ARMAGEDDON’S PROMISE
April 28, 2026
The first nuclear end times generation
Several dozen cars lined the road to Mortan Thiokol’s Brigham City explosives facility on the banks of the Great Salt Lake. The setting sun cast a shimmering acid green and orange glow across the vast salt wasteland to our backs. A row of cars faced the sand and gravel ridge. Families of spectators eager to witness another American success in the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union.
Finally the much anticipated blast and deafening boom startles the vehicular audiences to attention. Shards of shale grey and ochre gravel spray hundred feet towards the blackened heavens. Quartz flakes shimmered salmon against the ominous dark thunderstorm background. Dust clouds of dirt tumbled down the slope.
A collective sigh of satisfaction from the assembled families could be heard from the string of cars facing the test explosion of detonator TNT. The conventional blast that starts the nuclear chain reaction in the end times weapons perched on top of each Minute Man Intercontinental nuclear missile.
The United States had already proven in Hiroshima that it could instantly vanish an entire city of tens of thousands. And to make sure everyone understood that they could repeat the horror they dropped a second one on the people of Nagasaki.
My father sat proudly behind the wheel of his powder blue and bright white Bel Air, my pregnant mother leaning romantically next to him as she gently cradled me with her right arm. I was excited to see the drama.
My father took a job inspecting the blast mirrors that reflect the conventional explosion towards the nuclear core. He was also working on his masters degree in Zoology at Utah State.
I was one of those baby boomers, the first generation to be born into a world with the threat of nuclear annihilation. The first generation to have never woken up in a world free from that fear.
My father’s dream comes true and he takes his first permanent assignment with the National Park Service patrolling the Colonial Park Way between Jamestown and Williamsburg and a year later he takes a position directing the Rock Creek Nature Center in Washington DC.
Our family moved to a new brick house in Bethesda, Maryland. Like most classrooms in America during the dawn of the 1960s, my Kindergarten class at Bethesda Elementary started the day with a Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag followed by the Duck and Cover Nuclear Attack Drill.
The tinny alarm bell rang out and as instructed our class of twenty students climbed under our tiny formica desks. I exchanged my daily “this is stupid” glance towards the little girl seated next to me. We laugh together as we rose from the exercise sharing our amazement at the idea that adults honestly thought our flimsy desks would protect us during a nuclear strike.
The Duck and Cover drills and news of the positioning of nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba heightened fears of a life on Earth ending conflict.
I had Cuban Missile Crisis inspired dreams of the Red Army marching down Constitution Avenue in perfect formation. Thousands of men dressed in thick green wool uniforms with bright red trimmed caps and amulets armed with long guns thundered towards our place on Bells Mill Road. It wasn’t possible to even escape the horror of nuclear missiles on hair trigger even while asleep.
During some of the bloodiest periods of the war against Vietnam I witnessed the logic of nuclear slaughter as Realpolitik first hand. My mother’s father John Vanderpool Phelan was proud of his participation in setting up the Pearl Harbor false flag telling me it was the only way they could get the American public to support a war against Japan. He wasn’t shy about his work setting up a network to distribute heroin from his post in Burma to the black neighborhoods in the US as a strategy to blunt dissatisfaction with the unequal GI Bill. His record holding firebombing of Tokyo and his participation in the planning of the first use of nuclear weapons on a city seemed to be two of his proudest public achievements
Lt. Phelan was in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He was an Intelligence Officer with the 468th Bombardment Squadron in 1944 and 45 stationed in Burma.
His first floor den in Needham, Massachusetts was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he shot from a B 29 Superfortress flying at 20,000 feet. Filming the progress of that day’s raid during the world’s most deadly bombing campaign, Operation Meeting House.
I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with his friends General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson” he insisted. Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a one time aberration. A reminder that the United States called the shots and if your country fails to obey a nuclear assault may be in your future. America had no limits to what it would do to defend its domination.
A conversation with the Scottish born architect George Stevens while waiting to speak with my father at the National Park Service regional office in Boston lead me to attending Boston University’s Department of Fine Arts and a job at the Old South Meeting House. I took the 50 cent admission, sold past cards and shared the story of the Sons of Liberty and the meeting house rally that launched the Boston Tea Party.
During one noon brake I strolled onto the Boston Commons with my bag lunch in hand. I came across an older woman teetered atop a Hood Dairy milk crate speaking to a small group of grey haired ladies populating a corner of my favorite lunch time patch of lawn.
The orator with a magnetic Australian accent bellowed: “The United States has 27,519 nuclear weapons ready to wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the Earth. The Soviet Union has 19,055 nuclear weapons on a hair trigger prepared to kill everyone here in America. The generals and politicians call this nuclear policy Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD for short.”
The frightening speech ended with an invitation to protest. One of those in the audience, a fragile, white-haired lady, struggled to her feet and said, “Please give Dr. Helen Caldecott a big hand.”
As Dr. Helen Caldecott was declaring a nuclear emergency, I silently declared to myself that my art would speak to an urgency of our time rather than decorate the vaults and walls of those with money.
So that week I gathered my supplies on a table in the basement of the collective house at 41 Gardner Street that I called home. My X-Acto knife sliced out the answers to the issues of the day, cut by cut, into the poster boards of despair at the threat of war to become a public art without permission. This was an emergency. There was no time for money paying art.
I got blisters cutting stencils, removing thick chunks of cheap poster board to reveal in the grey drafting table rubber the dark underside of a nuclear mushroom cloud and the text “TODAY?” A subtraction of a negative space, sheet after sheet, until I had enough to withstand the soaking of the paint or the police confiscation. I was prepared.
I was determined to wake the conscience of Boston to the threat of a nuclear holocaust spray painting at least 350 impressions of my mushroom cloud Today? on the sidewalks and walls of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. My friends would sprawl out on the pavement looking as dead as possible. I would trace their outline in white chalk then spray the outline in white paint. We would paint dozens of “dead bodies” on the sidewalks and streets representing a mass casualty event. Sometimes with posters and slogans against a US massacre in El Salvador or sometimes as a protest to nuclear weapons bazaar. We also organize Boston’s Shadow Project painting a white circle around the city at the distance that would vaporize in the event that a one megaton bomb was detonated over the city.
The campaign inspired a documentary by Richard Kaplan called The Sidewalk Sector contrasting my public art with the sterility of corporate imagery and the Theater Works play Murder Now, a detective thriller in search of an Armenian nuclear dirty bomb threat to the Boston Harbor.
I joined my Boston University classmates in a trip down to New York to attend a protest against the nuclear arms race organized by Mobilization for Survival and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Public support for a ban on nuclear weapon would motivate the delegates at the first United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in New York in May and June 1978 to call for an end to the nuclear threat. When we stepped into the protest we were greeted by huge black and white photos of the nuclear blast survivors that lined the walls surrounding Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Mutilated victims with scarred faces sat below the pictures.
Eight of us who had been taking direct action to stop the construction of the Seabrook Nuclear power station in New Hampshire started the first Food Not Bombs collective in May 1980. One of the groups main focus was building for the June 12, 1982 protest in New York during the Second UN Session on Disarmament.
Cambridge City Council and Food Not Bombs cosponsored a march for nuclear disarmament held on August 6, 1980, gathering at City Hall taking Massachusetts Avenue and ending at Draper Lab on Portland Ave. Our ragtag group of protesters carried poster boards with the stenciled “Mushroom Cloud Today?” image spray painted on each sheet.
We organized another march in October in solidarity with the West Germans who were engaged in the country’s largest civil disobedience campaign seeking to force the US to remove its mobile Pershing Nuclear missiles from their streets.
Our little group held a free concert for Nuclear Disarmament on May 3, 1982 in Sennott Park with the goal of inspiring our community to join in the June 12, 1982, march in New York City. We parked our green van on The Avenue of the Americas at Bleaker Street sharing literature about Food Not Bombs with people from all over the world who had come to participate in the march. The organizing office was in a church a block or so away. We did what we could to provide meals to some of the one million protesters gathered in the Great Meadow of Central Park.
Several new arms control treaties were signed by the US and the Soviet Union. Arms control expert Scott Ritter best known for not finding any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq attended arms control negotiations between the US and Russia. Ritter claims these protests helped push the agreements forward. In recent months he has encouraged another round of mass actions against the new nuclear arms race.
The organization American Peace Test asked Food Not Bombs to help provide food during a ten day protest at the Nevada Test Site. Their funding helped the just formed San Francisco chapter to purchase folding tables and cooking equipment that we brought back to the Bay Area at the end of the protest. We blocked dozens of busloads of workers from arriving to help with Clinton’s underground nuclear test. A group of young women were released after having been arrested by Wackenhut Security for breaching the test site and were shocked to discover a group named Food Not Bombs was providing meals in camp. They had taken a huge banner saying Food Not Bombs to what they believed was ground zero for the test placing rocks on it to hold it safe from the winds. They had no idea there was a group with that same name.
The nuclear threat is always lingering. When the Russians are no longer useful as the official enemy Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction filled the void. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice famously said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” during a September 8, 2002, CNN interview. Colin Powell held up a vile of fake yellow cake at the UN. Scott Ritter and his team never found any evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program but the US was able to kill over a million people in a war that created a failed state.
The only country to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian population and its nuclear armed ally, Israel, has spent years stoking fears that Iran was just months away from building a nuclear weapon. When the US lost their puppet Shah to an Islamic Revolution the country of Iran became enemy number one. The perfect justification for billions in arms sales and billions more in military bases.
Iran fought a brutal eight year war defending itself against the US backed and armed Iraq. America even sold Saddam Hussein satellite images and the chemical weapons used against both Iran and his opponents in southern Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died in this US/Israeli instigated war. While Iran was suffering war and sanctioned from banking and business with the west the US taxpayers were dumping billions into companies like KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and V2X Inc. to construct military bases across the Persian Gulf.
America spent billions more building bases surrounding Russia. I was born in a former Nazi Hospital run by the US military in Frankfurt, West Germany when my father was taking part in the US occupation of the country after World War II. The U.S. maintains over 40 military installations in Europe with 50,000+ troops, serving as a cornerstone of NATO. The bases are inGermany(Ramstein Air Base, Stuttgart EUCOM), Italy (Aviano AB, NAS Sigonella), the UK (RAF Lakenheath), and rapidly expanding sites in Poland and Romania.
In Micheal Parenti’s essay “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia” he writes about the destruction of the first domino in NATO’s campaign to gain control of Russia. “In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men.” I visited the Belgrade Food Not Bombs activists at the Rebel Squat, the mansion of someone who was free to flee the war. When needing to use the restroom they directed me to the crater left by an unexploded US cruise missile. Their stories of cruise missiles lumbering over the city until they dashed towards a housing block were horrific. One volunteer Emma worked at a hospital with over 700 children deformed by the US depleted uranium bombs during pregnancy.
Yugoslavia was the first in the march by the US and NATO to take control of the Kremlin. The 2014 Obama Administration coup of the elected government of Ukraine was another step in their campaign to overthrow the Russian government. A nuclear armed government that is unlikely to let the US install a puppet regime. A growing threat of nuclear conflict concealed from Americans.
The Obama Administration agreed to a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) treaty with Iran. A treaty Trump pulled out of in his first term, providing Israel and the US with a new pretext for war. US intelligence agencies have repeatedly verified that Iran is telling the truth when it claimed it was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon.
Even so the war against Iran has started. The US and Israel seemed to believe their own lies and may have backed themselves into a corner. It wasn’t the three days to topple the regime war promised by Israel. Now that Israel is facing the possibility of catastrophic damage in another round of unprovoked assaults on Iran the Zionist child murderers may believe that launching their “Samson Option” could be their ticket to some warped idea of victory.
The Samson Option is Israeli’s plan to launch nuclear weapons “as a final, catastrophic resort if the state faces an existential threat, such as being overwhelmed by a conventional military invasion.” This policy is named after the biblical figure Samson who destroyed a temple, killing himself and his enemies. This doctrine was intended to act as an “ultimate deterrent by threatening to bring down surrounding forces if Israel falls.” It is clear it failed to deter Iran from defending itself.
After seven decades of being held hostage by the specter of a nuclear conflict, that threat is closer today than ever as the wars against Russia and Iran teeter on the edge of nuclear annihilation.
According to Ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson there was an emergency meeting at the White House on Saturday April 18th where General Dan Caine stopped Trump from using a nuclear weapon on Iran.
Caine may not be in his position for long as Trump continues to fire anyone in military leadership that opposes this unprovoked war and the threats to bomb the beautiful 5,000 year culture of Iran back into “the stone age.”
Are we really at the end of the nuclear age as Palantir’s Alex Karp claims in his manifesto “The Technological Republic, in brief” number 12. “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.”
Are we at the beginning of the era where US leaders take seriously claims by Beltway think tanks that the US can win a nuclear war against Russia and China and the sparks start flying. The Wall Street Journal published Seth Cropsey April 27, 2022 essay “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War,” adding “Washington might study Cold War-era practices that had a major effect on Soviet policy making,” outlining a fascist version of the “propaganda by deed” terror of a message sending nuclear attack that would show the US means business so obey.
The three of us heading to my friend Micheal Parenti’s memorial on Saturday April 25th passed a billboard on interstate 880 advertising the virtues of an AI driven nuclear defense. Is this robotic reality going to be our future? The future that Santa Cruz mayoral candidate Ryan Coonerty’s predictive AI targeting software has built to enforce the rule of the Epstein class. A future with no Dan Caine to interfere with the logic of the technocrats and the PayPal Mafia at Palantir.
In many ways the hopes of the June 12, 1982 march to end the nuclear arms race was shattered in the ruthless June 12, 2025 unprovoked attacks on Iran.
That energy of 1982 is needed more today than at any time in this nuclear age. If any group can spark that energy that brought a million protesters to the streets of New York it’s Food Not Bombs.
FOOD NOT BOMBS
PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA
menu@foodnotbombs.net
SOUP STREET
A memoir by Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
You can join me in my journey from the adventures I enjoyed as a child living the wilderness of America’s National Parks, the events that inspired me to dedicate my life to ending capital’s exploitive system to the founding of Food Not Bombs and the decades of traveling the world preparing and sharing meals.
Soup Street / by Keith McHenry 2026
ISBN: 979-8-234-00487-1
Price: $24.95
Pages: 332
Size: 6 x 9 inches
HUNGER IS NOT A GAME
May 16, 2025
When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on war?
We need Food Not Bombs more today than at any point in our 45 year history. President Trump has proposed the first trillion dollar military budget an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion in Pentagon spending while also proposing 22% in cuts for social services. President Ronald Reagan 2.0.
The lines of people seeking meals at Food Not Bombs grow longer month after month. American seniors call me all day long distressed that they have no food.
“I worked my whole life and always paid my taxes but now I am forced to beg for help. This is embarrassing” Jim said adding that all the pantries in his area have closed because they couldn’t keep up demand. I could hear his tears over my phone. Hour after hour calls of desperation. One has not eaten in three days. Another is eating cat food. All one woman has left is a box of Cheerios. It is heartbreaking that often all I can do is suggest they call their local 211 help line.
But nothing can match the shear horror of Israel and the United States starving two million Palestinians reducing thousands of children to skin wrapped skeletons.
On October 9, 2023, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, pledging that “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”
Thousands of truckloads of food have been blocked for over 70 days sitting but a few miles from these desperate mouths. the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report saids nearly 71,000 cases of acute malnutrition among children under five are expected between April 2025 and March 2026. We have gone from witnessing drone video of the February 29, 2024,Flour Massacre killing over 100 Palestinians as they struggled to grab food for their families to images of starved sunken eyed children breathing their last breathe.
When Food Not Bombs started during the May 24, 1980 Occupation Attempt of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station the eight of us could not have imagined that four and a half decades later that we would have provided billions of meals with the hungry. Yet the wars would also continue. Wars of famine and wars of genocide. A billion dollars in naval forces, lost F 18 Super Hornets and US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drones lost in one month this year defending Israel’s right to exterminate the families of Gaza.
The idea that Food Not Bombs volunteers would be sharing food in Moscow, Russia would have seemed impossible in those days when we were busy organizing for protests like the June 12, 1982 March for Nuclear Disarmament where over a million protesters walked across Manhattan to the Great Meadow that day. A world without a Soviet Union was unimaginable.
Food Not Bombs started when my friend Boston University Law student Brian Feigenbaum was arrested during our May 24th attempt to stop the nuclear power station on the New Hampshire coast. We found someone who could bail out Brian and that evening as we chugged back to Boston we agreed to raise the funds needed to repay his generosity by holding bake sales.
Well that was not at all lucrative but we did have a moving company called Smooth Move and one of our customers was discarding a yellow and green poster that said, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” It was a light bulb moment for our little collective. We bought surplus military uniforms, mounted the poster on cardboard, dressed as generals and headed out with our baked goods asking pedestrians to help us buy a bomber. We had stumbled onto an effective way to get an otherwise distracted public to hear our message.
While we were pitching our baked goods for bombers we also learned of planned protests in Germany against the deployment of the Pershing II nuclear weapons on their streets. In solidarity, Food Not Bombs and Cambridge City Council organized an October 10, 1981, march from City Hall to Draper Nuclear Lab. A tiny story in the Boston Globe that week noted that nearly 300,000 people took part that day in Bonn West Germany. Our march only attracted about 100 people but it was an important step in our campaign to mobilize for the nuclear disarmament protest in New York.
Later that month on a drizzly Halloween night Vice President George HW Bush spoke at MIT about those protests. About 3000 came out to the protest that ended with many of us dancing around a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.
“It is one of the exquisite ironies of our times that the United States should find itself in this position,” Bush said. ‘The Soviet disinformation apparatus is as disquieting as it is dishonest, but it has not been unsuccessful. These protesters are not only the most recent ones to have been attracted by the argument that the world has more to fear from America than it does from the Soviet Union.”
“Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women,” he continued. “Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism.”
Even though Bush portrayed our call for an end to the cold war as naive our campaign for nuclear disarmament would play an important role in pushing President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987easing the threat of a nuclear conflict.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from that treaty in August 2019, and Russia reciprocated by suspending its participation.
Now the US plans to deploy the Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile systems in Germany returning to the days when the Pershing missiles lumbering across the cobble stone streets. Maybe it time to launch another mass mobilization against the nuclear threat.
After we started our “bake sales for bombers” street performances the original Food Not Bombs group began organizing against the banks that were investing in the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and were profiting from the nuclear weapons industry.
We organize a theatrical soup line outside of the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting on March 26, 1981. I designed a flyer to show the connections between the bank and the military contractors with a warning that Reagan’s policies and those of the banks could lead to a future where Americans would have to seek food at soup kitchens.
Our friends were invited to dress as Depression Era hobos but as we were preparing a huge sixty quart pot of stew we realized we had not recruited enough people to have the shock value of a real soup kitchen. At around midnight I went to the Pine Street Inn Homeless Shelter and gave a speech about our protest and invited them to join us. One man excitedly responded, “cool, a protest like we did in the sixties.”
Nearly everyone I had spoken with at the shelter showed up. The first man we shared our soup with responded with “God bless you,” gently bowing his head. One by one they stepped forward for their cup of warmth offering a heart felt thanks. A young business man expressed alarm that Reagan had only been in office for a month and people were already standing in line to eat. The guys who ate with us suggested we share food everyday since there was no place for Boston’s homeless to get a free meal. It is difficult to imagine now but in 1981, homelessness in America was not a thing.
That evening we agreed to give our bosses two weeks notice so we could focus full time on recovering and delivering food while preparing meals to share at Harvard Square or outside Park Station Subway Station on the Boston Commons. I was a produce worker at Bread and Circus Natural Food Grocery and had been taking the food I was discarding to the mothers at the pubic housing projects on Portland Avenue. My boss agreed to let me continue to recover the discarded food.
One morning while dropping off food to the projects the women who I had been helping pointed out that a new building had just opened across the street. The women said scientists were designing nuclear weapons in the new offices, inspiring us to adopt the name Food Not Bombs.
I moved to San Francisco in 1987 with my wife Andrea and our Afghan Hound Bear. One morning we hear news that Veterans For Peace activist Brian Williams had been hit by a munitions train at the Concord Navel Weapons Station in the East Bay. He was participating in a campaign to stop weapons shipments to the wars in Central America called Nuremberg Action. Food Not Bombs had supported Brian and the other Veteran’s For Peace activists during their fast in Boston and I was stunned by reports that Brian’s legs had been severed so Andrea and I were moved to attend the protest that weekend. When we returned home and switched on the TV to watch the news reports on that day’s rally Andrea suggested I start a second Food Not Bombs group.
We pulled together a few volunteers meeting at a Chinese restaurant on Haight Street and agreed to share our literature and meals at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at Stanyan Street. We learned that there were no free meals in the Haight on Mondays we agreed to fill that day.
A hippy looking man stopped by our meal and suggested we could get a permit from the Recreation and Parks Department. I wrote Director Peter Ashe on July 11, 1988 requesting the suggested documents. Police officers would pass by our meal each Monday and ask if we had received a permit yet and I would walk over to the parks department office to find out the progress. No one there knew what I was talking about but agreed to take a message.
On August 15, 1988 the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched out of the woods and arrested nine of us. Local photographer Greg Garr took pictures of the police blocking people from getting food. His photo appeared with a UPI story of the arrests in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle inspiring outrage.
A week later a couple hundred people marched down Haight Street many banging spoons on pots while others carried buckets of stew and fruit salad or cases of produce and bagels. We set up at the entrance to the park. The police arrested 24 volunteers and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force took notes sending a memo on August 29th to the San Francisco Field Office claiming that Food Not Bombs was “a credible national security threat” even though we had just three chapters and a total of 30 volunteers.
The August 22nd arrests made CNN, the New York Times, The Times of London and several other news outlets. People started to send request for information on how to start their own chapter in defiance so I took my notes on how I formed the San Francisco group and made a flyer called “Seven Steps to Starting a Local Food Not Bombs Group.” I still mail copies out to people wishing to start their own local chapter.
The San Francisco Police made a total of 1,000 arrests over eight years. News of these arrests would inspire others to start chapters in their cities. We organized our first International Gathering to coincide with the indigenous community’s protest against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas. The national celebration was held in San Francisco since the city had the longest running Columbus Day parade in the United States. During our two day gathering we agreed on our three principles.
1. The food would always be vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone, rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. That each group is autonomous and uses a process of consensus to make decisions. There are no leaders, presidents or directors, and no headquarters.
3. Food Not Bombs is not a charity but is dedicated to using nonviolent direct action to change society so no one needs to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen.
After the gathering we joined the protest at Aquatic Park witnessing the indigenous elders push the official Columbus back out into the bay as we shared breakfast with the protesters before heading to Civic Center Plaza to feed the main rally against the 500 years of exploitation.
The Savings and Loan crisis was raging that across the country that same year tossing families out of their homes. That November the San Francisco Tenants Union and Food Not Bombs held a film showing in the Tenderloin about the squatters movement in Europe to inspire our own squatters campaign.
One participant agreed to pretend to be interested in buying the decrepit old building that once housed an X rated movie theater and would ask the real estate company for a key to check it out. We also planned to sneak into the gutted hotel across the street from the Glide Memorial Church soup kitchen the night before Thanksgiving knowing that the Mayor would arrive to do his annual photo op of serving a slice of turkey to a homeless guest.
When Mayor Jordan arrived we emerged from the glassless windows hanging a banner saying “Homes Not Jails” and blasted our disdain for the Mayor’s brutal “Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program” of homeless sweeps.
At the same time we had moved several families into the second floor of the movie theater. According to the book “No Trespassing” by Anders Corr we had placed locks on 400 buildings left vacant as a result of the corruption of the Savings and Loans industry and we had people living in as many as 100 of those buildings.
In 2008 another housing crisis forced over 5.5 million families into foreclosure. When Obama opted to bail out the banks, leaving millions of Americans to fend for themselves, thousands of people responded to the Ad Buster Magazine’s call to Occupy Wall Street on October 17, 2008 and took to the streets. Food Not Bombs volunteers swung into action helping set up kitchens to provide for their local Occupy Camps. That Thanksgiving Obama’s Homeland Security, the FBI and local police departments started to crush the protest.
The United States wasn’t the only country suffering from the 2008 economic crisis. I was invited to speak in England in 2010 and found that the least expensive flights to the British Isles were on Icelandic Air. The airline encouraged its passengers to spend as much time in the country as you wished with no increase in airfare so I spent a week visiting the local Reykjavik chapter of Food Not Bombs. I joined them at their weekly meal where they described how the conversations at their Saturday lunches often turned to a discussion about the corruption that had resulted in their own 2008 economic crisis. At one point the weekly conversations turned into a weekly march to the Parliament Building.
I was invited to speak about the history and philosophy of Food Not Bombs at a local community center. During the question and answering period a reporter asked me how I felt about Food Not Bombs initiating the uprising against the bankers and central government. I was amazed. Food Not Bombs had initiated a movement that toppled a government.
The Grapevine Magazine reported “Ever since the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘Disaster Speech’ on October 6, where he outlined the crash of the Icelandic economy, a crowd has gathered outside the parliament building every Saturday afternoon to voice their discontent and demanding the resignation of the government, the Central Bank directors, and other key figures associated with the collapse.”
A young Food Not Bombs activist, Haukur Hilmarsson, climbed up onto the roof of the Parliament building and raised the pink pig emblazoned flag of the Bónus food chain where the Icelandic national flag usually flies. Bónus is a part of Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson’s Baugur investment empire, which owns the majority of the country’s food stores as well as most of the media, and is widely seen to be one of most powerful men in the country, and a key figure in the economic crash.
Local news outlet Fréttablaðið calculated that in the past few years after the economic crisis the Icelandic judiciary had sentenced 36 bankers to a total of 96 years in prison. All of the criminal cases are linked to the notorious crash of the Icelandic banking system in 2008.
In 2011, Iceland rewrote its constitution using a uniquely open process. It reshaped the dialogue on how a population can use available technology, consensus building, and civic engagement when reinventing the governmental processes supporting the needs of their constituents.
As the global economy faces another economic crisis possibly more dire than those in 1992 and 2008 and the horrific genocide and wars continue to kill and maim, the work of Food Not Bombs has never been needed more than today.
Our 45th anniversary is a good time to consider strategies not only to meet the growing need for food but also how to use our global network to force a redirection of military spending towards funding healthcare, education, local infrastructure and social services. I believe we are creative enough to organize a coordinated campaign to disrupt the techno-fascist seeking to implement a totalitarian digital control grid with their Stargate AI warfare and surveillance. Our freedom and humanity is at risk. The bonds we have made at Food Not Bombs can provide a foundation for this resistance. This task might be more difficult than the removal of the Icelandic government but we have every reason to try.
I will be encouraging the audience at our 45th anniversary celebration in Santa Cruz to join us in initiating another mass movement against war and austerity.
The Santa Cruz chapter of Food Not Bombs is hosting a free concert Soupstock 2025, on Saturday, May 24th at the Duck Pond Stage in San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz starting at high noon. This fun party features six bands, arts and craft displays, information booths, face painting, dancing and free food.
I hope you will join us in taking nonviolent direct action to not only provide meals with the hungry but to disrupt the political and economic system to force an end to the suffering. Hunger is not a game.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – www.foodnotbombs.net
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