know it's very really fascinating um and then I get a lot of calls from hungry Americans because uh uh uh like for instance United Health gives out my phone number for free food to all their uh you know their advant uh Medicare advantage um people. So some sometimes I'll get like 10 15 calls a day who from people telling me there's horror stories of no they can't they're cutting their insulin in half their one poor guy was going to have electricity at the end of the month and it was 107 degrees in southeastern Texas and he didn't know what he's going to do you know so I had people eating cat food they're down to the well that's all they could afford could I get them some food people that had no money to buy gas for a vehicle to get to a grocery store. I mean, the stories were amazing and it was kind of a blessing to get that many calls. It was like three years of Monday through Friday uh of the last three years of the Biden administration. Um, and I don't know why it stopped under the Trump administration, but for some reason I stopped getting any calls once he got into power from people being directed to me by health insurance companies. In fact, the only day I didn't have a there was like three days where I didn't get any calls from United Health and those were the three days that that uh that the uh CEO had been gunned down in Manhattan and um then I didn't you know that was kind of a break you know it was kind of unfortunate way to have a break but that was a break and u so and then other projects that we've done as well is we do this thing called the really really free market where we give out free everything to people that started by Christ church, New Zealand food, not bombs in uh um in the '9s when they uh uh there was a free uh um you know free market uh a conference on free market economics at the college across the street from where they served. So they said, "Well, let's do a really really free market outside the free market conference." And that took took off all over the world. And then we have like a we already had bikes not bombs back in the very beginning where we were sending bikes down to Nicaragua and then we've also had food not lawns the homes not jails the pirate radio. So, in my second book, uh, Hungry for Peace, I have a whole little section on all the different spin-off non-hiral decentralized uh, movements that are based on the ideas of food, not bombs and that grew out of food, not bombs directly. And, uh, and so now you I see these things all over the world. It's just unbelievable. And I I write about it in my book, Soup Street. Um, and I have like stories there about how it built and what I what inspired me to become an activist. stuff like my dad gave me uh uh Walden by thorough when I was in the fifth grade and I just learned to read because I have dyslexia and I read on the duty to civil disobedience and I just that I just took off when that and uh I've been a war tax resistor ever since and I proud to say I've never given the federal government any money ever and uh so you know I write about that and uh and then a typical day at food not bombs in in Santa Cruz with all my character friends that come by and all the the fun things that happen at a food not bombs meal. And so part of our idea was that we would be in the streets in public and we would try to encourage housed people and unhoused people to connect with each other to demystify both communities or really the house community. People who because homeless people have been home, you know, housed, you know, they they know what it's like to live in a house. They did so once. and to just build a conversation and have a very public display of what is the the damage that's being done by investing all of our money in the military instead of providing for ourselves cuz it's right there in your face. There's like a couple hundred people standing there waiting to eat and uh and here we are people with no resources making that happen and uh and now making that happen all over the world. And then we do a lot of rescue work as well. Like when the port explosion happened in Beirut, food bombs was the first on the scene to feed the people that lost their housing from that. And uh we were in New Orleans for eight months. We were the only daily meals in New Orleans uh after Katrina. Um then we did we had a kitchen in in Brooklyn for Sandy. Um we our group in in Indonesia was on the first on the scene in their community when the uh Christmas tsunami wiped out much of their town. Um so we have have that kind of of background and then the other thing is we've done a lot of serving meals at to striking workers and to getting uh groceries to families of striking workers and actions all over the world. And then we still also many people know us from bringing meals to protests and serving the the demonstrations. So we're like a full spectrum uh non-hiral movement and I estimate when I looked at the photo of Beijing food not bombs group photo it might have been 200 people in that chapter and I and anywhere I go in Southeast Asia where there's a food not bombs chapter they have lots and lots of people. So there might be on any given Saturday tens of thousands of people cooking a food bonds meal somewhere in the world. You know there's probably and then and we must have served like billions of of meals billions and billions of meals and uh and it just keeps growing and that's what's an amazing thing that you would have thought maybe at some point it would peak or something but it doesn't. It just gets bigger and bigger and more and more groups start up and and there's more and more reason to have a food bomb. So, uh, because there's [clears throat] more, in fact, a woman that got kidnapped with me in Nigeria, she was doing a document, trying to do a documentary about food on bombs, and I hope she ultimately gets to it. Um, but um um, you know, she's kept every every few years she would, you know, she traveled with me all over the world and she would like, go, well, it seems like there's more bombs and less food. What do you think about that? And it is kind of a bummer question to ask the co-founder of Vuna Bombs, but it it's it's true. But maybe and a lot of us here are probably remember the hundth monkey back in the 80s, you know, and and our idea of calling ourselves food not bombs was if we said it enough, if people kept hearing it enough, kept reading it enough, maybe it would finally tip the consciousness of the world that we really should be focusing on food and and making sure everybody is fed and housed and clothed and instead of spending all our resources on bombs. And so maybe there'll be this magic uh time where the monkeys will have washed their potatoes in the river and there won't be any more war. So that's kind of my uh my dream of uh of doing this. But it is a blast doing Food Not Bombs and uh you know it's been an amazing experience. That's for sure. And I hope you get a copy of my book Soup Street. And if you can't afford it, it's all my books are free online because much of my audience has no money and they live in the global majority and it's often I can't mail them something, you know. So my just go to foodbombs.net and you'll see I have soup street is the right under the where you sign up for your the emails which are pretty infrequent from me but um and then also uh you could get uh the anarchist cookbook. my rewrote that uh in a response to food not bombs kids being framed by the FBI using the anarchist cookbook that William Powell wrote and uh by circling this bomb-making uh recipes. And so I said, "Forget that. It's none of that of William Pal's book has anything to do with anarchism. I'm going to write a book that actually has vegan recipes for a hundred and for families of six and talks about the actual philosophy of of of uh of um of anarchism. And William before he died uh emailed me and agreed that it was cool that I used his denunciation of his book as the uh forward to my book. And then uh and then Chris Hedges wrote the actual uh preface for that. and Zen wrote the forward to my first for the book before that the first two books of mine food not bombs how to feed the hungry and build community and hungry for peace and uh so there's a bit of the story about food not bombs >> oh my god Keith you're so inspiring and there's just so much in there that I think everyone here can take which is you know especially it's like you just have an intention and you meet how or where it is and you find your way around it and you expose it and you're, you know, a great example of non-violent direct action. Um, and just knowing that that's what you're doing. You know, I'm just right now we're in this moment of a genius non-violent direct action by MLmore that was a a domino that has the dominoes falling like crazy. And um I think I just wanna you know I had you here to talk about you know food not bums and local peace economy but I just want to say like how the two together which is like the work at code pink is yes we we're nonviolent direct actions we stand for peace wherever we are which creates you know people losing their mind and you know trying to shut us up and uh you know because you're dangerous right you're if you're getting in the way of the war economy um you're dangerous to them. And that's feeding people, that's teaching people about peace, that's, you know, giving people their agency and having them step away from the war economy and start building a future together. That's dangerous to um the war economy because it's it knows it's a failure. >> I mean, why did it kill 30 million communists? Because it knew it was a failure and it had to shut anything that was an alternative down. So, um, Keith, you're so inspiring. I'm just wondering, is there anything that you've learned and besides the fact that, um, [laughter] there's now more bombs and food and 25% of Americans are now functionally unemployed, which is why they need more food, which is a horrific number. A horrific number. Um, but yeah, the system is broken. And you keep pointing out the system is broken, but you do it through you Jen's way, through the through the mother, through the gifting of of food, through the gifting of life. Um, you don't you don't let it shut you down. You don't become a victim. You don't be you're not frustrated by it. You continue to meet it openhearted with love and joy and laughter. Um, you know, how do you do that? Like you know I know everybody here would love to know like we're we're you know we watch horrors every day and you watch horrors every day like on an intimate level. Um how do you keep that joy present laughter you know you just you are so not connected to the war economy? It is it's ugly over here and you are serving beauty over here. >> Thank you so much. Well, here's a funny uh introduction to that answer. Um, I went to Valley Forge to the historic site there and I pull into this uh overlook and there's a sign and it's a quote by um George Washington and he goes, "If it wasn't for Mckenry's good nature and humor, we would have never made it through the uh winter at Valley Forge, you know, something like that." because uh you because uh you my great great great-grandfather was on George Washington's staff and uh he signed the constitution and he was secretary of war under uh Washington and Adams and uh and so on but uh so it might be genetic. [laughter] That's what I'm saying. I also look like him from the from the paintings that of him. Uh, in fact, there's a painting of him apparently on the walk into the Secretary of War's office, oddly enough that Hex has to walk past. Um, so anyway, but I but the thing is that the whole thing of doing FA bombs is like so much fun, you know, really. You're out there with your friends. Uh, you you um I don't know, so much joy in it. And then of course there's all these like little like you say these little dilemmas that are happening you know like so we have to jump somebody's car or the police are going to tow it or you know we got to go get more tents because the the police sweeps have taken everybody's tents again another day or um you know and you just you're you're just mess your life with people uh you know the all the vendors that are donating the food how happy they are to give you the food you know the the um you you know, BA, we're still the same system where we recover food basically. We do buy the rice and beans and spices and stuff, but largely the food is all recovered and it's and and so, you know, when you I go to Trader Joe's to get do the pickup and the people are so happy that we've arrived and everything. So, it's just it's a complete it's like we're all giving each other gifts and having a great time. So, I think that's a lot of what the the what it is. It's just uh yeah, it's just so fun doing food not bombs. [laughter] I don't know. So you would in fact my earliest flyer which I still put out um I call it the big logo flyer and it has like little tags on the bottom and it says food not bombs as much a party as it is anything you know it's it's just fun because it is it's just I mean when you're cooking food and it's also um I've noticed you know there are food not bombs people it's an interesting you know the people attracted to being volunteers in food not bombs have very in many ways very similar u energy ies. You know, I can tell I can sometimes come to a town and see some people at a town square and realize they're they they'll know who food bombs is and they do, you know, because there's just something radiant about people that just do collect this food and give it out and hang out with the people that are in need with it and and uh and uh who share their lives. So this thou, you know, it's it's just very it's so inspiring. So that's how how I would never stop, you know. It's just uh [gasps] yeah, it's I never would want to stop. So [laughter] >> Oh my god, Keith, thank you so much. Um because that's what we teach here, the peace economy. When you do it, it is joy. Um it is life. It is what is taken away from us. And you've described that so beautifully. Um, thank you for what you do, educating, inspiring, and activating others for peace in the face of, you know, so much horror. It's like it's the thing to pivot to, and that's what we teach. And you pivot to service, you pivot to gifting, and that's where life is. >> So, I think that's really going to be like when it's people often ask me, you know, like how you what are we going to do? What are we going to do? It's so bad. The economy is collapsing. The wars are getting bigger. But the thing is just set up your own little thing like food not bombs or join your own local food not bombs because it's really local is going to make a big difference you know and particularly like now diesel price is so high you know and get maybe getting worse you know we have like every week we meet every Thursday here in Santa Cruz and uh when I make the announcement online every Thursday morning I remind people that if the power electricity and the phone service goes out we all meet at the town clock and we'll figure out what to do after that. And we have worked to, you know, stockpile food in case of a emergency. Um to we have a way of getting fresh water without electricity. We installed a hand pump uh on a well at our kitchen. And we figured everything out. Um because we did in in co we learned a lot because we serve food every single day for three years in s Santa Cruz because the indoor soup kitchens couldn't serve anybody. So um we ended up buying a we got a shipping container that we refrigerated. Then we bought another shipping container to have on site. Then eventually the city kicked that out and then we got another shipping container. [laughter] So we could have, you know, have uh, you know, bulk food and all of our equipment secure from rodents and so on. And we could just um, you know, make sure that if things go really even more south than they already are, you know, we the people that eat with us always want us to go back to seven days a week because we serve a you know what, like a 7 to 10 course vegan meal. And it's it's said to be that we have the we're the best restaurant in Santa Cruz no matter what amount of money you want to pay and it's free. >> Well, we've come to the end of our time together. I'm so grateful. So, so grateful. If folks want to find a a food not bombs near you, Marie has loaded them at peaceconomy.org and you put in your area and you can find one near you. was I always say, you know, learning how to pivot to peace economy, it's always good to go work in a community that already exists. It's kind of like learning a new language. There you'll get it much faster because you're with others who who live it daily. Uh so it's it's a great place, a starter place for you to go and you know what we've heard from Keith is you just show up, right? And you don't let them get in your way and you keep finding the way to do it and you find it together. It's about community. So Keith, deepest gratitude. Thank you so much for all you do. And um uh Marie uh I think the question for everybody um as we break into our breakouts I that I don't even know if we have time for but um is what can you do locally? Because I I think what you know what Keith is saying is the thing I'm always saying is like yes this is happening out there. Yes, more money for bombs. And yes, it's horrible. But if we we right now can pivot to doing the work that needs to be done, which is the taking care of each other, which is the gifting that can flow between us, which serves everyone. It's it's it keeps us healthy, keeps everyone else healthy. And you know, uh I I learned today it's like there's this $ 1.5 trillion dollar war budget. you know, we've got to throw everything at it because that's half a trillion dollars to the AI billionaires. I don't want to know what things look like. I don't need to know because what I do know is when we get together as a community, it's beautiful and full of joy and laughter as Keith was saying. So, um, thanks for joining us today. Um, Marie, did you want to, um, offer breakouts, a couple of them?