Feeding the Future: Keith McKenry on Activism, Community, and the Power of Food
Send us Fan Mail Send us Fan Mail In this thought-provoking episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we are joined by Keith McKenry, author and co-founder of Food Not Bombs. Since the 1980s, Food Not Bombs has been on a mission to deliver free vegetarian meals across thousands of cities, standing against war, poverty, and hunger. Keith shares the poignant stories from his new memoir, *Soup Street*, detailing the trials and tribulations he faced while trying to help those in need, often at ...
Key Takeaways
- Keith McKenry co-founded Food Not Bombs in 1980 to provide free vegetarian meals and protest war, poverty, and hunger globally.
- Early childhood experiences living in various U.S. national parks heavily influenced Keith's lifelong commitment to activism and social justice.
- Food Not Bombs chapters operate largely without money by recovering discarded, surplus food from local grocery stores, bakeries, and markets.
- Keith documented his experiences in his memoir Soup Street, detailing his numerous arrests and the challenges of serving the homeless.
- The movement has expanded to approximately 1,500 cities worldwide, proving that ordinary people can organize community food programs with minimal resources.
Send us Fan Mail
In this thought-provoking episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we are joined by Keith McKenry, author and co-founder of Food Not Bombs. Since the 1980s, Food Not Bombs has been on a mission to deliver free vegetarian meals across thousands of cities, standing against war, poverty, and hunger. Keith shares the poignant stories from his new memoir, *Soup Street*, detailing the trials and tribulations he faced while trying to help those in need, often at great personal cost.
Keith’s journey is deeply rooted in his childhood experiences living in national parks, which shaped his commitment to activism and social justice. He recounts the challenges he encountered, including numerous arrests for simply serving food to the homeless, revealing uncomfortable truths about how society treats poverty.
In this episode, listeners will learn about:
- The origins of Food Not Bombs and its growth into a worldwide movement
- Keith's personal experiences with law enforcement and the implications of his activism
- Practical steps for anyone looking to start their own community food program
- Insights into Keith's other works, including *Hungry for Peace* and the revised *Anarchist Cookbook*
- Upcoming projects and initiatives aimed at addressing the growing issues of hunger and homelessness
Join us for an eye-opening conversation that challenges the status quo and inspires action towards creating a more equitable society. For more information on Keith McKenry and his work, visit www.foodnotbombs.net
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Food Not Bombs?
Food Not Bombs is a global movement founded in 1980 that recovers surplus food and distributes free vegetarian meals to communities while protesting poverty, war, and hunger.
How can you start a community food program without money?
You can start a food program by collecting discarded or day-old produce, bread, and groceries from local natural food stores and bakeries, then preparing and sharing the meals with those in need.
Where can I buy Keith McKenry's memoir Soup Street?
Keith McKenry's memoir Soup Street and his other books, such as Hungry for Peace and the revised Anarchist Cookbook, are available for purchase directly on the official website at foodnotbombs.net.
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31:06 - (Cont.) Feeding the Future: Keith McKenry on Activism, Community, and the Power of Food
Welcome to the live in the dream. Okay. With curve ball.
SPEAKER_00If you believe you can welcome to the live in the dream with curve podcast. I interview you again. And it's by today. I am joined by Arthur, a co-founder of not all Ed McHenry to talk about hunger. You know, talk about how since the nineteen eighties they have been delivering free vegetarian meals in thousands of eight protests. Details and you know, it talks about how he has been being in a rest as advertised for just simply trying to read the homeless and and help out and make the community and world a better place. He uh not only has the Soup Street memoir, but he has multiple books, so he's gonna be talking about those and everything that him and his company is up to and gonna be up to. So Keith, thank you for joining me.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. That's exciting.
SPEAKER_00Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so um I was blessed to uh have a father and a grandfather that were park rangers. So I lived in uh USAMD, Grand Canyon, uh Big Bend, Shenandoah, Everglades, and at a time when those that was uh really the wilderness. And uh and in growing up uh in a park service family, my grandfather, my dad's father, um went his way to be uh one of the first park rangers at the Grand Canyon, happened to have a uh uh drove off the high road, like a dirt road, and was found injured by some hoopies. And they took him to uh their village, Alderai, which is the oldest continually inhabited village in in the United States, and he convalesced there. And um he became friends with the community, and then when I was a child, he would take us out to see the snake dances and the green corn dances, and I got to see that part of the world before Peabody Cole and the uh companies came there and exploited this sacred land, and it was seen that uh land being so beautiful and as it had been for thousands of years, uh, be desecrated that when I was 16, uh I decided that I would dedicate my life to changing society so that um, because I I felt like you know that any kind of economic political system that would allow that to happen was something that should be challenged. At the same time, uh my mother's father was in uh military intelligence and he was in the team that helped uh um plan the U.S. uh um aspect uh Pearl Harbor. He told me we had to do that or Americans wouldn't go to war with Japan. And I watched him argue with uh uh Curtis LeMay, uh General Curtis LeMay, his friend, and uh Robert McNamare to drop the atomic bomb on Hanoi to send a message to the communist. Um he was also the uh directed the most deadly bombing campaign in world history, the firebombing of Tokyo, which is called Operation Meeting House. So though childhood influenced me to uh to uh to be the activist I am today. And then some one some of my early chapters of of street uh of Soup Street, you know, I'm in Big Band and I play with my friends in Mexico and I end up getting cholera, and I'm the only one that survives because the other kids, my playmates, were Mexican and they weren't able to go to the hospital. Or uh, you know, so I I have uh stories about the influence of my living in national parks and uh and how that shaped the future of me becoming uh uh an activist who started FUNAP Bombs.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk about you you know, you've been arrested uh hundreds of times. So talk about those arrests and and what they reveal about uh how America treats poverty.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the original the my first arrest was I was 18 and uh I had no because I grew up in national parks, I had no interaction with law enforcement. I mean the law enforcement and the national parks were friends of my family, so there was never any real issue. But I was trying to uh park in front of my apartment in Portland, Oregon when two officers on motorcycles pulled in behind and they ended up beating me up, and uh I they ordered me to get back into my vehicle, my pickup truck, my 65 Chevy pickup, to pull into the parking space, and I ended up knocking over one of the motorcycles, and I wasn't gonna get out of the car again, so I knocked over the other motorcycle and thought I was gonna drive to Washington State across the bridge, but I made a wrong turn and he ended up getting arrested on the Hawthorne Bridge. And my uh uh public defender at the time suggested I jump bail, and that made a big uh change in my life because I discontinued using my social security number and uh and uh had to make my own way in a world where uh that was increasingly becoming more and more necessary. But then um uh I had I started Food Not Bombs in 1980 in Boston, and uh we had uh the Boston City Council, we had a really close friend there, include the mayor Al Velucci loved what our work. Um the uh um Carol Hill, who was in the Black Panthers, was a big supporter, and so I just assumed that that uh the authorities did you know and appreciated us because I know Al Velucci would say, Oh, you know one needs to go hungry in Cambridge because we have food not bombs, and and he would speak uh positively about us at city council and so on. So when I moved to the most liberal city in America, San Francisco, I assumed the same thing would be happening. But uh, so I uh met some uh young people who had studied the 60s at uh University of Maryland College Park, and uh we got to talking and we decided we would set up our meals every Monday at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at the end of Haight Street. And um one day this uh hippie came by and he said, Oh, you can get a permit to do this, just write the parts department. So I did, and then the police started coming by and saying, Oh, uh um, you know, uh uh, did you get your permit? And I was like, Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. No one responded. So I'd go to the parts department, which was only really a block and a half away across the panhandle, and they had no idea what I was talking about. And so then on August 15th, 1988, riot police came out of Golden Gate Park and arrested nine of us for serving food without a permit. And uh that started, people um were outraged by that, and uh, and uh a local uh neighbor had taken these black and white photos of the arrest, including one with riot police guarding the food from the homeless. That was in the San Francisco Chronicle, and people started to contact me going, Oh, we've got to resist this, so let's have a march down Hate Street and we'll try it again. So on uh the 22nd of August of 88, we set up, we marched down Hate Street, banging pots and pans and so on. And then when we got to uh set up, the police uh started to arrest people. Uh 24 were arrested, and years later I found out that the uh FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force had uh observed these arrests, and they had written a document on August 29th, 1988, to the FBI field office claiming that we were a credible national security threat. The um what was kind of astounding about that is there was 10 of us in San Francisco, 10 volunteers in Boston, and another uh 10 in Long Beach, California. So for like 30 people, we were apparently by serving vegan meals in the park a national security threat. But I come to find out years later, I was watching a lecture on C-SPAN of State Department officials who were comparing the people that serve the vegan meals in the park to uh to uh uh Al-Qaeda, who's more dangerous. And they said that the vegan meals were more dangerous because they were nice people, that the local communities appreciated because they were local to their their own towns, and that they were likely to convince the American public that money should be diverted from military spending to health care, education, and other social services. Now, I thought maybe I was not I was missing something about this uh lecture, but uh when I went to visit my dad after I spoke at uh Harvard Law, I turned on this his little TV there, and sure enough, the same C-SPAN lecture was there, and that's like, wow, they really are concerned about our message, and that's what makes us a terrorist organization. So in San Francisco, we were um arrested a thousand times. I was arrested 94 times. Um I uh had um uh 45 felony conspiracy to serve food in violation of a court order charges, and I got framed on the California Three Strikes um case. I my first strike was uh I was attacked by the mayor's film commissioner in a phone booth, and uh he claimed that he lost a $99 beeper, which meant that it was a strike felony. If it had been $98 uh beeper, it would not have been. The proof of it is he went out and bought a $99 beeper afterwards. Probably most people listening to this podcast have no idea what a beeper is, but they we had pagers back in the day, and that was around the time that the first flip phone started to appear in 1994. So then I got a letter from Facts to me from Amnesty International saying if we got convicted, we would be considered prisoners of conscience. And I was very proud of this letter, so I went to the Board of Supervisors' offices before their meeting one Monday, and one of the uh uh supervisors' aides, Nancy Kitts, um slammed her door on me and my friend Jesse, angry that we were uh, you know, that we were still what you know, her supervisor wanted us to stop feeding the homeless. And I uh cut my hand in the g in in the door. They ended up arresting me, accusing me of trying to kill her with a piece of glass. And because the police took our tables every day, we started using milk crates uh to set up to serve our food off of. And uh, and I got my third strike was uh uh felony possession of stolen property, 24 Berkeley Farms Dairy Milk Crates. Because riot police came and stared away on the edges of my uh every time I had a court appearance, um we realized it was not going to be easy to have a fair trial. So in the end, I did plead out to uh to the first case, assault battery, strong arm robbery. And uh, but my probation I wrote myself, and the judge was actually pretty cool, Lucy McCabe. And she's and so I could only be violated if I was accused of murder or a bombing. And then that's when I started staying out of out of San Francisco going on speaking tours. But food not bombs activists would then periodically get arrested in other cities. Uh, probably some of the most famous was Orlando, um, where 28 arrests were made. Uh, then there was uh Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Lauderdale actually won a lawsuit against the city, the Food Not Bombs chapter there. And uh first the city was going to have to pay several million dollars in penalties, but they were able to, they only ended up having to pay $750,000 to for our legal fees. And so this was part of the way that Foonat Bombs became uh a worldwide movement, is because people would hear these crazy stories about people feeding the homeless in city parks and getting going to uh to jail and being beaten up, and uh, and so while it was uh definitely not cool spending 500. I ended up when I pled out, I I pled out to credit for time served 500 days, and uh, and uh so you know that was completely uh uh you know, as anyone can imagine, was uh not a good experience, but we uh learned a lot through it, and it did encourage uh many, many chapters to grow. And back when we were first getting arrested in the first few years, you could make a toll-free call out of the uh out of the uh misdemeanor and the felony uh units, and so we would write my toll-free number, 1-800-884-1136, above the payphones, and the voicemail code. And so prisoners could leave messages for their families outside, and uh and families outside could leave messages to the prisoners inside, and uh that gained us a huge uh amount of support and credibility amongst the low-in community of San Francisco because we were there for them, and we were providing not only food and clothing and and uh and support in that way, but we were also helping them be able to communicate with their families and with one another from jail.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk about how ordinary people could feed their community with no money, no non-profit. And you know, basically uh they they can just get started like that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so what you know, I was a college student when I started Food On Bonds with my seven f friends. And how I and so I was um I I figured out that I could make a living by working as at a produce department at a natural food store bread and circus, and I had to be done by nine o'clock in the morning when the customers came in. So that gave me the whole day to go study. So I would pull off all the uh wilted uh vegetables and the bruised fruit and so on and put them in boxes and throw them out in the dumpster. But then it occurred to me I could take this to public housing, and so I started taking the food uh down to Portland Ave, which is a uh a bordered MIT, the backside of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I give it to the uh families, and uh they were super excited to get all this organic produce, even if it wasn't in perfect shape. So then uh one day uh one of the women that was uh that I was bringing the food to, she's like, Oh, they just opened this new building on across the street, and it's uh they're designing nuclear weapons. And so it turned out it was Draper Lab, and that's where I got the name for food, not bombs. But that recovery of the food uh is something that is is is easy to do in every community. There's lots of discarded food. So because of that that experience, I realized I could go to the bakeries in town and ask them if they had day old bread that they weren't selling. Um, I actually ended up with uh uh manufacturers would give us the the food that um was not you know up to their standards. So for example, a tofu company, and back in those days, they would just have like these eight-ounce blocks of tofu to sell at the grocery stores, but if their chunks knocked off of it or something, then they'd throw it in a bucket of of water, and then they would deliver it to the back of the store that I was had been working at, and uh, and then we'd make use that as part of our meals. So anybody can really do that. So when I moved to San Francisco and started the second Food Not Bombs group, I took notes. And um, because the first group kind of evolved naturally, you know, the series of street performances and and those kinds of things. So in San Francisco, I I had a job working at a place called Bob's typing, and then at lunch I would go in the neighborhood, and there was a house of bagels was not far away, and I'd ask them if they're throwing out any any bagels, and then the Tom's natural food, I'd get their discarded produce and so on. And then I would take it after work to the um other food programs, uh Glad Memorial Church, St. Anthony's, Martin DePourse. And so it was through that. So I uh you know I had documented that in my in what became a fire called Seven Steps to Starting the Food Not Bombs, because once we started getting arrested at Golden Gate Park, people would write us letters and they would want to uh organize against uh uh you know to it, you know, to resist, uh uh very upset that people would be arrested for serving food. They want to, in defiance of San Francisco, start their own group. So I would send them this flyer, which we have an example of on foodnotbombs.net under uh under the volunteer um link. And it goes from for how you collect the food, uh, how you prepare the food, and then how you share the food and how you take food not only to other food programs, but make your own meals and serve them on the streets. And as college students, we had no money. So um the fact that we could reproduce this idea with very little resource sources and um made it possible to do this in like probably about 1500 cities right now, and uh in every community, even in like Asia where there's a huge amount of poverty, what uh they will go uh from vendor to vendor at the the markets, and then knowing that they too are poor, the vendors, they would just like ask for a little bit of scraps, you know, they don't want to uh make it difficult on on them, and they would uh, in short order, get enough uh uh food to make a meal to feed several hundred people with not having negative impact on the um on the merchants. And uh in fact, the merchants were often super excited to be able to help because they were in in the same uh uh boat as poor people as the people food not bombs would be feeding in their town square. So it's a very, very simple thing to just uh be able to you go to a product to the grocery store. It's typically you don't want to go to like a major chain store, like Kroger's or something, but more local grocery stores, and you go in the morning when the produce worker is setting out his produce, and they'll have like a box of discarded food uh on the on the lower um uh tray of their of their cart and just say, Hey, do you are you uh give donating that to anybody? And then oftentimes they'll say, Oh yeah, church comes by. But what we found was that a lot of times people don't come back to get the food, and then it starts rotting in the back, and they're very reluctant to give you the food. But if you're persistent and you come several times, um they'll realize that you are serious about it and that you will pick up the food and that you will be feeding people. And now this food not bombs has a reputation worldwide. Many produce workers know, and bakers and and and and restaurants and so on know that we will come by. They're not gonna be stuck with food they can't deal with after throwing the dumpster ultimately, and therefore it works really, really well, and you're able to get basically all the food you really need uh to feed a lot of people. And occasionally, of course, you might buy like an onion or some spices or something like that to um aid in in your dish tasting really great, but uh largely all the food is essentially free, and you're just using your own gas money to go and pick up pick up the produce and to drive it out to the streets, so it doesn't really cost much money at all. In fact, in many many of our chapters, the people have almost no money, and yet they succeed at doing food not bombs on a regular basis.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk about your other books. You know, you got about uh three other books, so tell the listeners about those and tell them where they can get them and what they can expect when they read 'em.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the first book that I that I put that I put out is Hungry for Peace. And it's uh uh uh a um uh a ho a total description on how you can start a food not bombs, how you can has recipes, vegan recipes for 100 people or for a family of six. It also tells the history of food not bombs, it's uh it it uh how outlines how you can uh organize a meeting, organize a rally, organize a tour, um, and and how to do the day-to-day work of food not bombs. Then my second book was Anarchist Cookbook, and it also has recipes for a hundred, uh vegan recipes for a hundred, and vegan recipes for family of six. And it does and it talks about the the uh philosophy uh of anarchism, which is often misconstrued. It's not like violence and throwing Molotov cocktails and those things, it's actually uh the The uh type of anarchism that that we have supported is um is basically working together as equals, not having a hierarchy, and and and working to uh to improve your community and to make sure people have their basic needs met. And so it has that kind of a focus. Now, the reason that I wrote the anarchist cookbook, the second uh version of the anarchist cookbook, is because the first one by um William Powell, it had like these recipes on how to make bombs and all the booby traps and poison people and so on, and um and people would buy that book and think it was the Food Not Bombs book, and they'd be very upset that uh that it had no vegan recipes and it was had all this kind of crazy stuff that uh majority of the people that were, you know, did have didn't want anything to do with. Then the net the uh next reason that I uh re- I wrote this this new version of Anarchist Cookbook was because food not bonds activists were getting framed by the FBI and they were using uh William Powell's book as part of their evidence. So, for instance, there were five young people that were cooking at uh Occupy Cleveland uh during that protest and the FBI, like um they had a uh an informant and an agent that manipulated the five young people, and they were trying to get them to uh escalate their um you know to be more radical and so on. And one of the things they did is they gave uh the William Powell's book to them and they circled the C5 uh recipe. And so when they finally uh uh entrapped them and they uh went to, you know, um, you know, federal prosecutors used the fact that they had the anarchist cookbook in their possession as evidence that they were planning to bomb a bridge, which they were not actually planning to do, but you know, they were being like uh controlled into doing so by the FBI agent and the uh confidential informant that was uh trying to manipulate those uh five young young people. And that happened also with another friend of mine, uh Eric McDavid, where they used the anarchist cookbook as uh as uh you know to the uh jury to say, look at you know, they're really bad, they want to uh bomb people and kill people. And Eric had no idea he was even involved in a terrorist plot. There was a woman that was uh what you might call a honey trap, was an unsuccessful honey trap, uh trying to flirt with him, and then we're traveling across America together, and she would he thought she was joking about bombing uh bridges and robbing banks and so on. And uh he did not know that there was audio tape taping equipment in the glove compartment of supposedly uh Sarah's father's uh uh car, and then they uh they ended up using that to uh frame him as a terrorist, and he got sentenced originally to 19 years in prison, and it took forever to uh get him out. It took us nine years, and um my attorney that was involved in that was uh Dennis Cunning Cunningham, and uh and he uh also was the uh attorney for um uh Tupac's family and also for um you know for the family of uh um a number of other Black Panthers, and so he was aware of how the FBI would develop these cases, and so through his hard work, they were able to find the FBI documents that showed the entire thing was a plot designed by the FBI, and that in fact Eric had no idea he was uh participating in such a plot, and he uh so I write about how to avoid being uh convicted of terrorism in both the Anarchist Cookbook and in Hungry for Peace, because what I realized was Eric was just this soft-spoken person, and he he uh didn't know that anything was happening. And so I encourage people to, if you hear joking about doing crimes that you yourself do not want to be convicted of, uh, you want to speak up and make sure that the audio tapes that they're using are uh picks up the message that you are not interested in bombing a dam or or uh robbing a bank or whatever it is that they're trying to set you up for. And thankfully, uh since uh the anarchist cookbook has come out, there have not been any more uh attempts to frame Funot Bombs people in that manner. Although we are having uh uh the prairie land defendants, uh some of whom were sentenced to 100 years, 70 years, in uh uh outside of uh for doing what's called a noise protest, where they launched fireworks outside of an INS detention center on the 4th of July. Um, they some of those people were phonoparms activists, but they used a different technique to frame them. And part of that was that an informant uh hit in the woods with a rifle and shot at the security guards when they came out, and they pinned that on the uh on some of the defendants. And it's part of this whole new hysteria of the Trump administration to claim that dissent is terrorism and uh and part of their new clamp down. And so this was their first uh case, their first anti-Faw uh terrorism case. And these were just really nice, they are very nice young people who just want the best for undocumented people. Uh they they want the best for the homeless because they're out there feeding people, and so you know, we're entering this new era where this could, in fact, be a big problem for young activists. But I think that the spirit of people is such that it that it's not going to suppress um our ability to uh organize against uh you know, against the all the different racist attacks that are happening across the United States as a result of uh of the new policies of the Trump administration. And you can see that where you know for my friend Medea Benjamin is under uh investigation for how bringing medical aid to Cuba. Uh she's still out there every day making videos about ending war or stopping the uh the uh bombing of Iran, the you know, that how we should divert our
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SPEAKER_02money from the military to taking care of ourselves here in the United States, you know, provide education, health care, housing for the poor, those kinds of things. So fortunately, I don't think all of us are gonna be, you know, a lot of us are gonna be intimidated from speaking out because we are not the violent terrorists that the Trump administration is trying to claim we are.
SPEAKER_00Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you and your company are working on that people need to be aware of.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think the you know, one of the things that we do every year and is uh we have our free uh free
(Cont.) Feeding the Future: Keith McKenry on Activism, Community, and the Power of Food
SPEAKER_02concert, peace concert for peace every May to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Foo Not Bomb. So um we will have celebrations like that again in uh um this coming May. And in in Santa Cruz, we have a big concert in San Lorenzo Park. So that's one of our projects, and it's usually the uh the weekend before Memorial Day. Um Foo Not Bombs itself started on May 24th, 1980, and so we do this celebration in in honor of that. The other thing is that we are uh um organizing more um you know to deal with the fact that this war could result in a lot more homelessness and hunger. And so, for instance, uh local chapters are starting to use what you know to get donations of rice and beans and lentils and so on to stockpiles so that in case there is a uh the uh the gas prices get really high and it becomes more and more difficult for people to stay employed because of AI and all that, then we will be ready to meet the needs of these uh people. And so um here in Santa Cruz, one of the things we're doing is we had bought a uh a shipping container during COVID so that we could operate more successfully because we were the only food for three years for homeless people in our community because the two other soup food programs were indoors and they were shut down due to the restrictions. So we bought this uh shipping container, so we're like fixing it up, cleaning it up. We're uh you know, um going to like get get some more rice and beans from uh Costco and so on, and be prepared for uh what's coming up. And um, you know, so I think a lot of the chapters that's the that is largely their focus, and then we are bringing food to protests against uh ICE in our communities. We're br organi we're bring we've been providing food at uh Palestinian the encampments that have at campuses with uh that have gone across the uh the country when uh the early part of the genocide. So we're preparing to support um you know anti-war protests if they start to spring up. And um and and so that's that's the main thing we're doing. And and when SNAP was being cut, and we're there's talk of uh both HUDs getting huge cuts, which will increase the number of people forcing us to live on the streets, and there's cut work requirements now for SNAP for many people for food stamps. So we're anticipating that we're gonna get one, a lot more volunteers because you'll have to have your uh you have to work to get your food stamps, and uh, and we're already getting requests to volunteer with Foonat Bombs so they qualify, but um, but also that we are going to be preparing, you know, we're preparing to really meet this challenge that um is on the horizon where you know desire weekly meals and and some cities daily meals might not be enough to meet the need and that we'll need to expand. So we are doing things like setting up uh, you know, acquiring more paper products to help serve food, that just basically gearing up all our resources so we can meet the meet uh whatever catastrophe may arise in the near future. And it does seem pretty bleak with what's going on with the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine. And there I we think we do see a steady increase in need, but there could be a very dramatic increase in need, and we want to be there to meet that challenge.
SPEAKER_00Okay, the website is foodnotbombs.net. So close us out with some final thoughts, maybe that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on. A any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, people um well come to foodnotbombs.net, and that's where you can buy uh my new memoir. Um I I self-published the memoir uh and um because I wanted to maintain uh control of it. Um I was concerned that if uh other publishing companies and so on, you know, might not really push it and get it out there to the world um because of my experience of uh you know being a target of the FBI, of the CIA and Interpol. So anyway, you can get the book at foodnotbombs.net. It's right under you can sign up to get my our emails. Um, and then right below the uh the form for getting signing up for our email list are the books that you can uh um you can buy from me, or if you can read for free uh if you don't have the resources, because I do have all my books have PDF online that you can read. Um, then the other thing is that I really encourage people to volunteer with your local food bombs chapter because that's the whole key. It's all uh volunteer. So if we weren't uh an all-volunteer movement um with three uh clear principles that the food is always vegan and vegetarian and free to anyone, rich or poor, drunk or sober, that we don't have any headquarters or presidents, that each chapter is autonomous and that they make decisions as a group and they try to encourage the people that are in need of the food to also help determine the direction of our local food environments groups, and that we're not a charity, really, we're dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society so no one has to live in the streets or eat at a soup kitchen because really that is the solution. When we're spending, we see, like Pete Heggs said, demanding from Congress billions or more to fight Iran, um, while our young people are dying in the Middle East. Um, we really need to get the this uh this uh concept that we need to have our resources for things like food, clothing, health care, education, those kinds of things, and not for bombs. And you know, we're just uh really it doing in our community by diverting the resources that would help us to uh fighting wars of uh you know of choice that uh really the American people don't support. And it's just so tragic to see our young people dying in this conflict. And I'm very concerned that it will escalate and that we will see many, many um people who are joining the military because it's a way to get into college, it's a way to make a living in this bad economic situation, and uh, and then to be just used by by basically the uh the Epstein class as cannon fodder just to uh enrich themselves and to conceal their crimes and and all of that. So I really encourage people to go to foodnot bombs.net, check out my book. Uh I'd love it if you did buy the book. Uh uh, you can buy it. The only place right now you can buy it is at foodnot bombs.net. And uh and I really encourage you to do so. So thank you so much for having me. This is fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, definitely glad to have you, ladies and gentlemen. Please visit foodnotbombs.net and follow rate review. Share the website to as many people as possible. Also, to keep up with all things living the dream, please visit www.curveball337.com and share the website of the show to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Thank you for all that you and your company are doing. Thank you for joining us.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me for all this beautiful take care.
SPEAKER_01For more information on the Live in the Twin With Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball327.com. Until next time, live in the joint.