State Fights Free Food
By Keith McHenry
The State of New Mexico issued a citation to Food Not Bombs on June 1,2013 while our volunteers were preparing to share free vegan meals and literature with the public. Government interference with the sharing of food and ideas should never happen in our community. Defense of the right to use public space to express our desires and ideas is at the heart of many of the current struggles around the world today from Turkey and Egypt to Occupy Wall Street.
Government permission to share food and speak out for our rights should not be required in a free country. The excuse of food safety is bogus. After 33 years of sharing free vegan meals with the hungry first in Boston and now in over 1,000 cities world wide there has not been one report of illness. No one in our seven years of sharing organic vegan meals at the Plaza has anyone every complained of illness. Food Safety and sanitation can not really be the reason we were issued a citation.
If asked I am sure New Mexico Environmental Health officials will agree that the complaint they were responding to had nothing to to with food safety. It would be interesting to learn who complained and why since we have been welcomed by the Plaza merchants and have provided food for them and the wider community every week for years with a number of shop owners contributing food from their restaurants. Oddly the inspector did not even inspect the food and had to cross out the word “sell” and write “serve” above it because just is the case in every state it is not necessary to have a permit to give away free things to your neighbor.
It is important to defend the right to share food and ideas particularly now with the government considering making huge cuts in the food stamp program and as billions are being redirected to fight the never ending war on “terrorism.”
Some have suggested that our opposition to Monsanto may have inspired the visit by state officials. A week before the citation Food Not Bombs groups from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Australia posted reports about their having provided meals at their local March Against Monsanto protests. Taos Food Not Bombs initiated our local march from the farmers market to our weekly GMO free meal at the Plaza. We spoke with the Taos Police about the march and all went without a hitch. In our work to end hunger it is essential to stop Monsanto’s control of seeds and their ban on seed saving which is a leading cause of starvation.
In a report also published the same week as the state was issuing a citation against Food Not Bombs and congress was proposing huge cuts in food stamps the U.S. census claimed that in 2010, 46.9 million people in the United States lived in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007 — “the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty . This is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty rates have been published” They also reported that “In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States.”
Mean while America’s hungriest state New Mexico is also home to the world’s largest stock pile of nuclear weapons. As we are struggling to feed our people the Federal government is funding the design and production of their new Reliable Nuclear Arsenal at Los Alamos. If that were not bad enough Cannon Air Base flies million dollar drones over our state and is considering using Taos County as a practice area for the use of the MV-22 Osprey in future invasions. We already see this monstrous over budget weapons system flying down the Rio Grande Gorge. We also learned that the government is collecting data about every phone call in Taos and that one of our visits to the web, our emails and other electronic communication are also being collected, stored and analyzed while locally our taxes are being used for a new command center for some unknown agencies to use to command some undefined staff for some unclear reason.
Taos was not the only community where our volunteers were confronted. Officials in Seattle, Washington and Gainesville Florida also interfered with the efforts of Food Not Bombs that same week. After the occupy movement was driven from the streets nearly fifty cities including Philadelphia and Houston proposed the banning or limiting the sharing of food in public. They are still struggling to defend their rights.
After years seeking permission from the city of San Francisco to share food and literature at Golden Gate Park we learned that there was no legal grounds for the state to require us to have a permit. State laws showed that no permit is required to share gifts. It became clear that the authorities had no intention of issuing a permit because our message Food Not Bombs was considered a threat. A federal district judge ordered the city to end their efforts yet the harassment continued. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted twice to say it was legal to share food and literature at United Nations Plaza yet police beat and arrested us nearly every day for years. We were also the subject of a National Guard coarse in the fall of 1988 where reservists were told that Food Not Bombs was “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.” Yes in 1988 well before the 9/11 attack. As we came to discover in a U.S. State Department lecture aired several times on C-Span in April of 2009 federal officials considered us more dangerous than Al-Qaeda because our meals and message could inspire the public to consider that we may be more secure if the money spent on the military was redirected to social needs like education and healthcare.
The complaint issued to our volunteers in Taos could be an innocent mistake made by the owners of a new food cart in the plaza or it could be part of a larger pattern that we are experiencing across the United States. Either way if we let the state require permits for the sharing of free items and ideas in this atmosphere it wont be long before we will be required to have permission to help people with flat tires or their math homework. I hope to see you this Saturday from noon to 2:00 PM at the Taos Plaza.
www.foodnotbombs.net