Synonyms
Antiwar food justice; Community kitchens; Community meals; Food movement; Food waste and politicized food rescue; Sharing food in public space
Introduction
Food Not Bombs is the umbrella name for a loose network of self-organizing food justice groups that began in Boston in 1980 and whose work is anti-hunger, antiwar, and pro animal rights. Currently the movement is made up of a decentralized network of 500 chapters in 60 countries (Food Not Bombs 2012). Food Not Bombs groups rescue food from various nodes in the food system including farms, restaurants, grocery stores, distributors, community-supported agriculture, and bakeries among many other places. Operating outside of the state, not-for- profit, and religious social service sector, Food Not Bombs food rescue efforts involve local connections with food businesses. These connections create mutually beneficial relationships whereby the businesses can reduce their food waste through regular donations. Once rescued, Food Not...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Butler, C. T., & McHenry, K. (2000). Food not bombs. Tucson: See Sharp Press.
Clines, F. (1993, September 26). Candidates attack the squeegee men. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/26/nyregion/candidates-attack-the-squeegee-men.html. Accessed 22 Mar 2013.
Coleman-Jensen, A., Nord, M., Andrews, M., & Carlson, S. (2011) Household food security in the United States in 2010. Retrieved from http://www.usda.gov. Accessed 31 Dec 2012.
Cornell, A. (2010). The movement for a new society: Consensus, prefiguration, and direct action. In D. Berger (Ed.), The hidden 1970s: Histories of radicalism (pp. 231–249). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Day, R. (2005). Gramsci is dead: Anarchist currents in the newest social movements. London: Pluto Press.
Enke, A. (2003). Taking over domestic space: The Battered women’s movement and public protest. In V. Gosse & R. Moser (Eds.), The world the sixties made: Politics and culture in recent America (pp. 162–190). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Epstein, B. (1991). Political protest and cultural revolution: Nonviolent direct action in the 1970s and 1980s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Feeding Resistance: Food Not Bombs Members Arrested in Orlando for Serving Meals Without a Permit. (2011). http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/24/feeding_resistance_food_not_bombs_members#transcript. Accessed 31 Dec 2012.
Food Not Bombs. (2012). Frequently asked questions. http://foodnotbombs.net/faq.html. Accessed 31 Dec 2012.
Gunders, D. (2012). Wasted: How America is losing up to 40 percent of its food from farm to fork to landfill. Retrieved from http://www.nrdc.org. Accessed 31 Dec 2012.
Herbert, S. (2005). The trapdoor of community. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(4), 850–865.
Heynen, N. (2009). Bending the bars of empire from every ghetto for survival: The Black Panther Party’s radical antihunger politics of social reproduction and scale. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(2), 406–422.
Heynen, N. (2010). Cooking up non-violent civil-disobedient direct action for the hungry: ‘Food Not Bombs’ and the resurgence of radical democracy in the US. Urban Studies, 47(6), 1225–1240.
Holtzman, B., Hughes, C., & Van Meter, K. (2007). Do it yourself… And the movement beyond capitalism. In E. Biddle, S. Shukaitis, & D. Graeber (Eds.), Constituent imagination (pp. 41–57). Oakland: AK Press.
Jacobson, S. (2011, June 2). Three arrested, accused of illegally feeding homeless. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved from http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/crime/os-homeless-feedings-arrests-20110601,0,7226362.story. Accessed 31 Dec 2012.
Katz, C. (1999). Excavating the hidden city of social reproduction: A commentary. City and Society Annual Review, 10, 37–46.
Kelling, G., & Wilson, J. (1982, March 1). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/?single_page=true. Accessed 5 Apr 2013.
Low, S., & Smith, N. (2006). The politics of public space. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. New York: The Guilford Press.
Mitchell, D., & Heynen, N. (2009). The geography of survival and the right to the city: Speculations on surveillance, legal innovation, and the criminalization of intervention. Urban Geography, 30(6), 611–632.
Parson, S. M. (2010). An ungovernable force? Food not bombs, homeless activism and politics in San Francisco, 1988–1995. Doctoral dissertation. Retrieved from Scholars’ Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11179. Accessed 5 Apr 2013.
Shepard, B. (2007). Bridging the praxis divide: From direct action to direct services and back again. In E. Biddle, S. Shukaitis, & D. Graeber (Eds.), Constituent imagination (pp. 180–198). Oakland: AK Press.
The National Coalition for the Homeless & The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2010). A place at the table: prohibitions on sharing food with people experiencing homelessness. Retrieved from http://www.nlchp.org. Accessed 12 Dec 2012.
Tracy, J. (1996). Direct action: Radical pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this entry
Cite this entry
Spataro, D. (2014). Food Not Bombs. In: Thompson, P.B., Kaplan, D.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0929-4_432
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0929-4_432
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0928-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0929-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law