Soupstock 2022 - 42nd Anniversary of the Founding of Food Not Bombs

Soupstock - The 42nd anniversary celebration of Food Not Bombs

Free concert and festival featuring Lyrical I, THC-The Higher Collective, Joe and the Rogans, and much more.

Live music, free food, information booths, arts and craft tables, children’s area and lots of fun for everyone.

Your organization, community project or art and craft business is invited to set up for free at our event. Just show up ready to have fun.
Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs

PO Box 422 • Santa Cruz, CA 95061
http://www.santacruz.foodnotbombs.net
1-800-884-1136

When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on war?

The eight college age anti-nuclear activists who started the first Food Not Bombs collective in May 1980, organized to influence the Boston area community to resist the threat of cuts in social services and escalation in military funding promised by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and his Wall Street backers. Policies that we believed would magnify the trend that was already forcing many into poverty. We marched against the threat of nuclear war in a demonstration cosponsored with the Cambridge City Council. We delivered groceries to public housing across the Boston area and organized our first Free Concert for Nuclear Disarmament in Sennet Park, becoming the model for what our poet friend and volunteer Dimond Dave would call Soupstock 1989.

After four decades the goals of Food Not Bombs have grown more urgent as the world faces the threat of a nuclear confrontation pushed in the media, and hundreds of millions of people are sinking into deeper poverty. Billions of dollars are poured into buying lethal aid for wars in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa while people become homeless and struggle to feed themselves.

We could never have imagined we would grow into a global movement of volunteers who 42 years later was still busy recovering food that would otherwise be discarded and sharing our free meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities in more than 65 countries.

We have never been a charity. From the first days when we held our theatrical “bake sales to buy a bomber” we have been dedicated to seeking an end to the crisis of corporate domination and exploitation by taking nonviolent direct action so no one is forced to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen or live in the streets. Our slogan “Solidarity Not Charity” graces our social media and flyers.

Food Not Bombs was transformed in 1988 when we started a second group in San Francisco, where the police started to arrest our volunteers for the “crime” of making a political statement ultimately making over 1,000 arrests. The police also arrested our volunteers for feeding the hungry in a number of other cities including Middletown, Connecticut, Ft Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando, Florida, Arcata, Los Angeles, California, Moscow, Russia and Minsk, Belarus. A Federal Appellate Court in the 11th Circuit ruled that our Food Not Bombs meals are protected by the First Amendment and may order the City of Ft Lauderdale to pay our lawyers $1.5 million dollars.

The violent campaign in San Francisco against our volunteers resulted In Amnesty International declaring that any Food Not Bombs volunteer sentenced to prison would be considered a "Prisoner of Conscience" and that they would work for our unconditional release.

One of our first actions was to set up a soup line outside of the Federal Reserve Bank to protest the policies of the Bank of Boston and their investments in nuclear weapons, nuclear power and property speculation. Volunteers have continued our protests against the exploitation by the banks, hedge funds and the globalization of the economy by providing meals at protests against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank. You may have eaten with us at the anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Cancun, Miami, Gutenberg, and Toronto. We helped organize and feed Occupy Wall Street and local Occupy camps in hundreds of cities. We are continuing our four decade resistance to globalization, organizing against the social control of the new Central Bank Digital Currencies. Our struggle against the implementation of a global corporate dystopian future continues.

When capitalism failed to respond to its disasters Food Not Bombs has been there. We organized the food relief effort for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and Sandy. Our volunteers provided the only free meals for the first three days after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, helped after the Northridge Earthquake and we were among the first to respond to Typhoon Magkhut in the Philippines and the Christmas Tsunami in Indonesia.

Volunteers also provided hot vegan meals to the rescue workers in New York after 9/11, started animal rescue shelters in Slovakia, fed Camp Casey in Texas, border camps in Palestine, Poland and Mexico; striking workers in Korea. Our chapter in Reykjavik helped initiate the protests that overthrew the banker government of Iceland. We have provided food and material support to Aboriginal Tent Embassies and their efforts to protect the environment from mining and Australian military exercises. Our volunteers have been providing the only meals that the poor and unhoused could access during the pandemic. The Santa Cruz chapter has provided hot meals every day since March 14, 2020. Even more amazing our groups in Myanmar not only provided food during the pandemic but did so while under the martial law of the military dictatorship.

Food Not Bombs activists have also started many other autonomous projects like Indymedia, Bikes Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, Food Not Lawns, the free radio movement, Really Really Free Markets, and Anarchists Against the Wall in Palestine.

Our independence from state and corporate control is at the core of our power and a threat to the institutions of war and exploitation. Our freedom from authority and our work to divert military funding to health care, housing and education seemed to worry the FBI - Joint Terrorism Task Force who sent a memo to the San Francisco Field Office on August 29, 1988, claiming we were a credible national security threat. In a 2009 lecture at Tufts University an Obama State Department official compared Food Not Bombs to Al-Qaeda, stating we were a greater danger to the United States because we were seeking to reduce the military budget and use the savings to fund domestic social needs.

Food Not Bombs works in coalition with groups like Earth First!, Codepink, the American Indian Movement, and the National Union of the Homeless.

We invite you to join Food Not Bombs in taking direct action towards creating a world free from domination, coercion and violence.

Food is a right, not a privilege...Solidarity not charity.

Please consider making a monthly donation
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/donate.php