Bring Provisions: SFO Airport Protest

When my friend Paige Brown, a Climate and Clean Energy Activist by day, fermenting enthusiast by night, was posting these pictures on Instagram,  I asked her could I post them on this blog. I love noticing the way sharing food helps form community, in this instance the community of inspiring activists fighting against Trump’s Muslim Ban at airports across the USA.  We are going to need a lot of this, to keep our bodies and spirits in good health, and it’s so fun to see what all this abundance looks like in the sterility of an airport.

Paige writes:

“The Resistance will be well fed! The calls went out for an emergency protest at San Francisco Airport on Sunday January 30, as 50 people were being detained there because of DT’s Muslim Ban. The call to protest included the request, “Bring provisions.” My friend and I grabbed granola bars and bananas and headed over.

The SFO protest was determined, lively, large, and diverse. It also had more food than I’ve ever seen at any protest. It was a beautiful abundance of fruit, carrots, cheese, snacks, and water. People took over kiosks, making them into protest refreshment stations.

Pizzas arrived just as the crowd was cheering the announcement that the last detainee had been released. It wasn’t about the pizza obviously, but it was about people vigorously and enthusiastically giving and sharing food. People really wanted to feed each other and take care of each other. Open doors, open arms, and sharing food with strangers as an antidote to closing doors and hearts.”

Feeding a Movement: The Kitchens of the Standing Rock Camps

Chills of love and respect kept going down my spine reading this account of the kitchens at Standing Rock, from activist-anthropologist-writer Liz Hoover, on an ever interesting and insightful blog.

From Garden Warriors to Good Seeds: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement

Meal line up outside the mess hall of the Main Kitchen. Photo by Elizabeth Hoover

Since April, thousands of Indigenous people and their allies have converged on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and treaty lands, to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), slated to cross under the Missouri River directly upstream from the reservation. People have come from around the world to pray; to stand in opposition to Energy Transfer Partners and the Morton County Sheriff’s Department as well as 71 other law enforcement agencies; and to form community. Some people come for the weekend, others have quit their jobs and made resisting this pipeline their full time work. They spend their days building infrastructure at the camp, chopping wood, sorting donations, praying and singing at the main fire, and putting their bodies on the line between the land and an…

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Feeding the Fight Against the Dakota Access Pipeline

Supply Drives for the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone Camps in US Cities on Monday 19 September… am sure you can search for updates and addresses after this date– if you have good info, please leave it in the comments…

Helping with Food in Refugee Camps in Calais

Help if you can via this YouCaring crowdfunder and share this post.

These videos offer an inspiring introduction to the solidarity work around food in “the Jungle” camp in Calais, and those cooking, distributing and making it possible there for people to do this themselves as well. The refugees are from many places in the world, and it’s clear that most are fleeing terrible violence and have had quite a rough journey to get to where they now are.

Here’s a video showing how volunteers are working with the diversity and specificity of the people in the camp; you can feel the urgency:

 

This one shows the development of Kitchen in Calais:

 

This one what your group might want to contribute in terms of food donations:

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Lots of people seem to wind up on my blog, say the WordPress stats, looking for information about what Syrian refugees eat.  I have no personal knowledge about this, though I did a while back reblog some information that is now probably pretty obsolete pertaining to refugees in Lebanon.  That’s why you might end up here on my site.

I assume that people who ask these questions of internet search engines (maybe Siri can somehow learn as well) inquire from a place of compassion and concern, and perhaps the wish to contribute, donate, or volunteer.  Hence this post.

Some links:

Cooking for 1,000: Greeks, Syrians, Iraqis Together

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On the Greek island of Lesbos, thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-torn countries are coming to shore each week,” writes Annia Clezadio.  Local people are responding in the spirit of Social Kitchens, recognising real need, cooking and eating together. creating meals as a place of sharing and shared humanity rather than charity. Read “This Kid Came Up to Ask How Much the Food Cost. I Told him It Was Free” on Upworthy for a really inspiring picture of how things can be — how things are in fact, pockets of hope and kindness in the hugeness of crisis facing refugees from war in Syria and elsewhere.  It’s the best thing I’ve read in a while, so READ IT — and it includes a recipe for Kosta’s Bigouli for 1,000, a warm-spiced pasta dish that resonates as comfort food throughout the different communities.  You can help out here.

A long spoon, a bit pot. Photo by Annia Ciedzlo

More of Kosta, in Athens:

Even in our part of mid-Wales, even at the level of current hardship our British Austerity presents, there’s a choice– and you hear this reflected in the way people respond to the possibility of “migrants” and refugees coming to settle among us.  There’s a fear that there’s not enough to share. It’s around this fear that things get ugly, that racist attitudes get enflamed, that a sense of protecting one’s own community becomes something you choose over helping people, which you’d like to be able to do, if.  If.

The Parable of the Long Spoons is so instructive, such a powerful guide, to remember there’s more for everything in the sharing, perhaps especially when circumstances feel the most dire. This seems to be what’s happening on Lesbos, in Greece.  It’s not a choice between Them and Us, the best choice is Them and Us together.

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I commend Annia Ciezadio for picking up on the “story.”  I think we have a lot to look forward to in her writings and exploration of war and food.

Here’s something truly amazing Annia Ciezadlo wrote about community gardens and people trying to feed themselves in Yarmouk, the long time Palestinian camp in Damascus that’s been for years now under siege by Assad government troops and more lately by ISIL as well.  Somehow, in spite of violence, starvation, illness, assassination– truly desperate at a level hard to imagine — people are managing a dark sense of humour and keep planting seeds and moving forward.   Another must-read.

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GOFUNDME to get money to Kosta for his work

Communal Dining in Peru, and What UK People Can Learn

Through Twitter I recently happened upon a paper called “Selling out on the Revolution for a Plate of Beans’? Communal Dining in Peru and What We Can Learn From It.”  It’s a research project by Bryce Evans, who is a Food History academic in Liverpool. He also runs a community eating and cooking project in that city which is based on a kind of alternative vision to food banks, as he discusses in this video.

In his paper Evans asks: “What can the UK learn from the Peruvian model of egalitarian eating? What does this suggest about the role of the State vis-à-vis individuals and voluntary groups? And can the UK develop its food bank network so that it resembles the community kitchen movement of Peru?”

Evans compares the community kitchen movement as a mode of social eating and food distribution in various ways. Food banks in the UK can barely deal with fresh food, for instance, which is clearly an issue for nutrition.  There’s also the problem that hungry people often have no way to heat the foods they are given at food banks.  (I mean to write a piece called “In Praise of the Microwave” since that’s all that so many low-income renters have to cook with.) Emergency provision of food is also an opportunity for offering other services and meeting lots of social needs at once.

His paper is really worth a read for the important questions it raises, and its discussion of a really interesting self-help model I’d never known about:

 “The women who ran these simple food shacks largely avoided any political rhetoric. Most wanted change, but first and foremost they desired change for the good of their communities. Their vision of communal cohesion, development and food security did not necessarily coincide with the political goals of the state or its guerrilla enemies….Put simply, the women who ran the community kitchens wanted to feed people cheaply and nutritiously and they wanted the state to help out [by guaranteeing the provision of rice and beans] if possible.”

For me it brought to mind Graham Riches’ work in Canada (summarised in this recent newspaper piece).  “Given the urgent issue of food poverty,” he writes, [there is] a missed opportunity to change the public and political conversation from food charity to the right to food, informed by internationally recognised human rights principles and framework legislation.”  Jose Luis Vivero Pol might take this idea further, conceptually, from the Right to Food to food as a commons, which is a shift away from the current understanding of food as a commodity.

The powerful part of the community eating model in Peru is its social function in which food isn’t reduced to nutritional sustenance (commodified in an economic system) but comes with a whole lot more– community cohesion, social expectation that children should have healthy snacks, etc. Bryce Evans writes of the Liverpool program he runs:

“Manna’s project is a step above the traditional food bank model in that we do not provide hand-outs but instead focus on skills training, technical workshops, mentoring programmes and outreach work. …[W]e encourage people – young and old – to chop up vegetables and cook with us and to help us grow food, thus transferring broader skills…. Our project provides a community hub which, in a challenging and often alienating economic climate, brings people together.”

There seem to be many community kitchen/ communal eating projects around the UK, and I’d love to start gathering a list — alternative, loving, community oriented responses to hunger that bring people together around food, eating together, as do the Comedores Populares in Peru…

There is also, within the Local Food and community growing movements in the UK a great opportunity to think how we can contribute our broad and integrated notions about health and sustainability and food justice to fighting hunger, building community, changing the food system and the conception of food.  This is something I will work on in my way; please be in touch if you are interested in sharing information and strategy.

And please be in touch if you know of more projects like these– People’s Kitchens, free and cheap community cooking and eating, food festivals that don’t take the system off the hook yet celebrate deliciousness and the opportunity to do things differently.  We could really benefit networking, and learning as well how people are working with community gardens and free food and local food projects making the food tastier, healthier, and less charity, supermarket and waste reliant.

Though of course resourcefulness with waste is important, let’s not tangle the two conversations.

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And Food Banks do have an important emergency function.  This is an American article but I think it offers good advice what to donate.