Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Food Not Bombs with Keith McHenry
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Feeding people sounds simple until you do it in public, for free, every week, with the explicit message that communities deserve food and care more than war budgets. I’m joined by Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs, the global mutual aid movement that has shared free vegetarian and vegan meals in thousands of cities since 1980. Keith walks me through the unlikely chain of moments that shaped him, from a childhood framed by the U.S. military and the National Park Service to discovering civil disobedience and committing to a life of nonviolent direct action.
We dig into the real origin story: recovered produce, public housing neighbors, and the stark contrast of hunger beside nuclear weapons research. From bake-sale protest theater to “soup line” actions that drew attention to poverty, Food Not Bombs became a repeatable model for grassroots community organizing. Keith also recounts arrests in San Francisco for serving food “without a permit,” the public backlash that followed, and what he later learned through FOIA records about federal surveillance and being treated as a national security threat.
Most importantly, we break down why this works as a decentralized movement: three clear principles, no hierarchy, consensus decision-making, and a task-based structure that welcomes people across politics and faiths. Keith shares details on his memoir Soup Street (released May 1, 2026) and how to find a local chapter or start one if your city doesn’t have it. Subscribe, share this with a friend who cares about mutual aid, and leave a review so more people can find the tools to build community power.
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Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_01Well, hello and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we have us a very special guest. His name is Keith McHenry, and he's the co-founder of Food Not Bombs, the global grassroots movement that has shared free vegetarian meals as a protest against war and poverty in thousands of cities since 1980. His new memoir, Soup Street, tells the story of that movement and the extraordinary life behind it, from a free roaming boyhood in America's national parks to hundreds of arrests and a lifetime spent feeding the hungry. He's also the author of Hungry for Peace and co-author of the 2015 edition of the Anarchist Cookbook. Oh, interesting. And Keith, welcome to the show. I guess uh you do have quite an interesting uh background.
Rewriting The Anarchist Cookbook
SPEAKER_01I I have an old copy. Geez, it must be from the early 80s of the Anarchist Cookbook.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you know, my friend Chaz, my who runs C Sharp Press, he and I decided we would rewrite the Anarchist Cookbook because we were seeing Food Not Bombs activists being framed by the FBI using William Powell's book. Got it. And they would circle the uh C5 on there. And then also people were what thought they were buying my earlier book, Hungry for Peace, and they'd open it up because they knew I was an anarchist, so they open it up and where's the vegan and vegetarian recipes in here? We don't see anything, it's just how to make a bomb or LSD or something. Right, right. And you know, after so then after the uh the Cleveland Food Not Bombs kids ended up getting sentenced to 10 years in prison using the anarchist cookbook, I wrote William Powell before he passed away and said, Hey, look, it I'm gonna rewrite your book, and I want to use your denunciation of your book as the uh forward to my book, and he was cool with that.
SPEAKER_01Oh, nice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so anyway, that's uh how that came about. And I and I have to say, there's not been one case I think of anybody being framed by the FBI using the uh anarchist cookbook since that book came out. So if nothing else, we've kept a lot of people out of prison.
SPEAKER_01So I love that, that's for sure. Yeah, so you've got quite a story, and you know, we've got about a half an hour to tell it, but I I want to forward this by saying a lot of my guests come back a second time or more to continue their story. So if we find ourselves, you know, touching on a lot of things that we could go deeper on, I'm gonna make that invitation to you right off the bat. Beautiful. Tell me about you know how how you came into this. I'm a bit of an activist myself, and I've been locked up for things that I shouldn't have been, and maybe not quite as lifetime dedicated to you for the same reasons, but I think we walked down some similar paths. How is it that you came to find this place?
Childhood Roots Of Activism
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, as a child, uh my I had like a yin-yang grandfathers. One grandfather flew uh B-29s at 30,000 feet and firebomb Tokyo in uh the world's most deadly bombing campaign, Operation Meeting House. That was my mother's father. And so I he I you know I would watch him argue with you know the Secretary of Defense McNamare and his best friend Curtis LeMay over the phone about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi to send a message to the communists. Then my other grandfather, my dad's father, he was a medic in World War I in the trenches in Belgium, and then he became a uh National Park Ranger. And so when I my my father became a ranger, I'm third generation park service. I was a ranger for back in the 70s. And and so he my grandfather would take the family out to the Hopi land to visit his friends as he were he had had an on his way to be the first junior park ranger at the Grand Canyon in the Great Depression, he crashed and he was found by some Hopi farmers. It took him to Old Arribe, the oldest continually inhabited village in the United States, and he convalesced there. And so he would take us out there to see the snake dances, and this was all before the Peabody Cole started, you know, strip mining Black Mesa, and before the, you know, we I drove around in what's now flooded by Lake Pow before it was flooded. And it was just such a magical, beautiful, spiritual place that when I saw the corporations ravage it and high tension power lines, you know, race through the desert along US 89 and so on, I was so upset I decided I would just dedicate my life to doing whatever it took to dismantle a political and economic system that would allow such a thing to happen. And then my but my father also gave me a copy of Walden when I was in the fifth grade. I read on on the duties of civil disobedience. And I'd been a communist for one year in the fourth grade because I loved spaceflight. And my best friend Gerald Flanagan was uh into uh in into the stars. He actually uh now that's what he does. All right. But so then, but then when I read uh Walden, I go, okay, I understand, you know, now I'm going to uh be an anarchist. So that's when I became an anarchist in the fifth grade, and I've been sticking through that since then. But then then when I was uh also around the same time that I dedicated my life to changing society to confront capitalism, I also bought a bunch of fertilized eggs for my mom from burpees. But I was since I was 16, I didn't really think about what it meant to have sexed eggs. And so I saved five dollars and I got unsexed fertile eggs, ended up with 25 roosters and 20 years. So then I my dad said, Look at you know, these roosters are gonna get old, and then if you ever do something that insane, what happens is you get uh 25 featherless hens and uh a bunch of mad, crazy roosters. Yeah, my dad said, Let's uh start killing the uh the roosters become before they get too tough to eat. And uh it was that first night when I killed uh a rickety chicken, which was the hen who had a deformed leg. What a horrible thing that we chose her to be the first dead. It kind of uh you know brings you back to uh Nazi Germany type of and then I and then I killed the uh the six roosters, and the whole barnyard was flipping out, and my mom's goats are freaking out and everything. So I that's when I became vegan. We called it vegetarian at the time. And so when, you know, so then I, you know, by accident, I ended up going to uh Boston University studying painting and sculpture.
The Moment Food Not Bombs Began
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01And in the morning, yourself into that, huh?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so uh yeah, it was just a conversation I was having with uh a coworker of my father's one day when I was waiting to speak to my father in his office. And he goes, Oh, you know, what's your plan, son? What are you gonna do when you grow up? You know, and I go, I don't know. I'm I've been liking painting and drawing, and and uh I was selling pictures of yachts at Fire Island when I was a maintenance uh sign painter for the Park Service down there. And so then I uh ended up going to BU. And that was very transformative. So one of the things I did was I was a produce worker in the morning because I could get had to have the groceries set up at the commercial store I was working at, Bread and Circus in Central Square, Cambridge. And so I'd take the produce to the public housing a few blocks away on my way to class. And so one day the women that were collecting the food from me were saying, Hey, they finally completed that brand new building across the street. It turns out it's a lab to build nuclear weapons. And so I go, Wow, man, you guys are desperate for food complaining about housing authority not fixing up your buildings and stuff, yet they got a brand new giant building right across the street from you to design nuclear weapons. That's where the name Food Not Bombs came from.
SPEAKER_01Got it. All right, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So then I um so then I I was started well at Boss University. I took American history from Howard Zinn. Okay, and he wrote a People's History of the United States. So I started, he talked to Seabrook, New New Hampshire, of the protests up there. So I started going to him. And then on May 24th, 1980, a friend of mine, Brian Figenbaum, was arrested, and we had to bail him out. You know, we're trying to bail him out because it was pretty serious charges, and it was only because his name was he was identifiable, because back in those days we all used the name Alexander Berkman or Emma Goldman when arrested, because way to really prove who you were, not like now. So we uh we got some found somebody with some money, bailed them out, and on the way home, we go, why don't we uh do bake sales to pay the guy back? Well, we start doing that, we don't really make any money, but we had an old that old van, Sue Eaton, who's another co-founder of Foodan Bomb's van. And so we started a company called Smooth Move, and we were moving a family, and they had a poster that said, Wouldn't it be a beautiful day if the schools had all the money they needed? And the Air Force had to hold a bake cell to buy a bomber. That uh light bulb went off, and so we bought some military uniforms at the Central Square Army Navy surplus, mounted the poster on cardboard, and we started trying to buy a bomber with our bake goods at Harvard Square and the Boston Commons, and it just totally uh took off because then we uh also when we were moving, we moved the uh New England Free Press and we they had overprints, and there was a lot of really great you know radical literature that they were donating to us for free. So we set up a literature table with their free literature, baked goods, and then we thought, well, this is working so good because regular, you know, it's hard to get the attention of people about anything. And then we're we're vegan. It's actually was called vegetarian at the time. So people thought were to look at us and go, Wow, are you Hindu or what's going on? We met a well, you know, a young man with a bright red beard that's like a vegan. So anyway, it just created this amazing energy. So then we decided why don't we do a soupon like in the Great Depression, and we'll get our friends to all dress up like hobos, and we'll set up in front of the stockholders' meeting of the Bank of Boston because the bank was financing Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, and the board of directors were also the heads of uh nuclear weapons uh companies. So we the night before we made all this soup and we're like, oh no, we didn't get enough friends to dress up as hobos, it won't look like a soup line, it'll have no emotional impact to the passers by. So I went to the Pine Street Inn shelter and gave a little speech at about midnight. And the the guys they're like, Oh, this is cool, protest like the 60s, and then they came and to the meal, and people were shocked. You know, one guy I remember came out of South Station and he's like with his coat and tie and everything, he's like, Whoa, Reagan's only been in office 30 days, and there's already soup lines in America. So, anyway, the guys tell us, like, you know, there's no food for homeless people, you should just do this every day. So that night when we're cleaning up all our equipment and stuff, we go, man, why don't we just give two weeks' notice at our jobs and just do this nonstop? So the guy, my boss at Bread and Circus was like cool with me picking up the discarded produce every day. I hooked up with white wave tofu to they would give us their discarded chunks of tofu, like one or two five-gallon buckets of uh of tofu. So we became famous for tofu cream pies, and we you know, we used tofu spread and all these things that we started making. And and so that's it, it was just like so much fun. Eventually, we had to go get jobs. I eventually became a sandwich maker at Passium's coffee house, which was a massive blessing because I got to meet people like you know, like Alan Ginsburg and hung out with Odetta, you know, Rambling Jack Elliott, all these famous folk musicians, and and uh but then you know, so Funa Bombs went along. It was like a you know, we organized uh we built support for a big anti-war protest in June 12th, 1982, in in New York City and so on. And then in 1988, I moved to San Francisco and I decided to start a second Funa Bombs group, and I took notes on how I started that one.
Arrests In San Francisco And Fallout
SPEAKER_00And oddly enough, on the 15th of August, riot police came out of Golden Gate Park and arrested nine of us, including myself, for serving food without a permit. Turned out there was no permit to be had.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. But they can arrest you for not having one.
SPEAKER_00Right, correct. It was crazy. So, you know, but on Labor Day, about 2,000 people came out to because we were serving food every every Monday at the end of uh Hayton Stanion, the entrance to Golden Gate Park. On the 22nd of August, the very the second week, we marched. You know, people are so outraged by the original uh arrest, and there's a big photo in the San Francisco Chronicle of riot police guarding the food from the homeless. So we had this march down Haight Street, we set up again. The police arrest 24 people, but about three, four years ago, I found out in my in FOIA documents, Freedom of Information Act request documents, that the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force had observed the the arrest and declared us in a memo to the San Francisco Field Office a credible national security threat. And then that Thanksgiving, and that what's weird about that is there were 10 volunteers in Boston. There was a new group that had been called breadknot bombs, but we convinced them to change their name to Food Knot Bombs in Long Beach, California, and San Francisco Food Knot Bombs. So here we are, 30 young people that are now a national security threat by handing out free vegan meals. Wow. And we found out I was on a speaking tour in in 2009, and I watched a C-SPAN lecture by a State Department official, one of Obama's State Department officials, comparing the people serving the vegan meals in the park to to the uh Al-Qaeda, who's more dangerous? Whoa. And the conclusion was that the vegan meals were more dangerous because it would the people were friendly, local to their community, and could convince the American public that money should be diverted from military spending to health care, education, and other social services.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, how horrible.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I ended up seeing that again at my dad's house a few days later. Had I not seen it twice, I would have thought I just was like tired after the lecture. But I saw it a second time and I was like, wow, they actually are concerned about words, about ideas, not about bombs. So that you know, I kind of wish that I I'd gotten a clip of that at the time, but the FBI was totally tormenting me, and I was busy with what they were doing to me, and forgot to really try to get a copy of that video, which I really regret to this day.
SPEAKER_01But you think there's still a a clip out there somewhere, but yeah, it's hard to find.
SPEAKER_00I talked to C uh C-SPAN a bunch, and it turns out you had to know the name of the person speaking how they catalog it. Unfortunately, I always tuned in uh after he'd already started speaking. Man, so I never got the name, so I never could get the clip. But but it would be really valuable for I put that on foodnot bombs.net in a endorsement by the Obama administration that we're a national security threat. Maybe one of our listeners will track it down and get it to you. I hope so. That'd be beautiful. So anyway, the the uh I made a flyer called Seven Steps to Starting of Food Not Bombs when after we started getting arrested in San Francisco because people would I got a letter from England that said Food Not Bombs, San Francisco, California, USA. I got the letter, and and so people wanted to start these groups. So I made a flyer out of my notes called Seven Steps to Starting of Food Not Bombs. And I remember when I made the flyer, they had just invented the answering machine. And so I was like, and what and you know, get get a phone number and and an answering machine so you never miss a call for somebody who had to volunteer with your group. And and then I had then years later, I started communicating with Johannesburg South Africa Food Not Bombs through MySpace. So I go, Oh, and then you can even get a MySpace, and then eventually pretty funny how long Food Not Bombs has been happening that we span the invention of the answering to Twitter. That's kind of crazy. So yeah, it's been it's so now um we're in 1,000 cities at least. I just got an email this morning that they want uh me to post uh Helsinki food not bombs on the foodnot bombs.net web page that they've started sharing food there. And we have groups like in small cities like Victoria, Texas, and you know, we have a hundred groups in Indonesia, and they've been dealing with the earthquake most recently. We have we're in 50 cities in the Philippines. We're when the when the uh port explosion happened in Beirut, Food Not Bombs was the first on the scene to feed the people who lost their houses. Wow. So um so we this is all grassroots. It's all we're 100% volunteer, nice great staff, and what makes it the magic of food not
Three Principles Behind Global Growth
SPEAKER_00bombs? Why it can just happen all over the world with no infrastructure really is the fact that we it's simple. We have three principles the food is always free, vegan and vegetarian, and free to anyone, rich or poor, drunk or sober. Okay, that there's no headquarters, presidents, uh directors, and each chapter is autonomous and make decisions by consensus and encourages the people depending on our food to participate in the decision-making process, and that we're not a charity, that 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. So then we have like the so-called corporate identity of the of the purple fist holding a carrot, which gets morphed into uh fist holding, you know, wheat or or rice or corn cob or whatever, you know, like depending on what part of the world you're active in. And it's you know, immediately recognizable. And and so through those kind of, you know, also we we existed before the web. I started making a website, foodbombs.net, and it turned out the first year of the web. And I didn't know that until I came across a news article in the New York Times saying today's the 20th anniversary of the first uh image posted on the web. I'm like, oh my god, I posted my Foona Bombs logo on the web that same year, and had no idea. I assumed the web was already out there, and then I just was a Ludhe and had no idea it existed. But a 10-year-old son of uh my roommate showed me in about 10 minutes how to make a website, so I did. So it turned out it was super easy. I was really confused why it was so easy, and then uh, but it was, and so anyway, that uh that's the uh you know now we're like all all over the the world, and and first world gathering was in 1992 in San Francisco, and this was in we had learned that San Francisco had become the official city to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading uh the Americas. So we had read a little article about Native American people were gonna protest that, and so we decided to hold our first get gathering in October, you know, 10th and 11th in San Francisco, and then we fed the big protest that you know the next on the 12th of October, and then then we had another, and that's when we you know formally agreed to our three principles, and it was a world gathering because we actually had somebody from Canada come to the gathering. Yeah, made it officially world. I love it. Yeah, yeah. But we did have a Melbourne group by that time. All right. We had uh groups in in in Melbourne, Australia. We now we have Melbourne, Australia, and Melbourne, Florida. We had a group, we had groups in England and and you know, in Brixton, and we had groups in so we were really were world, but back then, you know, people couldn't fly. Like it was so expensive to fly across the world, and I don't think anybody would do that now anyway. But anyway, so when we did have the second world gathering in 95 during the anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, we did have people from all over the world come. And and we had well, that's when we started indie media in preparation for that. And we had already in 92 started another project called Homes Not Jails, where we're taking over abandoned buildings left empty by the savings and loan crisis. We had a pirate radio movement, we had 1.400 radio stations in North America, low watt radio stations. Then we had uh the really, really free market started up in in New Zealand at Christchurch New Zealand that spread across the world. So there's been all these spin off things like that as well, like you know, food not lawns, bikes not bombs. So it's you know, it's a basic. A DIY world. And in fact, that's what I call my little pro publishing company, DIY Press, and for my book Supstreet. And it describes some of these uh events. I wrote so many words though, it ended up becoming probably three books. I wrote 750,000 words from over the last 10 years, and I've participated in the initial writing class I took with author Nick Flynn, who wrote Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It became a movie called Bean Flynn, where his father is uh Robert De Niro is his father. And that was everybody quit the class on day one, so I got to have him for this writing workshop personally. It was great. And then it turned out uh the reason I took the workshop because in his uh in the announcement for the workshop, he said that his book surrounded events at the Pine Street Inn in Boston. And since I gave my first speech about food not bombs at the Pine Street Inn, I thought, well, this will be interesting. And it turned out we did a lot of we were having a parallel life in Boston at the same time, and I knew a lot of his events, like he put up crosses all in the Boston Commons with the names of all the people who died that year living outside. Well, I remember those crosses, and and you know, it's so interesting. And he actually dated a Funat Bombs volunteer during that time, so and then I took another class almost every week for eight or nine years from Andy and uh in Opening of the Mind. And and and he and that really helped, you know, to read your work to other students, you know, other people writing their books, it's a book completion workshop. And so that's how I came about having Soup Street. So and that would be really my fourth book. The first book's out of print, and that was uh Food Not Bombs How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community, but I replaced it with a much more detailed book called Hungry for Peace, and then I followed up with the Anarchist Cookbook, and now I have my first uh memoir, and I'm working on my second one currently, I which is tentatively called Always Free. And if you the last chapter of my book ends with that we are free. Um so I'm hope that this trillion.
SPEAKER_01I love that. Wow, you you uh deliver a lot of information very well, very quickly. I love that. That was a great unload. I am kind of blown away with your success of being able to accomplish all you have without all the bullshit of leadership drama. And you know, I I built a civil human rights nonprofit, and we tried to do a lot of the things you're talking about. This was more about people being locked up for nonviolent drug offenses, and you know, but it's all along a similar path, and the enemies of freedom are still the same. And I struggled because people were always needing a leader and they were always looking for somebody to, you know, to tell them what to do or or to tell them what not, you know, so that they could say f you, whatever it was. The idea of everybody getting together and just doing it, which is what I always wanted to do, just
Why Decentralized Organizing Works
SPEAKER_01was so difficult to happen. What do you think? How do you think you're able to pull that off so successfully? Like what do you what do you attribute the ability to bring that all together?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think part of it is having these three principles, which are easy to for anybody to follow. But the other thing is a task-based movement, right? So it's not only ideas. You you know, you basically you have to show up at some kitchen, cut a bunch of vegetables and and fruit, you know, bake some bread or something, and then take it out on the street and hand it out. So the the the so it naturally lends itself to being both reproduced and also the fact that there, you know, there's is no hierarchy. And I think that my part of it is my personality is I do not want to, you know, I grew up in the 60s. I saw the assassination of uh, you know, about the assassination of Mart Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and so on. So it was clear right from the start that we should not have a charismatic leader at all. And that because then then basically they could say I did some kind of ugly thing, like had sex with a with a dog, and therefore our whole movement is terrible and we shouldn't do it. So we we avoided that pitfall, but uh I think it it does help that it's task-oriented, and then also you know, a lot of people can resonate with with people you know needing food on the streets. You see homeless people out there, so it's easy to have empathy if you are an empathetic person. And so, and then also the fact that our our philosophy was always around uh, you know, as a philosophy of anarchism, even though you know we intentionally did not call ourselves an anarchist movement, because really you learn about the the most important things about anarchism is you know it's doing the you know, living as an anarchist, you know, doing the test. So we have like you know, fundamentalist Christians came out and uh risked arrest in Houston because they agreed with the idea of of freedom. So ideology was not so uh you know harsh that you had to have some kind of a purity test or something, yeah. And that that and that also really helps. So it's also amazing that you know, you know, Indonesia the the where we're active in Indonesia is almost exclusively in the Muslim areas of of the archipelago. And at the same time, you know, we have have you know Jewish activists and Palestinian activists working together in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00And so you it it it spans all kinds of uh, you know, we have people that are in Russia doing food not bombs, and then people that I mean we were doing it in Ukraine until uh the 2014 coup when it became too dangerous to for food not bombs kids to defeat gay people and people of color. So so anyway, so you know it does it it it it's very inclusive, it can be adapted to you know communities in Africa, it can be adapted to people in Latin America and you know anywhere in the world. So it's it's not dependent upon you having a certain faith or or a certain belief, other than that uh that you're humanitarian and you and you really want to you know end war and end poverty. And so that's another thing. Rather than being a charity, that I think that's key as well, because people are much more motivated to continue doing food opens because you're really trying to change society, as opposed to responding to the ever-growing number of hungry people in what seems to be, you know, as I noticed that groups start up that are not politically focused on on changing society. Not that we're, you know, we certainly are not backing political candidates or anything like that or parties, but but uh but the uh it it makes it so that you you're it's easier for you to remain more dedicated because you're really trying to you see the direct effect of handing out the food and talking to people. Yeah. Also you have this goal of improving the world. Whereas if you're just feeding the homeless and which is a really valuable thing to do, it's just not a lot of groups just stop because uh, you know, it's like, well, the line just comes every week.
SPEAKER_01It just never ends, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's we're not making any any headway. So I think those that combination of that we're not a charity and dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society is also a key of why we can be a global movement.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Well, I that invitation I made in the beginning, I I definitely want to follow up. There's so much more to talk about. Unfortunately, our listeners generally don't have much more of an attention span than a gnat. And although you're riveting, I know how people are. If I go real long, it just it isn't better on that note. But I would love to come back and continue this conversation. There's just so much to talk about with this. If you had one thought to leave our listeners with, what do you think that would be?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that we really can make a difference. It's not about having money or it's about simple
How To Volunteer And Find Chapters
SPEAKER_00ideas that can be transformative. And so and the main thing is that with food not bombs, the whole thing runs on volunteers. And and so that you you you know, people, you know, if you want to help make a difference in this way, you can just volunteer with food not bombs. Go to foodnot bombs.net. And I and so I think there's a lot of hope in that. I know right now, you know, with the wars going on and the you know, the economy teetering, it's a desperate situation. But you go to a food not bombs meal and it's like a party, and people are all to you know together, like all through COVID, we never stopped. In San Santa Cruz, we did it 365 days a year for three years. Nice. And we have live music at some of our meals, like every holiday we had live music that we powered with a solar system, and and it just was a joyous celebration at every meal. And and I think that you you can find a lot of hope in doing things like volunteering with your local Food Not Bombs or whatever other mutual aid or organization, it can you know really transform your life for the better. And I try to express that through Soup Street that uh the the pages of how I just you know you know the things that I experienced growing up that ultimately led me to starting Food Not Bombs and to sticking with Food Not Bombs for 46 years. So Soup Street, when was it released? It was released on May 1st, uh 2026.
SPEAKER_01Okay, and how how do our listeners find it?
SPEAKER_00So you I think now you can get it like at almost any like Amazon and stuff like that, but I prefer you buy it from foodnot bombs.net. And on the front page, you can just scroll past the you can sign up for an email, and then right below that is an image of the book, Soup Street, and then what's the difference between what I send you and what Amazon sends you is you get all my Substack flyers and and and how to start a Food Not Bombs and and uh how to avoid being uh how to deal with the police arresting you if you're starting if they're coming out to get you for feeding the homeless.
SPEAKER_01So nice, that's fantastic. I struggle to see how you avoid being a charismatic leader because you're pretty darn charismatic. But I I I love that you've accomplished what you have. I I'm very in alignment with your work. If somebody is listening to this and they're like, wow, I want to go find one of these meetings. How how do they go about that?
SPEAKER_00So if you go to foodnotbombs.net, there's a locations link at the top. Click on that locations tab, and then you can see where all the foodnot bombs chapters are. Now, if you find that the information is outdated on the city that you're trying to connect with, just uh email me menu at foodnot bombs.net, and I will search and see if it's been if there's new social media or new information about it. And then if that group is no longer active, then I can hook you up with how to start a Food Not Bombs chapter. So under volunteer, you have two tabs. One is what you would do if it ex a group already exists, some of the volunteer tasks. But if you don't have a group, you can click on the other tab, which is seven steps to starting a food bombs, and you can connect with me. I can send you like uh PDFs of flyers you can post in your community to help you get started. And and then as you get social media for your new chapter and for new details, then I'll post it on the map and replace whatever the outdated information is. Or if you're starting a brand new chapter like the people in Helsinki are doing, then I would just uh set up. I think Helsinki did exist years ago, so I'm kind of guess it stopped because I featured them in a in Hungry for Peace. So they must have taken a break or something. So anyway, so that's how you do it. Food not bothered.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm gonna look it up and see what's near me and uh maybe pop in and help some folks for a little while.
SPEAKER_00Great, thank you so much, Joe. That's beautiful.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, Keith, it's been a pleasure, and I I'd love to have you back to go deeper into this and maybe spend some time in your book. And you know, I'd love to get that to happen. Great, yeah. Send me an email and we'll put it together. I certainly will. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumvine, and I want to thank all of our listeners for making the show possible, and we will see you next time.
