FOOD NOT BOMBS:
The Keith McHenry Interview

Interview by Claudette Vaughan

Food is political. This is an explosive interview. Keith McHenry, co-founder of the first ever Food Not Bombs is speaking to the Abolitionist on feeding the poor, Bush's America for activists today, what really happened at Katrina, what our obligations as planetary citizens are and on his friend, Bill Rodgers.

Abolitionist: Can you tell us some of the history of your involvement with FNB's Keith and what obstacles you had to overcome to make it work. Keith McHenry: When we started in Boston in 1980 and there was 8 of us that started the movement. We were doing it initially as street theatre to stop the nuclear weapons industry and the nuclear power industry. This was to show that there was another way to live with included respect for animals and respect for the environment and we were trying to promote a vegetarian diet as well. So we set up in the park and when people came by we

A lot of people weren't stopping by and we weren't getting much business. So then we tried this idea when we found this sign that read: “Wouldn't it be a beautiful day if the Pentagon had to hold a cake stall to buy a B1 bomb?” So we thought, “Wow, let's dress up as Generals” and see if that would work. So we made vegan pizzas and we got all these Generals clothing from a disc store and we told people we were trying to buy a B1 bomber and could they help us out. And that action started the whole basic idea of doing theatre, having the food and connecting as many issues as possible.

Abolitionist: And FNB's is now in over 70 countries in the world. Is that correct?

Keith McHenry: Yes. I was just recently in Nigeria with a filmmaker from Sydney . We were working with the FNB chapters there. Soon I'll be visiting FNB's in Turkey at the end of the month. There's FNB's groups all over the world. It's just incredible. In the US there's possibly as many as 320 FNB's.

Abolitionist: Were you in Nigeria to do a documentary on FNB's?

Keith McHenry: I was there to do FNB's but the filmmaker has been following us to video of us doing FNB's. She traveled with me all through Europe, the Middle East, North America and Nigeria in Africa . I basically visit the chapters; help them determine what it is they need and what they can use. I give a talk about the history of FNB's to their membership and in Nigeria we went to the people living near the oil refineries and we started FNB shelters there with all people from every sector of society including the President of Nigeria's Special Assistance on Food Security, the Special Assistant on Women's Issues, the Minister of Works and all other kinds of NGO's and just the average person on the street.

Abolitionist: Food is more than just one more commodity that is brought and sold. It is an over-riding human need and right. The capitalist machine is a very special kind of delirium. Do you think FNB's pragmatic philosophy forces us to examine 21 st century societies meaning for ‘the good life' in the western world and, as importantly, how such new meanings gain authority and come to effect our daily lives?

Keith McHenry: Yeah we wanted to do something different than most organisations that work for peace, social justice and animal rights in so much as we are trying to reach the average person in the culture – whatever culture that is- and have them realize the connections between lifestyle, diet, militarism and how everything is linked. Of course our emphasis is slightly different depending on whether it's a developing country or a first world country. In western Europe and in a lot of the United States the big focus is on recovering food and showing how much waste there is while so many people are going hungry. In Africa the focus turns out to be the way that we make decisions which is we use a decision making process called ‘Formal Consensus' and they like the non-hierarchical way that we organize with autonomous chapters. They like the fact that we are not connected with any religion and that we were promoting animal rights. The whole idea of vegetarianism and animal rights was completely new to them. To them they are facing different issues than say from people in Poland or Israel . So the FNB's philosophy can adapt specifically to the culture where it is placed and it will emphasis aspects of FNB's depending on whether they are a wealthy country or not.

Abolitionist: The elite v the people is an on-going struggle. Food and the politics of food plays a pivotal role in controlling the masses and some would say it always has. Is food through USAID used as a reward or punishment to black, poor countries especially in Africa ? Has that been your experience?

Keith McHenry: Yes, Foreign Aid is completely used for political manipulation and withholding food we can see the most common issue is the election of Palestine when Hamas gets elected, the United States withholds all funding because they don't like who was elected. They provide for one side of a conflict in overseas funding and food so they can feed their people and with diversion 2 they block food to people who they think won't agree with US Foreign Policy.

Abolitionist: The recently revealed ‘Terrorist Watch List' listed FNB's as Number 7# for FBI surveillance.

Keith McHenry: We know we have been under surveillance, we know with certainty, since 1988. My home-phone was wire-tapped and I have the wire-tapped document on the FNB's website under the section ‘Spying and Surveillance'.

More recently there's been a number of FNB's activists arrested in the United States for terrorism. Right now we have only one in jail and one other recently died in jail – December 22, 2005.

Abolitionist: Is that Bill Rodgers? Did you know him?

Keith McHenry: Yeah he was a good friend of mine. It was very shocking this whole experience. At the same time we started getting all these other things from the American Civil Liberties Movement on surveillance including Colorado and North Carolina and myself down here in Tucson , Arizona . MTV showed that there were documents from the Pentagon claiming that the protests that I organised was “an on-going credible terrorist threat” to the United States government. So we are trying to get to the bottom of that. We are doing more legal work and at Austin Texas Law School one of the students reported that there was a power point presentation that had FNB's listed as one of the terrorist groups to be monitored by the FBI in Texas.

The FBI in Texas said they attended our meetings and there's been some additional work to infiltrate our meetings but we have these problems all the time.

Abolitionist: How do you protect yourself against that kind of lunacy?

Keith McHenry: Well the first thing we have to do is not be too upset that our emails are interrupted all the time. Right now I'm actually having problems with my health insurance which seems to be apart of what is going on with the government. It's important to keep in good spirits because you know if you are doing good work and you are changing society, that you are influencing people to stand up for peace, human rights and animal rights then that's why the government is after you. So from that point of view it's an honour. Now the other thing is we don't do anything illegal. Our meetings are always public and we make decisions by consensus. That tends to get infiltrators or you will get interruptions but you can still move forward because everybody feels as if they are a part of the movement, that it's theirs and so if anybody is advocating doing something violent then that person isn't really speaking in the best interests of FNB's.

FNB's has never agreed to do an act that would get them in trouble with us serving free food which resulted in over 1000 arrests in San Francisco. I faced life in prison, I spent 3 years in prison in California for doing this and that was around the period of time the government was started to say that FNB's is a terrorist group. The Pentagon used FNB's as a case study for out of counter domestic terrorism. They have been doing that since 1989 since we first began getting reports of that.

Abolitionist: Some activists have come to realise that to demonstrate against the WTO which controls so much of the lives of people everywhere is more dangerous than demonstrating against their own governments' policies. The collapse of Seattle slowed down the trade liberalisation project. It demonstrated that globalism is not an inevitable phenomenon and it provided a breathing space for a hard look at what trade liberalization has meant for the lives of the poor and what those implications are. What are your views on trade liberalization practices?

Keith McHenry: Food Not Bombs is actually the group that was responsible for having proposed a protest in Seattle against the WTO. What I did was organize with a collective in San Francisco and with some people from Spain to show a video about the globalisation of the economy on a tour that went to 50 cities in the US and Canada called “The Un-Free Trade Tour” in the Fall of 1997. At that time we didn't know where the WTO was going to meet, we did know that they were planning to meet in North America and the proposal was we would all go to whatever that city was and try and shut down the meeting of the WTO. As we now know, thousands of FNB's activists did go to Seattle with other organizations which are considered more prominent – International Global Organisation and the Global Exchange etc – and these other anti-globalisation groups they also attended but we are the one's that ‘met and greeted' those groups to organise the Un-Free Trade Tour. They decided not to participate but they did give us literature which we took with us on tour. Ever since Seattle we have provide hot food on the streets to every Convergence, to blockades and direct actions.

We see the increase of hunger and poverty worldwide as growing as a direct result of a number of things, one of which is the globalisation and the neo-liberal policies of financial institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and so on. Also, the privatization of economies that has been forced on people by these institutions and by the United States . You can see in many countries now it's becoming quite the crisis as they are down to basic necessities as a direct result of being forced off their land. You can see now that whole thing of genetically modified foods and what a crisis that is causing hunger and starvation in the world.

We have been very much in the forefront of organisating against that.

Abolitionist: Where Foreign Aid is concerned to Africa it seems as if nothing has improved substantially for Black Africans. Bob Geldolf is out there and yourself and FNB's but why is nothing changing in Africa to bring them significantly up to a first world country level?

Keith McHenry: Exactly but it's really impressive what's going on in Africa by the people themselves not by US Foreign Aid or the US Government. What's really remarkable is FNB's is able to, because of the way we are organized, when we started chapters in Nigeria and there's 15 FNB's there now – I started 4 directly – and for them it's more about self-governance and having control themselves and not about this idea of dumping food and running the global economy so out strategy at FNB's is we actually raise money specifically to buy seed. We have a direct connection to farmers throughout the Continent and then we buy the seeds, they plant them and grow the food. FNB's gets half the harvest to feed the poor and they get to keep half the harvest either to sell or to feed their own community. That way, we're not destroying the farming community in Africa – we are actually supporting them. We have direct personal contact with these farmers, with their farms, we work with them so it's really quite remarkable.

Abolitionist: Food Not Bomb's was also feeding the survivors at Katrina. What was that like?

Keith McHenry: At the time we knew the Hurricane was coming I was actually feeding people not far away from Bush's ranch when Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq was having a vigil. We were watching the Hurricane on the internet and some of us there were from New Orleans so I raced back to Tucson by bus, did a food drive which was very well received. We filled the bus up with food within 3 days and the headed back to New Orleans . Before we got there, there was a FNB's chapter from Hartford, Connecticut had already arrived 3 days after the hurricane hit and we were the first and basically the only daily food program since the hurricane hit. We also worked with other groups such as ‘The Rainbow Family' and with the American Association of Medical Students. We brought food to the whole Gulf region and also medical care, material support, clothing, tools and so on to people that were hit.

At the same time the US Government is doing nothing. They provided no food. The Red Cross gave out my own home number as the official number to get food if you are a survivor of Katrina. And so they collected millions of dollars but we were actually the one's on the front line doing the work.

Abolitionist: There is an international media cover-up trying to portray Bush as the bumbling, stumbling idiot that couldn't get his act together to move quick enough to save lives at Katrina however the fact remains that aid did not arrive for the poor and mostly black citizens of the United States yet North Queensland in Australia had a hurricane a couple of weeks ago and Bush was on national TV asking if his government can provide aid to assist the survivors in Australia yet he couldn't do the same for Katrina residents. Is there such a blatant racial hatred towards Blacks in America that they don't even bother to cover it up anymore?

Keith McHenry: I think it's a combination of the racism of the United States but it's also this idea that they can disperse this Black community through-out the country and then be able to seaze the land and turn it into developments for the wealthy. So there's a political struggle over who's going to own New Orleans is ongoing. And it was clear that they knew in advance where not going to help the people in Katrina. I mean that was planned. We had to talk our way through military check-blocks to get the food down there and there's many cases where we were turned back and we had to go a different way to get into the area but the US Government spent it's resources, time and money trying to keep aid from getting to New Orleans and into Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

That's why the Red Cross was not able to do anything. They were not allowed to. They were part of the US Government aid agencies organisation and even though they are a private organization they are attached to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deliver food to the people hit by Katrina. It was like an actual government policy.

So The US Government intentionally allowed thousands or people to die. The death toll is not known and they still haven't gone to do anything. It's almost going to be a year since Katrina happened and the United States hasn't shown up yet. It's very, very frightening.

Abolitionist: The land aspect is the key to it all. It's why the US Government didn't act for its citizens. A article by Naomi Klein written in May, 2005 on the tsunami said, “Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, The New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that “almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding” and “…But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, “It's not the reconstruction at all – it's about reshaping everything.” If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in racial, social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them”.

This is the key to how the New World Order is playing out. Klein reported how quickly rich western developers brought up the devastated land for resorts. The same formula worked in both cases - Aceh and New Orleans .

At the time of Hurricane Katrina, Barbara Bush inspected the site and when she saw that poor black folk were on the streets with beds made up for them she said they were disadvantaged people anyway so they are probably better off now. What do you make of that Keith?

Keith McHenry: Yeah, that was very sick and of course a few months later those people she saw were living in cupboard boxes out on the streets. There are over 1 million homeless Americans as a direct result of Katrina and the fact that the social service agencies failed completely. That's very, very frightening.

In the area of Bush's Foreign Policy and its priorities the next thing for Bush is rushing nuclear weapons into production and in particular there's going to be a Bunker Busting Bomb and he's threatening to use a nuclear weapon against Iran . We are very, very concerned about that and we are trying to work against that because that would bring peril. If the United States does nuke Iran there will be globally an economic crisis for sure, if we even survive the whole thing. We are gearing up to try and provide food, counseling, medical attention and everything for people who have become displaced as a direct result of economic crisis in this invasion with this bombing.

Abolitionist: FNB's is No-Profit, aren't you?

Keith McHenry: Technically we are not nonprofit. We are not registered with the government but we have ways to get tax-deductible donations because of our nature – because we are FNB's we're not allowed to be non-profit.

Abolitionist: Can you draw us a picture of your friend Bill Rodgers who died in custody late last year?

Keith Rodgers: Bill was a very gentle man who, at the time of his death last year, was 36 years old. He and his girlfriend ran a bookstore in Prescott , Arizona and he worked with the Prescott Food Not Bomb's. My last conversation with him was about surveillance and how goofy it was that non-violent activists like ourselves were being spied on. He took FNB's to Uton where I live now and of course we are dedicated to non-violence. So the whole idea that we, and he, would be accused of terrorism is frightening. They were trying to say that he was a pornographer and all this scare campaign but Bill was loved by the community. He was a gently, quite person. He loved hiking and camping and his Catalyst Bookstore was such a main institution for Arizona . I think it may be the only alternative bookstore in the States. So people here were completely freaked out and of course everyone in the community are wondering when they will be next because we do the identical same stuff that Bill was doing and Sarah who was arrested as well so we don't know if a Grand Jury is about to indict us or not. Just to know that a close personal friend of yours who was a wonderful person be falsely accused of these things and then mysteriously found dead in this cell is really upsetting.

Abolitionist: What do you think our obligations as planetary citizens are?

Keith McHenry: I think we do need to do whatever it takes to organise an alternative society that is not based on the greed and violence that is capitalism. And try to do a combination of 2 things: 1). Resist and participate in planning and organizing non-violent direct action to resist the assaults of the people of this world and on the earth but at the same time build our own institutions that provides for our own basic human needs and withdraw our support completely to stop funding and participating in a consumer society. Create our own art, our own music, our own culture and that kind of thing. But I also encourage people to continue to resist.

I know there is often an argument to ‘Go Back To The Land' type of movement that we had here in the 70's that stopped organizing against the government and then found themselves eaten alive by the system. So we do need to end the system at the same time as replacing it with one that is harmonious, non-violent and healthy.

Abolitionist: Where does respect and the rights for non-human animals fit into a political spectrum that's already defined by the rights of humans – yet as I say that, there's plenty of humans on the planet without any rights either?

Keith McHenry: Well that's the thing. Basically people and animals are being treated with the same kind of disrespect, even the land itself with the bombing and the poisoning of the earth – so the issue of rights for everyone and the whole ideology that humans are better and above animals is another sub-division because it's denigrated that some humans are more worthy than others. This whole system is designed to pit one group of people or species against another. We shouldn't have to make those kinds of choices. The destruction of the environment and the earth and its resources is a violent assault on all living beings including people.

That's one of the goals of FNB's is to show that we are all interconnected. There isn't this – on one hand animals which is just meat that can be used by people and on the other hand somehow the “good” people who deserve wealth and the somehow “bad” people deserve to live in poverty. We really need the time to pull the idea that there's a direct link between the whole of us. A new report just come out this week saying that by the Year 2050 half of the species of life on earth today will be instinct if the current rate of exploitation remains.

Animal rights and Food Not Bomb's in Africa are exactly in tune. One of the largest perils for dangerous species in Africa is extreme poverty and the fact that people have to eat endangered species to live. There were even some reports we had in Africa of parents having to eat their children to live. Let's put that in a situation. It's all linked together and we can provide food and clothing to the average people who are not able to have those things, that gives them a lot more freedom to then be working on other aspects of their own liberation.

If you spend half the night and the whole day to get enough energy to live then you don't really have any time for additional efforts. I think in the last 5 years it's one of the things that frightens the FBI and the Pentagon in the United States is that we are fundamentally attacking their way of life by just introducing theses ideas which are actually growing in popularity but are really only common sense. We are unmasking the greed and hypocrisy that we primarily by the US but also by other western countries.

Abolitionist: Do you think that political action should focus on collective action that produces solidarity and food becomes political when change is demanded?

Keith McHenry: One of the big debates in America, for instance, is a lot of people considering individual action and so on because the situation is so desperate but the reality and the solution to these problems which I agree with is organizing as a community and other organizations that share your goals and at the height of democracy provides consensus to make decisions to ensure your group is working in harmony towards a common goal and a taking a united action. Those types of grassroots and building from the grassroots – from the bottom – up and organizing mass resistance to the horrible attacks on our future that we really need to engage in. In America people are in this – even though it's very clear that the United States is advocating nuking Iran and the crisis that would be caused by that would be catastrophic – even the activists in the United States are kind of stunned by the magnitude of the crisis and are almost immobilized by it. So it really is up to us to counter that fear and try to move people forward, to ask them to get out on the streets, to do things like marches and blockades and direct actions and so on and at the same time starting to set up our own safety nets. We showed with Katrina that it was really the activists, the anarchists and the people who were working with Food Not Bombs that has become the safety net for America . While that has been ignored by the mainstream corporate media completely the people that were fed all know that was through Food Not Bombs. I get calls every day and I can actually help people get food and they actually get food and they are amazed that we didn't say to them “Oh, here's another phone number” like they have been getting all along but actually we were the last place they had to call because they ended up getting help.