Hooligonians

So last week Vancouver Food not Bombs had enough people to serve! And it was mostly new people? What happened? Not everybody left Vancouver... Also, someone was apparently being bossybossy. That is not the FNB way! Hopefully next week will go smooooootherly.

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FNB also happened in Halifax, where I was, and it was fun!

Thankfully, I actually found out where the cooking was happening this time (as their website is out of date and not super helpful, only the Sunday serving still happens as far as I know). I knew it was happening...somewhere...and people even told me where the cooking/serving happened, but I forgot, because I knew I wouldn't need to remember.

Why? Because of the Porch Crawl!

The Porch Crawl was an awesome party that went around like eight different locations (various people's houses), where there was drinking, dancing, games (giant chess!), tunnels, music, and more things I don't remember as the night went on. The last house it went to was also where FNB was cooking the next day. It was also where I fell asleep.

(By the way, you should totally organize a porch crawl, they are awesome fun.)

The next morning I got up, wandered off to find clean clothes/get over my hangover, and then returned to the FNB house, where I pealed and chopped things, washed dishes, and did some other stuff I don't remember. Yay food.

Then we walked over to the library, with someone pushing a bike and bike-cart for some of the bigger stuff, to serve.

We had! A salad (with a tahini sauce), a tofu scramble with lots of vegetables, apple sauce with a granola topping thing, stuffing (that's what we should have done with all the bread we always had!), plus bread and random vegetables. Yum yum. And I gave out some of my friend's vegan caramels (made with coconut milk).

There were also some random Christians or something when we got there giving out coffee and juice.

Not that many people came to the serving, it was mostly just people who lived at the house and their friends. Which is how I started doing FNB all those years ago. Still, you sometimes get people who are really appreciative of the food, and I think it's a good way to create community and meet other people, something that was harder to do at servings in Vancouver. And everyone served themselves! Hurray!

After the serving I went off to photocopy some zines (both my own and Sugar and Snails/Slugs and Spice) and give them to
The Anchor Archive zine library! Which is a pretty sweet place. There was lots of other FNB stuff there as well!

In addition to a zine about the history of FNB in Halifax, there was also the "Food Not Bombs Halifax Archive". A basket full of photographs, meeting minutes (!!!) and other stuff. Yes! They used to have meetings and discussions and stuff, wow. They don't any more though. I didn't really have that much time to look through them though, as I was busy looking at other stuff.

And! While I was in there, a girl came in and started talking to a guy who was volunteering there. They started talking about FNB, and it turned out that he was a guy who had lived at the house where FNB happened, and she was from Ottawa and talked about how people had tried to start FNB there this summer but it had fizzled out. So that's why I couldn't find it!

Woah, that was a lot of FNB for a day. Now I am in England and I have no idea when the next time I will be able to update this blog about something like that. We shall seeeeeeeee.

Sad news in Vancouver/Nova Scotia Farming

Over the last few weeks there haven't been many people showing up to the FNB servings in Vancouver. Sometimes there haven't even been enough people to do a serving. This sucks!

Hopefully things will start up again as a huge influx of people will start showing up and they can start having awesome servings again.

If you want to stay up to date on what's going on with Vancouver Food Not Bombs, you can subscribe to the mailing list.

The mailing list will also let you know about other servings you can participate in if you cannot make it on Saturday's.

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In other news, my trans-Canada trip has brought me to Nova Scotia. I didn't get to go to any FNB servings in the last week, as I was visiting my friend's farm. That was a lot of fun, and we harvested melons, pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, onions, cucumbers, beans, and other things I don't remember. They were delicious!

I'm back in Halifax now, so I should be checking out the serving on Sunday!

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I'm continuing to give out copies of the Sugar and Slugs/Snails and Spice (the Vancouver FNB cooking zine) wherever I go. I've made the banana cupcake recipe from the zine a couple of times and people really like it! You should try making it for some friends.

I'm going to drop some zines off at the Anchor Archive Zine Library here in Halifax. My friend Alex Wrekk, who I met at the Portland Zine Symposium a few months ago, is going to be their zinester in residence next month.

Wishes it had been "food not wine" on Friday night

So, Montreal. Montreal has to have an active FNB right? Right? Well, I dunno.

I found two different days/times in two different places for when FNB servings happened in Montreal. The first one was on Saturday. But I was too hungover to get to it. Yes, indeed. Stupid alcohol. If it was Vancouver I would have gotten out to it, but since I didn't know where it was I just did nothing all day. Bah.

Today! Sunday! I go to the place. I wait around. Nobody shows up. I guess that zine thing had wrong/outdated information.

But! However! All was not lost on my trip to Montreal. I did indeed participate in a different free vegetarian food organization. The People's Potato is a group at Concordia that serves vegetarian lunches to upwards of 500 (!!!) people a day, Monday to Friday at Concordia.

Myself and a friend went and checked it out on Thursday and Friday and it is pretty awesome! They encourage people to bring their own dishes, but they also supply them for people that don't have any. And they serve a lot of food. Every day they have a soup, a stew, a grain, and a salad (sadly, no dessert, as they don't use sugar?). And it's different every day. I had amaranth on Friday. I've never had that before. I barely know how to spell it.

The People's Potato actually employs people to cook! They're able to do that because every student pays them a little bit of money in addition to their tuition. The money also helps pay for all the food that people make. Something to strive towards for everyone who's in university now.

In addition to eating the (yummy) food they gave out, I also helped wash dishes both days (as my friend had classes/meetings to go to, and I had nothing better to do). I washed lots of dishes, met some nice people, ate seconds, and gave them a copy of the Van FNB cooking zine.

I also gave a copy of the zine to an anarchist bookstore in Montreal. So if you desperately want a copy and are in the area, they said they were going to photocopy some.

Kitchen(er) Helpers Part Deux

After last week's failure of cooking with FNB I was totally pumped to do it this week. I was staying at the house of people who participated in it! Surely it would happen!

But it didn't.

Lets write some background first. Several months ago some friends of a friend came to Vancouver, helped out with FNB there, and slept on my floor for several days.

Since I was in Ontario (and killing time to some extent), I figured I should go see these people and meet my friend who I had never met before (penpal!). I got there just in time for the going away party of two of the people who'd crashed at my place, and it was good to see them again before they left for Germany. It was also good to see my other friends and meet lots of other people.

Later in the week I made the banana (cup)cake recipe from the Sugar and Snails (the dessert half of the FNB cooking zine) and everyone loved them. Hurray!

However, when saturday rolled around, it didn't seem as though anyone was going to be able to do FNB. Several of the people I was staying with were working, and nobody had a vehicle for moving foods from donation site to cooking place to serving place (Vancouver has it so easy with all of these things within just a few blocks of each other). So, unfortunately it didn't happen. Apparently some people took some food stuff and just gave it out without cooking it or whatever, which is good, but not awesome. Hopefully next week, after school has started again, will be better for them (and also Vancouver, where, based on the listserv, nobody was able to go to the serving this week. I hope it went well!).