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Keith McHenry is an American activist, best known as the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. [1] He also co-founded Homes Not Jails and contributed to the founding of the Independent Media Center.
McHenry was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, in 1957, where his father was stationed in the US army. [2] The family then moved to Logan, Utah, while his father earned his master's degree at Utah State. Keith's father became a park ranger in the National Park Service and the family lived at a number of parks including Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Shenandoah and Everglades.
Starting in 1975, McHenry attended Boston University, studying painting [2] and sculpture. He took a class in American history with Howard Zinn. Keith and his work with Food Not Bombs is mentioned in Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Zinn wrote the introduction to McHenry's first two books.
While at Boston University, McHenry became active with Clamshell Alliance, making several trips to Seabrook, New Hampshire to protest nuclear power. He began to organize actions in cities on the east coast of the United States against nuclear arms and war, while promoting alternative energy and organic gardening. In 1980, he and others started the first Food Not Bombs chapter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The group provided entertainment and vegetarian meals in Harvard Square and the Boston Common after making deliveries of uncooked food to most of the housing projects and shelters in the area.
In 1988, McHenry moved to San Francisco, where he started a second Food Not Bombs group. He was one of nine volunteers arrested for sharing food and literature at Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988. [1] In the following years, Keith was arrested over 100 times for serving free food in city parks; he spent over 500 nights in jail. He faced 25 years to life in prison under the California Three Strikes Law, but in 1995, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission brought about his release. [3]
He has started Food Not Bombs groups around the world. He gave up his graphics design career to pursue FNB. [4] In 2005, he helped coordinate food relief as well as shipments of clothing and other supplies to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. In 2012, he founded the Food Not Bombs Free Skool, which teaches a summer course covering social issues, community organizing, nonviolent social change, cultural events, and sustainable agriculture.
In 2017, McHenry went on Kevin Barrett's podcast Truth Jihad to discuss the September 11 attacks as a false flag event. [5]
In 2021, McHenry came out as an anti-COVID vaccination activist, publishing an anti-vaccination post that said, in part, "(...) I first wrote a letter on this subject when I received an invitation to attend a meeting forming a new progressive alliance. To participate you had to provide proof of a vaccination or a negative COVID test. I wrote to invite the progressive community to stand in solidarity with the working class by refusing to meet in facilities that demand proof of participation in the vaccine experiments." [6]
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A fast-food restaurant, also known as a quick-service restaurant (QSR) within the industry, is a specific type of restaurant that serves fast-food cuisine and has minimal table service. The food served in fast-food restaurants is typically part of a "meat-sweet diet", offered from a limited menu, cooked in bulk in advance and kept hot, finished and packaged to order, and usually available for take away, though seating may be provided. Fast-food restaurants are typically part of a restaurant chain or franchise operation that provides standardized ingredients and/or partially prepared foods and supplies to each restaurant through controlled supply channels. The term "fast food" was recognized in a dictionary by Merriam–Webster in 1951.
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Philip Francis Berrigan was an American peace activist and Catholic priest with the Josephites. He engaged in nonviolent, civil disobedience in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament and was often arrested.
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The International Solidarity Movement is a Palestinian-led movement focused on assisting the Palestinian cause in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. ISM is dedicated to the use of nonviolent protests and methods only. The organization calls on civilians from around the world to participate in acts of nonviolent protests against the Israeli military in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The ISM participates in the Free Gaza Movement.
Food Not Bombs (FNB) is a loose-knit group of independent collectives, sharing free, usually vegan and vegetarian food with others. The group believes that corporate and government priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance. To demonstrate this, FNB serves surplus food gathered from grocery stores, bakeries and markets which would otherwise go to waste, or occasionally has already been thrown away. The group exhibits a form of franchise activism.
A soup kitchen, food kitchen, or meal center is a place where food is offered to the hungry and homeless, usually for no cost, or sometimes at a below-market price. Frequently located in lower-income neighborhoods, soup kitchens are often staffed by volunteer organizations, such as church or community groups. Soup kitchens sometimes obtain food from a food bank for free or at a low price, because they are considered a charity, which makes it easier for them to feed the many people who require their services.
Clyde Kennard was an American Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In the 1950s, he attempted several times to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College to complete his undergraduate degree started at the University of Chicago. Although the United States Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the college rejected him. Kennard was among the thousands of local activists in the 1940s and 1950s who pressed for their rights.
Kids Against Hunger is a nonprofit organization owned by Richard Proudfit, up until his death on November 14, 2018. It was established with the mission to significantly reduce the number of hungry children in the United States and to feed starving children throughout the world. This is being achieved by getting volunteers involved, and by setting up food packaging satellites in the US, and through partnerships with humanitarian organizations worldwide – enabling Kids Against Hunger to deliver its specially formulated rice-soy casserole to starving children and their families in over 60 countries. The Kids Against Hunger network currently includes about 100 food packaging centers with the goal to establish 500 packaging centers in all 50 U.S. states.
The Royal Voluntary Service is a voluntary organisation concerned with helping people in need throughout England, Scotland and Wales. It was founded in 1938 by Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, as a British women's organisation to recruit women into the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) services to help in the event of War.
Project Bread's Walk for Hunger is the oldest continual pledge walk in the United States and the largest annual one-day fundraiser to alleviate local hunger in Massachusetts.
Marian Price, also known by her married name as Marian McGlinchey, is a former Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer.
The Pink Panther in: A Pink Christmas is a holiday-themed animated special, starring The Pink Panther. It first aired on ABC on December 7, 1978. A follow-up special, A Very Pink Christmas, was released in 2011.
One World Cafe was a nonprofit community kitchen, and predecessor to the One World Everybody Eats (OWEE) foundation based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Its motto was "a hand up, not a hand out." The community kitchen concept is a restaurant based on a gift economy, allowing patrons to "pay what they can" and serving all members of the community regardless of their ability to pay. The Cafe incorporated volunteer and common-effort aspects similar to those of a community garden. The organization's stated goal was to provide all who eat high quality, all natural, simple food and to ask patrons to give fairly in exchange so that all could partake. In 2012, the cafe would close as the owner chose to focus on helping other communities, replicating their One World Cafe model in their larger foundation.
The Charles Street Jail, also known as the Suffolk County Jail, is an infamous former jail located at 215 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. It is listed in the state and national Registers of Historic Places. The Liberty Hotel, as it is now known, has retained much of its historic structure, including the famed rotunda.
Stjepan Mesaroš was a Croatian-born American labor activist. After immigrating to the United States in 1920, he adopted the name Steve Nelson. He was one of nearly 3,000 American volunteers who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, where he served as a political commissar. For years, he was a leading functionary of the Communist Party, USA. He achieved public notoriety in the early 1950s when he was convicted and imprisoned under the Pennsylvania Sedition Act and the federal Smith Act. He is perhaps best remembered as the defendant in Pennsylvania v. Nelson, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1956 which invalidated state sedition laws.
Hollis Watkins was an American activist who was part of the Civil Rights Movement activities in the state of Mississippi during the 1960s. He became a member and organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961, was a county organizer for 1964's "Freedom Summer", and assisted the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation from their chairs at the 1964 Democratic Party national convention in Atlantic City. He founded Southern Echo, a group that gives support to other grass-roots organizations in Mississippi. He also was a founder of the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
La Soupe is a Cincinnati, Ohio, nonprofit organization that uses discarded food to produce meals and delivers them to other nonprofit agencies for distribution to people experiencing food insecurity.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 vaccine mandates have been enacted by numerous states and municipalities in the United States, and also by private entities. In September 2021, President Joe Biden announced that the federal government would take steps to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for certain entities under the authority of the federal government or federal agencies. Most federal mandates thus imposed were either overturned through litigation, or withdrawn by the administration, although a mandate on health care workers in institutions receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds was upheld. All federal mandates were lifted when the national emergency was declared to have ended in May 2023. A small number of states have gone in the opposite direction, through executive orders or legislation designed to limit vaccination mandates.
Keith McHenry/Food Not Bombs Archives at the University of Victoria Special Collections and University Archives
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