Food Not Bombs: Serving Heaping Helpings of Revolution to the Masses

FNB volunteers serve food on a Sunday

The aroma of a vegetarian meal wafting from a rickety old serving cart draws a diverse crowd to the Southeast corner of Tompkins Square Park on Sunday afternoon. Squatters and yuppies alike curiously meander around the wobbly makeshift serving table, noting the mismatched stainless steel pots and pans, hodgepodge serving plates and silverware set awkwardly atop it. A friendly face doles out portions of hearty vegetable soup and sliced bread to hungry park-goers. The weather is bleak, but the atmosphere surrounding this little rolling cart is pleasant and welcoming.
Food Not Bombs is an organization that represents its utensils: mismatched, jumbled and worn-out, yet functional and strong-standing. The group, which has been active since the early eighties, serves up free vegetarian food to the masses on Sunday afternoons in Tompkins Square Park. Using one hundred percent donated food supplies; FNB is a loosely organized and fully people-generated grass roots organization of activists who believe that the most basic necessity of life is food. The group contests that government money, which it sees none of, should be going directly to the poor people rather than to military operations. FNB meets at ABC No Rio on Rivington Street at 1:00 PM on Sundays to cook and then transports the food to the park around 3:30 PM, “rain or shine.”
Susie is a regular FNB volunteer shuffling around the cart busily and animated. Tall with natural blonde mid-back length hair, Susie is in her early thirties and is incredibly soft-spoken and welcoming. She has a naturally pretty face and wears tapestry-printed gypsy style clothing. She makes strong and meaningful eye contact with everyone she speaks to, including strangers and straggly looking bohemians, who she seems to recognize.
“It sounds weird,” she says shyly, “but I look forward to Sundays with FNB. It is the best part of my week.”
Susie says that on a typical Sunday FNB serves about fifty to one hundred people and welcomes between three and fifteen volunteers.
“Usually there are about three regular volunteers and a bunch of people who pass through. There are a lot more people hanging around in summer, of course.”
When asked about the groups politics, Susie is vague.
“I guess we’re all anti-war and probably socialists. Some of us are freegans. We are a great mix of politics.”
The term “freegan” refers to a growing trend in vegan-vegetarian lifestyle. The typical freegan refuses to pay for any food item, arguing that all food should be free and that the necessary food items can be obtained simply from others’ waste. It is hard to imagine any freegan going hungry for long in New York City.
“We get all our food from an organic market in Brooklyn and a few other small donors,” Susie says. “The donations are tax deductable and we carry away their ‘garbage’ safely without wasting, so it works out for everyone!”
The enthusiasm of FNB volunteers is palpable and kind of addicting. While Susie is shy and quiet, she is passionate about her work with FNB and believes wholeheartedly that this is the smallest and most valuable way she can help feed the masses in an ethically sound and affective way.
FNB is representative of the neighborhood it serves in. Tompkins Square Park and the East Village have most definitely been known to welcome activists and artsy renegades. The group of hippie-looking volunteers does not look out of place in Tompkins. While the East Village has most definitely gone through some intense gentrification and refashioning in the last ten years, the homeless and squatter communities still congregate in the park, making it a unique and open forum for all types of people. FNB is welcoming and representative of each of these groups.
While FNB has been serving in various cities since its flagship chapter in Boston begun in the eighties, the populist and grassroots trend of completely people organized community service is gaining a lot of attention and steam during the current economic pitfall. FNB volunteers enlighten people to the concept that in America, people always have too much. Recession or not, America is a nation of wasters and disposers. Clothes, electronics and foods: they’re all disposable. If one small group of passionate, disorganized people can salvage some of that waste for only a few people that have barely anything, their day is a success.