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Our Local History

By Yutaka, Serena and more current history by our collective memory...

Calgary Food Not Bombs (FNB) had its origin in the political all-ages punk rock scene in late 1995, early 1996. Youth boredom and rebellion turned to anger and frustration at tangible sources of outrage - sexism, animal suffering, poverty and white supremacy. Edmonton punk rockers had recently formed a chapter of Food Not Bombs, and the idea that we could do something constructive to combat poverty propelled some members of a local all ages promoters collective (C.H.U.M.P.S.) to call a meeting. While many punks were content with mixing it up on the dance floor, a group of mostly young women pushed people active in the scene to consider real rebellion. We met at the University of Calgary for months, discussing how to get food donations and endlessly going over scenarios of being attacked by the police. A punk rock benefit show at Carpenter's Union Hall raised over 700 dollars, allowing us to buy the supplies needed to cook the meals. After eventually securing food donations from a Safeway store, a bagel shop, and Community Natural Foods, we were ready to begin our public servings.

We used our parents’ cars to do food pickups on Fridays and Saturdays, cooked in the morning, and served every Saturday at 2pm at Olympic Plaza from May to July 1996. We served between fifty and one hundred people. Our servings attracted the attention of the City of Calgary, who told us that we required a permit to serve food in the park. When we applied for the permit, our application was rejected because the City doubted that we were a 'legitimate' organization. In reality, they wanted the poor and homeless out of sight for the upcoming Calgary Stampede and an International Rotarian Conference. We had already brought attention to the city’s homeless and faced the repression of the government that was supposed to care about its own citizens. We were angry about all the food that was thrown out across the city and the realization that capitalism is inherently wasteful - our stickers read "wasted food is preventable torture."

During this time, the homeless population in Calgary was growing, though not at its current rate. Charitable organizations serving the homeless were small and had a low public profile. Many of us saw ourselves as contributing to an increase of awareness of the problem of poverty in Calgary. We garnered media attention for refusing to stop serving food to the hungry despite the City's harassment, and because teenagers with dyed hair and piercings were doing something "constructive." That fall, members of the rave community organized the first Chunky Soup - a historic all-night-rave-punk show in September 1996 that managed to raise over $4000 for Food Not Bombs.

After several visits from the City and the Cops, we decided that we would not be intimidated into stopping, so we moved our servings to City Hall. In the summer of 1997 we decided to move to the Calgary Board of Education grounds on 6th Avenue. Some people felt that if we stayed at City Hall or Olympic Plaza, the harassment would prevent us from continuing to serve food to the hungry.

Over the next two years we cooked in various punk rock houses, eventually securing the use of the kitchen at the Calgary Multicultural Centre (the site of our future office). The relationship between the all-ages punk rock scene and Food Not Bombs continued to be strong. The majority of FNB members were active in the scene, as show promoters, members of bands, writers of zines, and regular show-goers. One example of this relationship was a joint punk rock show and presentation featuring the co-founder of Food Not Bombs - Keith McHenry - from San Francisco and two anti-World Bank/IMF activists from Spain in October of 1997.

By 1998, many original Food Not Bombs members had moved on to do other kinds of political activism, and those that remained in FNB became frustrated by the groups' limitations. Among the new FNB members was a reluctance to step up FNB politics, causing tension in the group and eventually a successful push to expand FNB Calgary's mandate.

Calgary Food Not Bombs began to participate in and organize increasingly confrontational political events. In August, Food Not Bombs organized a weekend of workshops named 'Cut Your Strings'. The gathering incorporated the Do-It-Yourself ethic of the punk rock/anarchist scene with workshops on feminism, body image, and racism. In December that year, US president Clinton bombed Iraq, and Food Not Bombs organized a demonstration outside of the US consulate to oppose the military aggression.

Food Not Bombs continued to do political work in 1999. FNB members did presentations in high schools about poverty in Calgary and wrote articles about our work in their school newspapers. The Calgary Downtown Association (a local business organization) began a campaign targeting panhandlers as lazy and undeserving of any sympathy or support, so FNB members spoke out in support of poor peoples’ right to ask others for help. In response to a growing movement of people across the country who were demanding an end to homelessness, Prime Minister Jean Chretien created a new 'Homeless Minister,' Claudette Bradshaw, who toured across Canada delivering empty promises. On July 5th, 1999, Calgary Food Not Bombs organized a delegation to attend her public open house, where we confronted her government's lack of action on the funding of affordable housing.

Beginning June 18th 1999, the Group of Seven (or G7) held a summit meeting in Koln, Germany. A call went out across the world for an International Day of Action Against Capitalism and Calgary Food Not Bombs responded. We held a video showing of 'Beyond McWorld' - a film exploring the movement against capitalist globalisation, and organized a demonstration targeting Shell and Chevron for their role in exploiting the people and environment of Nigeria. Our work against poverty continued, as we participated in a coalition effort in October for a national day of action for affordable housing, originated by the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee.

During these years, Calgary Food Not Bombs maintained our weekly servings as the core of our organization’s work. We faced many obstacles, from the sudden decision by Safeway to stop donating their unsold food, to harassment by the City and the Calgary Police Service, as well as internal disagreements, sexist dynamics and hierarchies, fluctuating membership and political differences. Still, FNB remained active and made a great contribution to Calgary's sparse political landscape. While at times Food Not Bombs servings seemed inconsequential and strategically ridiculous, it transformed dozens of youth into committed radical activists. A group of marginalized youth realized that they were not the only marginalized community in town, and created a group that challenged injustice without government funding, agency support, adult approval, handholding by teachers, or mandatory community service hours.

In 1999 and 2000, FNB went through a state of flux. We lost our kitchen space in the Multicultural Centre and disagreements over the extent of FNB’s political nature caused tension within the group. However, FNB volunteers helped a broad coalition of groups to organise a series of demonstrations against the World Petroleum Congress, which held its meetings in Calgary in June 2000. These demonstrations, which brought out roughly 3,000 people, proved the city’s largest demonstrations in living memory, and the commitment of many FNB volunteers helped get them off the ground.

Food Not Bombs itself was also being rebuilt at this point, with a core group continuing the weekly servings and attracting new volunteers. Two benefit concerts for Food Not Bombs raised the group’s profile and provided it with money for supplies, literature and various other publications designed to raise awareness about the rising poverty in Calgary. The group secured a church kitchen and new volunteers began to swell the group’s ranks, carrying it through to the winter of 2001-2002.

Over the first few months of 2002, the group began to go through a shift. After nearly two years of standing back from most of the city’s political activity, Food Not Bombs began to get involved in the upcoming G8 Summit. With the prospect of thousands of activists converging in Calgary to protest the G8, anti-G8 organisers called for help from the community. Food Not Bombs answered, and began to work with various groups to plan the logistics of feeding the huge number of people expected in the city around the G8. For the week of G8 in late June, Food Not Bombs operated a kitchen in Bridgeland and served food twice a day, feeding thousands of demonstrators and members of the public. We also helped stage the Peoples’ Picnic, a mass picnic and concert in Riley Park on J26, the main day of G8 protests.

Coming out of the G8, FNB began working closely with the activist community, which was suddenly growing at a fast pace. We served food at numerous events in the activist community, including a community forum on future networking between activists in Calgary. We also began to work closely with the Alberta Coalition Against Poverty (A.C.A.P.), an organisation of anti-poverty activists and homeless Calgarians. FNB helped organise a Sleep-In in Memorial Park in September 2002, during which hundreds of people spent the night in Memorial Park, some sleeping, and some holding an all-night vigil for the homeless in Calgary who had died on the streets over the past year. The Sleep-In gathered significant media attention and helped prompt action from community members and local politicians on the problems facing the city’s homeless population. Over the following months, we worked with A.C.A.P. as they staged several more actions and rallies, including their Party for the Homeless, a roast for Ralph Klein, and a demonstration to raise the minimum wage.

That autumn, Food Not Bombs moved into a new kitchen at Truth Axis, the city’s best-known punk rock house. Over the following winter, we continued serving every week. At C.U.P.S., where we temporarily moved our servings inside during the coldest weeks, it was clear to see that the city’s homeless population was growing at a fast pace. The building’s front room was often filled with nearly 200 of the city’s homeless, and this says nothing of the larger shelters, or the hundreds every night who can’t get a bed in a shelter and have to spend the night on the streets. Over that winter, George Bush began to build up a military force to attack Iraq, and Food Not Bombs actively supported the early demonstrations in September and October.

By December, many of us were involved in organising anti-war efforts and eventually helped to create Peace Calgary, the anti-war coalition of a half-dozen groups and scores of individuals that organised most of the city’s anti-war actions in the following months. Food Not Bombs held a serving at the January anti-war protest and helped to organise the huge demonstrations of February 15th and March 22nd, both of which were recorded as among the largest protests in the city’s history. Food Not Bombs also supplied food to the 24-Hour Vigil for Peace, which spent thirty days encamped in Olympic Plaza during the war, and many FNBers spend numerous nights at the Vigil. FNB volunteers worked closely with other groups and individuals to plan the J26 Reclaim the Streets, a night march and street party held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the G8 and reclaim public space. Part of this involved protesting the City Park’s By-law – the same law that had been used by the police to try and prevent Food Not Bombs from serving, years before.

In the summer of 2003, we added a Wednesday serving and began to collect unsold produce from a large local farmers’ market. We also helped harvest food for Food Not Lawns, a group that had converted unused space (including it’s members’ lawns) into community gardens, which donated much of the food to us. With plenty of food and more frequent servings, FNB began meeting the increased demand for food. That summer, the police decided to crack down on drug dealers and homeless drug users in Olympic Plaza, and we intervened often to get the badge numbers of arresting officers and acted as witnesses to one particularly violent arrest, during which police attacked a homeless man who was in the way of their operations. Around this time, we also became involved in the case of Maggie Pompeo, a mother of four who challenged the Klein government’s electricity deregulation policies and spent two weeks without power, forced to choose between buying food and paying the electricity bill.

In the autumn, we began the Community Food Project, an attempt to reach the thousands of people living in Calgary’s lower-income neighbourhoods, often out of the public eye. We began by talking to people in Victoria Park, a low-income urban neighbourhood, and dropping off leaflets asking for interest in the project. We then began to deliver food to the households that had asked for it, on a weekly basis. This new project has so far been successful, and we hope to expand it to other neighbourhoods in the coming months.

Over the years that Food Not Bombs Calgary has existed, much has changed in the city. Today, more than 100,000 Calgarians live beneath the poverty line, and every day, tens of thousands of them go hungry. It is estimated that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 homeless Calgarians, who live on the streets or in the downtown shelters. On top of these "visible" homeless people, there are an estimated 8,000 more who live in smaller shelters, move from place to place, or are forced out of their homes and have to live with relatives or friends for months at a time. These numbers are all much higher than they were just a few years ago. However, Food Not Bombs has helped to bring these problems to the public’s attention, and the city is slowly rising to address these issues. At one point, Food Not Bombs was the city’s only radical anti-poverty, anti-war group, but Calgary now has a healthy activist community with several groups that have grown out of Food Not Bombs, or were founded in part by FNB volunteers. After years of being harassed by police and the city, Food Not Bombs seems to have finally become accepted by them. Despite our interventions in the police arrests at Olympic Plaza this past summer, the police largely left us alone. The city’s traditional charities have begun to cooperate with us, and even the city parks officials who maintain Olympic Plaza have helped us out by spreading the word about our servings. It seems that after years of work, Food Not Bombs has accomplished many of its objectives and become a respected organisation. However, with the rising population of poor and homeless, there is still much more work to be done, and Food Not Bombs still has an important role to play in the activist community that we helped to build. We still have a lot of work to do on the way to a more equal and just city, and world.