Part One: Countercuisine: The Counterculture of the Diggers & Food Co-ops

In this reverse episode, author Wren Awry teaches Margaret about the 60s & 70s radicals who changed the way we relate to food in the US.

Sources:

Appetite for Change by Warren Belasco

The Theater is in the Street by Bradford D. Martin

“Digger Meets Panther” from Shaping San Francisco 

www.diggers.org

www.diggersdocs.org

"Remaking the Commons’: A History of Eating in Public" by Gaye Chan & Nandita Sharmain and “Notes on Utopian Failure in Commune Kitchens” by Madeline Lane-McKinley, both from the anthology Nourishing Resistance.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your
weekly reminder that people can do cool stuff when they're
cool people. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. I'm your host sort of.
Usually this time it's a reverse episode that I like
to call Ren explains things to me, eh eh, instead

(00:25):
of the book men explain things to me.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I mean, yeah, I'll take it. Yeah, I mean I
do like explaining things on occasion when I know about them.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Excellent. That's Reren ren or I who is the author
of Nourishing Resistance, which is a book available from PM Press,
And basically, Ren is the person that whenever I have
like food history related questions, is a very strange life
that I lead that this comes up regularly, that I
have food history related questions and I ask Gren. So
Ren has agreed to do a whole reverse episode for us.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hi Ren, Yes, And I should just mention I'm the
editor of Nourishing Resistance, not the author. Okay, just because
there's so many different contributors, I want to make sure
to highlight that. But yes, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah cool? So wait, I want to I have to
introduce everyone else first too, Yeah yeah cool? Okay, because
Sophie Sophie Lichterman, Hey is our uh producer? I forgot
your title for a moment, I don't have a title.
God King and our audio engineers Ian, everyone say Hi, Ian, Hi,

(01:28):
Ian Hienne, Hi, everybody, We're here in a surprise twist.
I really love this. Yeah, but bye bye bye. I
have a good recording.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
I'm honored to be here on the day that that
Ian makes a.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
And our theme music was written for us by an
woman and now Wren, I have no idea what this episode.
I have a vague idea because you you tell me
things that I'm not allowed to research, because I tell
other people when they come on what they're not allowed
to research, but I try not to give it away. Totally. Yeah,
I don't quite know what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Great love that so I was wondering Margaret and Sophie.
First off, a question when you think of revolutionary movements
and countercultures in like the nineteen sixties and seventies, what
comes to mind?

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Hippies?

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, hippies, Yeah, great answer.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Free love, black panthers.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yes, yeah, you're like naming a lot of things that
are going to be in this episode. Community community, yeah, totally.
So I'm glad I asked you all this question. Great start,
But when you think of these things, do you think
of food?

Speaker 4 (02:47):
I mean, I'm always thinking about food, but that's just me.
But to this specific question, I don't think the first
thing I thought of was food totally.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
But when you do think about food, like food of
the sixties and seventies, what comes to mind?

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Okay, Well, I I briefly covered because of a thing
you sent me on an episode. I briefly covered whole
wheat bread as relates to this, And I also think
of soup and those are it? And then like pretending
that drugs are food.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Hmmmm, totally, yeah, I think I think fondu.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
You know what fondu is not everything else is in
this episode, which I think actually probably has more to
do with the fact that Margaret and I talk about
history too much, so that like, even though you don't
know what this is about, you've kind of gotten a
little bit of a head start. But everything that you
said is going to make an appearance except for fondue.
So I'm gonna have to like really go back to
the drying board on.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
That well, reconvenience.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
I also don't know if I've ever had fondue, So
maybe I need to go like try it or something. Anyway,
this episode is going to be about what I would
like loosely call counter cuisine. Counter cuisine is what Warren Blasco,
who wrote a book on the subject called Appetite for Change,
calls the food of the hippie movement and counterculture of

(04:12):
the nineteen sixties and seventies. And we're going to focus
on food and the leftist and anarchistrans of the broader counterculture.
But it's still kind of going to be about hippies,
and it's a the two parter actually has a different
focus on each each side of the part. But we're
going to start by talking about the Diggers. Oh so,
I'm your response, Sophie made me think you had no.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
No, I just got excited.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
I want to make over the topic.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
I yeah, So I want to start with the San
Francisco the English. I'm pretty sure they no, I do. Yeah.
I did mention that you have done an episode on
the English Jiggers before and that people can go back
and listen to it. And then it's with John dar
Now from the Mountain Goats. But no, we're going to
talk about the San Francisco Diggers and the San Francisco Diggers,

(05:06):
they actually were inspired by the original Diggers, And just
in case listeners haven't heard that episode, the original Diggers
were seventeenth century English communalists. They occupied a hill outside
London and planted it with beans, carrots, and other veggies,
and they wrote these really radical pamphlets about how quote
unquote the earth should be a common treasury for all.

(05:27):
And the San Francisco Diggers named themselves after these original Diggers,
and they drew a lot of influence from them. I
should say that you could do like an entire episode
on the San Francisco Diggers. They did so much in
the three short years they existed. But as a food
history nerd, I mostly interested in their outsized impact on
food based mutual aid. So this segment is going to

(05:49):
focus on that. But I do want to start with
a little bit of background so we know, like who
the Diggers are and how they showed up on this scene.
So the Diggers were first and foremost a theater and
they were formed by members of the San Francisco Meme Troop,
which apparently is spelled like mime but pronounced like meme
and I don't.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Know, well, like mimetic right, No, I don't know how
use no eight memetic is spelled like meme, the internet thing.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
Yeah, I have no idea, but I've heard it pronounces
the San Francisco Meme Troop, which is interesting to me. Okay,
but they were but they were like mimean they Yeah,
they did other street theater as well.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Okay, they weren't just like putting like captions under photos
and then posting them up around places.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
I mean no, but they kind of were doing like
the nineteen sixties version of those sick Okay, cool, you know,
and the Diggers will too, Like they're all about like
thinking about how the message gets across. I admittedly don't
know as much about the Meme Troop as I do
about the Diggers, but from what I can tell, they
that is a through line in both of these projects. Okay,
So they were formed by members of the Meme Troop

(06:57):
in fall nineteen sixty six. The Troops started nineteen fifty nine.
It performed free political satire and it still exists actually
and continues to perform around California. Peter Coyote, one of
the founders of the Diggers, credits the troupe with introducing
him to a way of looking at the world and
analyzing it according to inherently Marxist principles. And he said

(07:19):
that this education was it wasn't necessarily doctor naire but
analysis class capital. Who owned what, who did what, who
worked for what? Okay? So, in the summer of nineteen
sixty six, members of the Meme Troop established an organization
working with others called the Artists Liberation Front. The ALF,

(07:39):
not to be confused with the ALF, opposed the established
art worlds and big art foundations, and they were planning
a street art fair and some future Diggers were involved
in these planning efforts, and while called the Digger contingent,
got really upset when other members of the ALF wanted

(07:59):
to let vendors sell things like food at these fairs.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh yeah, everything's free.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah. They were like everything should be free. Yeah. They
believed in a gift economy where everything should be given
away for free. And that was like the line in
the sand that they drew. So they split off. And
one of the first things they did, is Diggers, was
to circulate these mimeograph broadsides. And no one is entirely
sure what the first broadside was, but the Digger Archives

(08:28):
website argues that it was one called time to Forget,
and Time to Forget, Like many of their broadsides, is
pretty snarky and sarcastic. It starts with a list of
things that the reader should quote unquote forget, such as
forget the war and Vietnam flowers are lovely, and forget
police brutality. The cops are your friends. All sarcastic, of course.
Then in all caps it reads You're free to forget,

(08:50):
so forget follow the calm business tactics of the Psychedelic Shop,
the I Am Thou and all other marketeers of expanded
consciousness and dig yourself tech reality only for sex, only
to eat, and only to join the Artists Liberation Front
for your own.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Okay, so it was all basically like fuck sellout hippies
is where it comes from.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yes, yeah, yeah, So it starts with that as sort
of the root. Yeah, and I should mention here that
some of the Digger broadsides use what we might cultated language.
I'm not going to share any of it in this episode,
but it feels important to acknowledge, and it's also like
a broader thing you see within contraculture movements of the
sixties and seventies, where largely though not exclusively white, groups

(09:31):
like the Diggers would reclaim words in the service of
what they saw solidarity, but they weren't really like their
words to reclaim right. And there was plenty of misogyny
within these movements too. This is kind of my disclaimer section.
We'll talk more about misogyny later. It's something that'll come
up more in Part two when we're talking about food
co ops. Just a few things to be aware of.

(09:52):
And while this doesn't come up directly, there's also just
in general, a lot of cultural appropriation happening in the counterculture,
especially appropriation of religious practices from South and East Asia,
So that feels important to acknowledge too.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Well. Like the guy's name that you started with was
like something coyote, and was he a white guy or
was he indigenous?

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Like he was not? No, And yeah, and you see
that a lot of the people who started the Diggers
actually were like working class kids from New York City.
And I don't go into that too much because one
thing I really wanted to do is sort of destabilize
this idea of like figureheads around the Diggers because that
happens a lot, and it's just like the small handful
of men. So I mention a few of them, but

(10:32):
I don't talk about them. But that is where a
lot of them, yeah from ok so, yeah, and I
believe that was true of Peter Coyote as well, but
I would fact check me on that. So. So, around
the same time the Diggers started distributing these broadsides, a
police officer murdered Matthew Johnson, a black teenager in the
San Francisco neighborhood of Hunter's Point. This led to what's

(10:54):
now called the Hunter's Point Uprising, which included six days
of revolts, and Hunter's Point is often just decribed as
a forgotten uprising, but it did inspire two young radicals
to form what would become a very well known organization.
Any idea what that might be?

Speaker 2 (11:08):
This is the Black Panthers. Yep, yeah, the community college kids, right, totally.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah. So Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seal formed the
Black Panthers in October nineteen sixty six, partly in response
to the Hunter's Point Uprising pretty much immediately after it,
and the Panthers will come up again in this episode.
It's basically impossible to talk about nineteen sixties radical politics,
especially in the Bay Area, without mentioning them. But I
also know that you've done a whole episode on them before,

(11:36):
so listeners can go find that as well. And during
the Hunter's Point uprising, the Diggers performed puppet shows on
the street making fun of the National Guard, and they
also gave way free food.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
And they're making fun of the National Guard. I can't
remember if this is before or after the Kent stayed upright,
it must be before Kent still, yeah, but it's like, yeah,
they're making fun of armed people who are going to
shoot some people and their move in pretty soon, so
it's like, not a it's not nothing when you talk
about making fun of like the National Guard in the street.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
No, yeah, And I don't know more about this because
I found it as like one one thrower wayline in
one source. But they yeah, it wasn't nothing, for sure.
And while they technically began before Hunter's Point, a lot
of people cite this uprising is when the Diggers really
started to gain traction and really started to do the
work that they would become known for. So soon after

(12:27):
two Diggers, Billy Murcott and Emmitt Grogan started daily free
meals that they called feeds in the panhandle of Golden
Gate Park. They had both lost their sources of income
and they wanted access to food and figured other people
might too. It's always nice to have food. They went
to the produce market and got donations of chicken, turkey,
and leftover vegetables, but didn't have access to a kitchen

(12:49):
and they needed to find a place to cook the food,
so they went and stole two twenty gallon milk cans
from an industrial dairy and cooked a stew right there
in the panhandle. Hell yeah. They also created a flyer
to advertise this first feed, which included what's now perhaps
the most famous Digger slogan, which is it's free because
it's yours.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Okay, okay, Yes, I really like the idea of like, man,
we're hungry. I've got an idea, let's feed everyone by
getting donations. Like I love that, like can do attitude,
and I also love the like instead of it being
like other people are hungry, it was like, what are
we going to eat today? I know, let's start a movement.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Totally And yeah, it really came from them, you know,
not having a source of income and really wanting to
eat as well. Right, So it starts in this very
true mutual aid based moment, not like a yeah, not
this charity kind of model. So at one early feed,
some diggers jumped out of a fan and as they
distributed meat, produce, and bread, they yelled, food is the medium?

(13:54):
Does this phrase or mind you of anything? Uh?

Speaker 2 (13:59):
The medium is the mess? No, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Oh okay, yes it actually is that. Yeah, okay. So
it's an echo of Marshall mclewin's the medium is the message.
He was a Canadian media theorist who became really popular
within the counterculture, which is funny because he was also
this stodgy Catholic dude who is like much older than
everyone else. But he argued that, to quote www dot

(14:21):
Marshall mcluwin dot com, the message of any medium or
technology is the chain of scale or pace of pattern
it introduces into human affairs. So Free Digger Meals used
the excess of waste of capitalism to nourish and modeled
a slower pace of life and a coming together of community.
They also reclaimed anti capitalist patterns of space use by
feeding people in a public park outside of the framework

(14:44):
of for profit restaurants and grocery stores. So they're really
taking these media theory ideas from mc lwin and from
other people and trying to put them into Yeah. Yeah,
they're very like they're sort of like relationship between theory
and on the groundwork is really it's like firing.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
To me, the most cliche word is practice, but this
is just like literally it. It is where theory and
practice meet. They're not like, oh, we should just do
things or we should just think about things. They're like,
we should think about things and then do things.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah good, exactly, yeah, yeah yeah, and constantly be thinking
and rethinking about them.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah coo.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
The Diggers incorporate it, so they incorporate other aspects of
their cultural work into the feeds. These included theater. They
would screw on stupids really tightly to force diners out
of passivity. They'd have to like grapple with them to
open the stupids.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Fucking nerds, I know.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
And then Emmitt Grogan and Billy Murcott also built a
giant frame of reference. So it was this giant doorway
painted a golden orange that diners had to walk through
before they were able to eat nerds, and the idea
is that the feeds, they'd have to leave quote unquote
consumer culture at the door and instead fully participate pat
in the ideals of the gift economy. Yeah, they were
total nervous.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
I love it.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
Yeah. And Digger papers were also distributed at the feed
These Digger papers were made by secretly using the mimeograph
machine in the Students for a Democratic Society offices in
a building that belonged to the San Francisco Meme troop,
which is really funny to me. Did Yeah, It's like,
fuck you, dad, we're using the minograph.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
So one of my favorite papers is called take a
Cop to Dinner, And I'm kind of cheating because it
was printed in September nineteen sixty six before the feeds began,
but it's food related, so I'm going to talk about it.
So the background is the owner of a psychedelic shop
in the hate Ashbury posted a take a Cop to
Dinner sign in his store window in an attempt to

(16:46):
try and build bridges with the cops, which inspired other
neighborhood business owners to do the same. The diggers, Yeah,
who understandably hated the cops, and critiqued the local merchants
for their continued investment in consumer cap decided to respond,
and you can see a scan of this broadside on
the Digger's Archive, which is a website that has a
ton of Digger materials on it, and it starts with

(17:09):
a very strange poem about genitals and hydrogen bombs, which
I'm not going to read because why. But then the
broadside lists the boys various people and organizations from racketeers
to unions to the Catholic Church and Department of Justice
bribe cops to encourage them to turn a blind eye
to things that were technically illegal but in the service

(17:30):
of upholding power. So the Broadside becomes more and more
specific and ultimately calling out Theelin Psychedelic Shop and then
nearby I Thou Coffee Shop, before ending the list with
cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots. And this
is printed and distributed in the weeks before the Hunter's
Point uprising, which seems to gesture the fact that there was,

(17:50):
you know, this feeling in the city even before this
uprising happened about what was going on with the police.
They also distributed leaflets for other events at their feeds,
such as is the one for the Intersection game, which
was held on Halloween nineteen sixty six. They invited pedestrians
to walk in geometric shapes at the intersection of Hate
Nashbury to disrupt the flow of automobile traffic. And this

(18:14):
is really successful. Around six hundred people showed up to play.
It caused a giant traffic jam, and five diggers were arrested.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Okay, so this is like so they're like writing sigils
with their bodies in motion, like in the street. Is
that the I think so?

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, it's sort of yeah, walking in these funny shapes
in order to, yeah, just to like tie up traffic.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
He there's that like kind of meme of like the
circle of protection from a self driving car where you
like drive the like yellow line, you like paint the
yellow line around the car and then the car can't
leave because it can't cross the yellow line or whatever.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
You know. I haven't seen that, but that's brilliant.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Oh yeah, no, and this just feels like that for
the six Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
Okay, Yeah, they really do feel like even though we're
talking about food and how their predecessor of you know,
spoiler alert things like food, not bombs. They're also kind
of a predecessor of meme culture, so that's like an
interesting tie in. So I've read a bunch of times
that the Digger Feeds inspired the Black Panther breakfast program.
It's always felt like a stretch to me, or like

(19:24):
the story was more complicated. And then I found a
video of Digger Kent Minnault where he talks about meeting UEP.
Newton in fall nineteen sixty six. Newton did tell him
he had heard of the Digger Feeds and implied that
he found them inspired, but followed that up by taking
Minault around Oakland and talking about the Black panthers plans
to serve kids a fortifying breakfast before school. Newton also

(19:45):
pointed out the yards of certain houses and mentioned that
he'd been talking to the women who own them about
using them to grow fresh food. So it's possible that
the Black Panthers took some inspiration from the Diggers, but
as Minault says in the video, the Panthers' ideas were
much more system than those of the Diggers, and the
Panthers definitely inspired the Diggers in turn, so it's definitely
a two way street.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
And you know what else is a two way street
that's alts wrongcoming from you. I know, I loved it.
Medium is the message as relates to advertising. Help me

(20:26):
out here.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
It's time for ad breaks unless you have coolers on media.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
So yeah, here's ads maybe, and we're back.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
So the feats continued regularly until February nineteen sixty seven,
when they started to peter off. There are a lot
of reasons why this happened. There were population pressures as
young people from around the country flocked to the hate Ashbury,
which is what would result in the Summer of Love
in nineteen sixty seven.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Which I totally knew was nineteen sixty seven. I totally
didn't have to completely change my brain to.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Be sixty nine, right, but apparently sixty seven.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
I'm a good history I'm not a historian. I'm a
pop his history writer. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Well, the thing the thing too, is like the thing
about doing a lot of food history is often I'll
know about the food stuff, but not about everything else. Yeah,
so there's actually not too much more I could tell
you about the Summer of Love besides the fact that
it was in nineteen sixty seven. So yeah, okay, no worried.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, no, we all knew. Everyone knew that it was
sixty seven, not sixty nine. Absolutely, Okay, now that actually
makes sense because then it was like, yeah, that's like
where it because it kind of, as I'm under the impression,
a lot of hipie stuff sort of like really started
in the Bay Area and spread out, so it was
like probably more generalized by sixty nine or something. This

(21:52):
is me talking out of my ass totally.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
That is Yeah, that is the impression I get, Yeah,
that it spread out, and then you're getting to sixty nine,
you're getting a lot of repression, You're getting a lot
of breakdown in the Bay Area. But then again, there
are like many people in this world who know way
more about this than me, So I'm just making it,
you know, kind of making an educated guest based on
what I know about the Diggers and related projects.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
I'm like annoyed because I've done like probably yeah, probably
like twenty episodes total, like including like multiple parts or
whatever related to late sixties early seventies movements in the US,
but I haven't covered this, like the Summer of Love stuff,
So I'm like, I don't know, I haven't read those
books yet.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Maybe it needs to happen.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, you know, ye yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
I actually had a bunch of places in the script
where I was like, you could do a whole episode off,
and then I like edited most of them out.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
No, because I thought you should pitch it to me.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
It's actually just me me pitching other episodes. Yeah. So anyway,
another reason that there was a crackdown. City authorities were
cracking down on free food distributions and ordered produce suppliers
a stop donating to the diggers, whoa classic repression for
the city government. But there is another reason that regular
feeds stopped. Can you think of what group of people

(23:09):
might have done most of the cooking and had to
do a disproportionate amount of the labor.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
It's probably some group that I wouldn't even be able
to think of, because no one ever thinks of, like yeah,
like whatever the opposite of men is.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
Yeah, I don't even know what that is. No or no, Sophie, do.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
You happen to know any of this? Never heard of it?

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Okay? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, yes, as we're jokingly gesturing
at it was the women who were involved.

Speaker 4 (23:36):
Women.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
You do say there were women?

Speaker 2 (23:41):
Oh wow, so cool?

Speaker 3 (23:44):
I know right. Women were responsible for cooking as well
as procuring food for the feeds, which at one point
were daily and regularly served up to two hundred people,
which is a ton of work.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
As I was researching this, I was thinking about how
I'm part of Autonomous Community Center here in Tucson, the BCC,
where we do weekly meals that feed up to forty
or fifty people, and every one's in a blue moon.
I sign up to cook and it feels like a lot.
So I can't imagine doing that every single day.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
No, So for like your shitty boyfriend who's just on drugs,
who's like, come on, don't you care about the cause?

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Totally? Yeah, who's making all the broadsides? And you know,
there definitely was this.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
Yeah, the men got to be thinkers and the women
had to do a lot of the grunt work.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
So yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
So a great example of this is that even though
Emmett Grogan claimed that he got all the food for
the feeds, Our Pale Peter Coyote wrote about how the
digger women would actually collect the donations because the produce
venders were more inclined to give food to them than
to the men. Yeah, and yeah, It's also really funny
because a lot of the things that I saw were

(24:53):
like these burly Italian men at the produce market only
want to give food to the women, which I thought
was kind of hilarious in a vague like leaning into
ethnic stereotypes way, but it might have happened. I read
an oral history with a digger named Judy Goldhoff, who
is one of the women who would go down to
the produce market. She also talks about gleaning in nearby

(25:14):
agricultural fields, so they would go out and gather produce, yeah,
like zucchini and onions that get left behind during the
mechanical harvesting process. And she also mentions a number of
women who were involved in the feeds, including a group
of students either like from Antioch College on break or
dropouts that wasn't totally clear to me but had come
from Antioch College, as well as someone named Nina Blasenheim.

(25:36):
And Blasenheim comes up a bunch of times in these
oral history interviews as bottom lining the feeds, but I
haven't been able to find out more about her, but
I do want to name her again, Nina Blasenheim, because
according to these women, she did really important work making
these feeds happen. The poet Dianda Primo was also involved
in the Diggers, and I will admit that I wrote
more about this in an article for gastro Obscura, but

(25:58):
I'm not going to go a ton into it for
contractual reasons.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
Ah fine, I needed you. You wrote one of my
favorite pieces of poetry ever. The it takes all of
us pushing on this from every direction.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah, her revolutionary letters are amazing. You should read them.
She's one of my favorite poets. I have a tattoo
of one of her lines of poetry. So I'm a
huge dand a Prima fan. And her involvement with the
Diggers was pretty peripheral, but it is interesting and you
can find stuff about that online. I was like working
on that piece and this at the same time and

(26:31):
got into kind of sticky like they need to be
different scopes kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Is that piece out yet that people can read it is?

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah, it's on gastro Obscura, so you should be able
to find it just googling like gastro Obscura Diggers.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Or yeah or run awry, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
You know whatever you want to google. So even after
the feed started to wane in spring nineteen sixty seven.
The Diggers continue to do mutual aid. In addition to
their spectacles, parades, and other theatrical events, they open free
stores that offered clothing and products that were procured both
through donation and theft. Oh yeah, and when police would
inquire about who was in charge of these stores, the Diggers,

(27:09):
in true anarchist fashion, would tell them that if they
wanted to see someone in charge, they'd have to be
the one in charge. They'd basically be like, there are
no managers, you're the manager. They would also invite people
to take turns being the manager of the store, which
from what I can tell, mostly meant helping customers find
what they were looking for, suggesting clothing, things like that.

(27:30):
They also operated at least one crash pad to house
the young people pouring into the hate ashbery, so a
housing space that people could stay at and living.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
So you mentioned because earlier the only specific political ideology
you've named with them as like Marxism from the alf
the thing they came before. In my research, which was
very minimal, but I read about the Diggers as an
explicitly anarchist organization. Do you know like when that shift happened,
or if it was like a little bit more loose
than that, it was just like whatever, we clearly don't

(28:00):
want anyone in charge, and we just use marks for
like a way of understanding the way that like economics works.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Or Yeah. So from my reading, which I think once
again somebody else could go way more into this side
of things. But they were a lot of what they
were doing was really rooted in everyday life, right, and
so they were very anarchist in their approach. But a
lot of the writing they were doing, a lot of
the theory and discussions they were having had more to

(28:27):
do with what was happening on the ground in San Francisco. Okay,
So I would say that from what I can glean,
they were definitely an anarchist project. They were also, like
so many radicals at the time, super Marxist influence. I
would say that they were they were mostly anarchists. I
would define them. That is the label that makes the
most sense. Okay, but it does feel a little bit

(28:47):
loosey goosey, like I'm not sure if every digger would
identify that way, you know.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, no, that that makes sense to me, And yeah,
that that tracks, And this is an interesting I like
that everyone's the manager, but I like how it like
runs up against this hard wall when you're like you're
the manager and like, no, don't make a cop the manager.
I have one rule, I know, totally. Yeah, but also
it probably like scares that no cop is going to
be like, yeah, that's right, I am the manager here now, right,

(29:11):
you know.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah. I feel like they had this really like a
whole huge thing about disorientation, right, so they're disorienting this guy. Yeah, yeah,
you know, just throwing him into confusion.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
No, I like it.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, And they also continued food based projects. A lot
of the work that Dan Daprima did was from this
later era. She moved after the feeds had ended. Flyers
from this era show free distribution of lettuce and information
about Digger sponsored spaghetti dinners held at local churches. A
lot of the flyers were handwritten on one B yob

(29:44):
stands for bring your own bowl, which I thought was
pretty funny. And also during their feeds they would often
ask people to bring their own bowl. And there's lots
of ideas about why this was. Some people are just
like they didn't have bowls, and other people are like
they wanted to make sure people were like active participants
and not passively eating.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
I can tell you why. I think it was. So
there's all I used to eat at and cook for
a lot of different food up bombs, and the one
that I went to that eventually was like, now, whatever,
you have to bring your own dish was so that
they didn't have to wash all the dishes.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
See that makes so much sense, And it's so funny
to me because I also have done similar things throughout
my life and I was so deep in the history
that that never.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Occurred to me. No, No, I mean yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,
I'm sure. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's participatory, yes,
participatory doing the fucking dishes. Like yeah. I was like, however,
I was like really angry about it. I was like
I was probably twenty one, and I was like, this
creates a barrier, you know, and like yeah, because you know,

(30:50):
not everyone who's going without a house is like carrying
around a bowl or whatever. But honestly, most people are.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
And in a lot of photos, there's some amazing photos
in the Digger archives, the early feeds, and you see
people eating out of like soup cans all sorts, of
recycled material. I do think they did down the line
start providing things for people to eat out of. But yeah,
people were very improvisational with what was a bowl.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Cool. I've definitely eaten food ut bombs on a car
on a piece of cardboard, oh totally.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yeah, yeah, or the like empty bean can.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah totally.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
So now we're going to get to bread, and we're
going to touch a little bit on some whole wheat
bread stuff, although I think different from what you went
into before. So we're going to talk about digger bread.
Have you ever heard of the digger bread recipe?

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Is it involved dipping it in melted cheese. This is
my attempt to bring spot.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
I mean, we're not having a font you were trying
to bring up doing to it all.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
The only thing I know about digger bread is I
have this I have this understanding that could be totally
wrong that the reason that like old grain and whole
wheat bread is popular in like healthy food in the
United States period is because of some weird anarchists in
the Bay and the sixties, along with Tide. Those are
like the things that I'm like aware of or have

(32:14):
been told that they influenced.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
I'm so glad you brought that up, because admittedly, when
I was writing this script, there were definitely things that
had to stay on the cutting room floor. And I
have read about the influence of the Diggers and wholl
weat bread and then was struggling to like find it
again and didn't want to put something in. I couldn't
one hundred percent cite.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Okay, well I'll claim it apocryphaly.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
But I'm pretty sure that that, Yeah, they had this
huge influence on whole wheat bread across the country. The
Diggers also had a huge they like popularized tide in
within the United States. It did draw on more traditional
forms of dying I believe from Southeast Asia, but I'm
not totally sure. But yeah, that's also another thing that

(32:58):
someone could look into excited about.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
I can never be excited about that.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
I don't know, well, I know, and.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
I feel like so it's like all the like metal
heads I know are really into tight I and I'm
I'm like just slightly too old because I was around
the worst era of hippies, which is the early nineties
and like mid nineties hippies, the like yeah, pale end
of the Grateful Dead the most like consumerist, burned out,

(33:28):
like apolitical, misogynist hippies in the world. It from my
point of view, and so I have this like really
deep like fuck that version of hippie. And so the
version of hippie that I like is when you like,
look and they all look like medieval peasants. I'm like
that shit rules. You could be in a cult, you know,

(33:51):
I say, with my hood on, I'm wearing all black.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
And yeah, I think that from what I can tell,
the Diggers look exactly like what we think of as
the worst kind of hippie, which is interesting to think
about because because they're awesome, that they're awesome. Yeah, and
a lot of people, a lot of hippies of that
era were awesome.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
And you know, like all things, it gets co opted
and watered down, yea, all things within the you know,
within our like super capitalist United States. Yeah, it gets
becomes this other thing totally.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
And the fact that I'm angry about what happened when
I was fourteen should have no influence on whether or
not a doom metal band wants to make a tid
eye version of their shirt. And I actually think, I
actually think it's cool that it's coming back. I'm just like,
it's like not quite for me, even though I love
natural dying and all that stuff. Like I have a
whole bucket of black walnut rhinds that I'm going to

(34:40):
die some of my dresses with next.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Week, but they're not going to be like black walnut
tied addresses.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
No, although I'm like, what if I just tried to
get over it by like, No, I probably won't. I
don't think that's going to happen anyway.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Then this is a great time waiting. This is a
great time to talk about my boots. I'd like to
talk about my boots.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Is that okay, Le's talk about your So.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
I have this pair of boots that I originally got
because a friend's kid was having her bot mitzvah and
she asked everyone to wear like flowery things. And I
really really love a clothing assignment from a child. It's
one of my favorite things. And so I went all
out and I found at a thrift store these Doc Martin's,

(35:24):
except that they have like hippie paisley flower print all
over them, and I don't wear them very much because
anyone who knows me knows that I mostly wear all black,
but I put them on today because it felt appropriate.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Don Are you going to at some point for us,
because because.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah I can, I can totally wait, I'm really clumsy,
but I'm going to try to do this.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
I see the side they do. They look really fucking cool.
Enough about it, now, you'll know that I've finally gotten
over self consciousness. When my hair is just in a
crown braid with flowers in it. That's when you know
I'm just like finally just like see, you would look
really fucking cool.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
I know totally you would. I highly recommend. Anyways, Yeah,
we'll support. So back to bread. In June nineteen sixty seven,
a few months after the feed stopp happening regularly, some Diggers,
who were baking alongside Ruth and Walt Reynolds, who were
volunteers at All Saints' Church, turned four hundred pounds of

(36:31):
flour and a bunch of other ingredients into a whole
wheat bread, which they distributed to residents of they hate Ashbury.
The event was super successful, and the Diggers soon opened
a regular free bakery out of the church. It distributed
about two hundred loaves each on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
That's amazing.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
I've been challenged to do an ad break by my
very charming and clever podcaster friends, but I feel like
the diggers would just be like, it's free because it's yours.
So maybe as you listen to these ads, if they're
for anything that you have to pay for, I don't know,
maybe you think about how you don't have to pay
for them.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
You know, yeah, I couldn't.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
As somebody who recently can't eat gluten, and all gluten
things are more expensive than non gluten things, I think
non gluten bread should be free too.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah. Right, this this podcast is brought to you by
free bread of glutenous and non glutenous varieties. And if
any other ad creeps in and it's not for something free,
that was a mistake and we're back. Oh okay, but wait,

(37:40):
so you're talking about all this. I think what's really
interesting you talk about how like there was like cross
they didn't influence the Black Panther's free breakfast program, but
both were aware of each other, right, yes, yeah, and
both of them well the feed wasn't, but the both
were out of churches. And this is the kind of
thing that I feel like sometimes gets left out of history.

(38:00):
Is like when when radicals go over it, it's like, no,
that's actually that, that's not nothing, that's not a meaningless detail,
you know that. It was totally It was out of
this church that was like, sure, you all can come
bake four hundred loaves of bread a week here.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
Totally. Yeah, And I can't remember what kind of church
it was, but it was some kind of I grew
up in New York, where there the Protestant population is
not huge, and growing up, I used to call them
love your neighbor Protestants.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
So like instead of the Evangelicals or whatever.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
No, but like the you know, social justice oriented like
really awesome sort of uh, you know, I don't know
that much about it, but like theologies that are centered
around liberation of all people's versus like trying to take
away everyone's right and that. I don't remember exactly what
the All Saints' Church was, but they were certainly of that.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
That makes sense, yeah, at.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Least said the time. Yeah. So, but but the kitchen
and the church didn't have baking trays. So Reynolds had
this idea that they could use coffee cans to bake
the bread. Oh and I find this part really interesting
because even though it seems like it was just a
practical solution to lack of baking trays, and it probably was,
it meant that the bread was literally made in packaging

(39:22):
for a beverage that played an intrinsic part in the
rise of capitalism, the very capitalism that the Diggers so apused.
And so I kind of wanted to do a brief
coffee and capitalism.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Okay, let's do it as a non coffee drinker. I'm
gonna feel so good at the end of this, or
I'm gonna feel really bad. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
I feel like neither. I feel like we're all the
products of history in such complex ways.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
No, I don't do anything literally, she said after introducing ads.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Anyway, Sorry, go ahead, this is like the one paragraph
version of like books have been written about this. So
coffee came to Europe from the Arab world, and it
caught on in the seventeenth century in like Western Europe,
it started to replace alcohol as the everyday drink, so
instead of being slightly drunk all the time, people in
Europe were caffeinated and able to work longer hours and

(40:15):
also talk really fast. Coffee houses.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
Do you like that? I wrote a joke into the
script because I was like, Sophie and Margaret are so
good at jokes, I'm gonna have to, like, you know,
keep up with the Joneses. No, No, it's good, my
very very cheesy coffee joke. Yeah. Coffee houses became popular
in London under Cromwell and the London Stock Exchange.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
No, he's a demon. He comes up as is evil
every single time. I'm like, is there something I don't Yeah,
just signed Ireland. Well, yeah, anyway, you already do that.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
Anyway I already knew that. Yeah, And he became coffee
become He didn't become popular in London. Coffee becomes popular
in London under Cromwell, the London Stock Exchange, and the
contemporary insurance industry grows out of these coffee Do not
ask me to tell you more, because I don't remember
any of it, but fascinating. And Adam Smith literally wrote

(41:13):
The Wealth of Nations in a coffee house. And then
during the Industrial Revolution, coffee allowed workers to grind harder
and for things like night shifts to exist because they
could drink coffee and stay awake, and the coffee concept
of The coffee break comes from a factory owner in
Denver in the nineteen fifties who gave his workers two
mandatory coffee breaks a day to increase productivity.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
So what you're saying is to be anti capitalist, everyone
should be drunk all of the time.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
I like how you came to this conclusion. I don't know.
I'm not going to answer that. This is too big
of a question. I wout two cuffs of coffee this morning.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, No, I'm not actually anti Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
Do what makes you feel good and stand against oppression everyone.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, and you could be awake while you stand against
a You can be productive in a lot of ways,
you know, there is good productivity. That is like one
thing that people are like, Well, I understand all of
the like, don't work so much. Capitalism wants you to
work so much. I'm like, but we could also work
to fight it too. That'll still work, you know.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, and people have different levels of that.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
I love getting shit done, So I'm I think we're
on a similar wavelength that way. But yeah, So the
Diggers baking holy bread and coffee cans really kind of
in my mind, fits with their whole using the excess
of capitalism for revolutionary means thing both practically and metaphorically.
And it also kind of fits with that food as
the medium thing, right, because bakers and eaters are thinking

(42:44):
about the relationship between capitalism and food by baking coffee cans.
I know that this is a stretch, but like so
much of what they did was a stretch too, like
trying to convince people of things that I feel okay
about making this connected.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Yeah, I mean they literally had people walk through a
frame of reference before they like, it's fine, it's good,
even total.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
And then I should also say I have actually not
tried baking the diggerbread recipe. And it's because now a
lot of coffee cans are aligned with toxic material. Oh
there are some that aren't, and you can do research
into it, but I'm like a very anxious person, and
I would just like somehow convince myself even if I
had like completely checked that it was fine with a
certain coffee can, that it somehow was it. So I

(43:25):
haven't actually had a chance to make this bread. You
could also just make it not in a coffee can.
That's another option. There are recipes out there online.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Okay, see now, I'm like, but we could make like
a you could we could make and sell a bespoke
coffee can that doesn't have anything bad in it. That's
for making your bread.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
You can buy that. Oh really is okay, But it
just seemed too far. No.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Yeah, and also it yah goes against the concept to
some degree. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I
wouldn't be mad at myself. I like kitchen gadgets, like
totally seen. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
So these free bakries, but around the Bay. This was
helped by coverage in the Berkeley Barb, which was an
underground newspaper that had a circulation of eighty five thousand readers,
which is huge for an underground Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yes, that's not so underground. That's amazing. Uh huh.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yeah. And the Barb covered the free bakers extensively, including
one that sprang up at the Olem Poly Ranch commune.
I hope I'm saying that correctly. In one article, journalist
for the bar Brightes, a bakery owner decided to drop
out and lay the ovens, mixers, and other accessories on
the ranch. In turn, the residents of the ranch are
baking bread and distributing it free throughout the Bay Area,

(44:37):
and the photo that ran with the article, there are
topless young people, mostly women, needing bread on a table
covered with empty coffee cans. This seems like regular Hippi shit,
but I do want to acknowledge there's this really complex
intertwining of sexual liberation and the patriarchal male gaze that
women in the nineteen sixties and seventies communes faced in
a pretty intense way. So I just want to say that.

(44:59):
Speaking of photos, there's a pretty amazing one of kids
cutting into Digger bread at the Free Hueye rally in
February nineteen sixty eight. The photo was taken by Ruth,
Mary and Baruch. It was in support of Huey Pan Newton,
whom in Nault had toured Oakland with, as I mentioned earlier,
and who was accused of allegedly killing a police officer
in the midst of defending himself from police violence. And

(45:20):
based on print materials I've seen, like flyers, it seems
like at least some of the Diggers were pretty active
in this free hue campaign, so this continued. Sometimes. I
think that the relationship between the Diggers, from what I've seen,
it seems like the relationship between the Diggers and the
Black Panthers was overstated and a bit of wishful thinking
on the Digger's part, But there was like actual, real
tangible solidarity that was happening as well. And then in

(45:43):
May nineteen sixty eight, Ruth and Walter Reynolds start a
free bakery at the Resurrection City encampment. Have you heard
of Resurrection City? No?

Speaker 2 (45:52):
This sounds amazing, So I.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Hadn't heard about it until I started researching the Digger.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Chris Christian hippie homeless commune, not exactly, although I was
just going on the names Resurrection makes me think Christian.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
It was Christian. Yeah, so Resurrection City. It was a
six week tense city on the National Mall in Washington,
d C. That was part of the Poor People's Campaign,
which is a multiracial movement for economic justice that in
particular brought together to cano black and white Appalachian activists.
And there's way more to say about Resurrection City than
I can in this episode. This is another one of

(46:29):
those you should do an episode about, but here's a
brief snapshot. The Poor People's Campaign was started by Martin
Luther King Junior, and other members of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. After King was assassinated in April nineteen sixty eight,
organizers carried on the campaign and demanded a quote unquote
economic bill of rights that included a living wage for

(46:51):
all workers and an adequate income for those unable to work.
The camp was ultimately evicted on June twenty fourth of
that year, the day after its permit expire, but it
did lead to more money for social services, including an
expansion of the food Stamps program and more funding for
head Start, as well as free and reduced lunch in
Mississippi and Alabama, and it was also described by participants

(47:15):
as practice for living together in a largely collectively run city.
Residents described it as a city where you didn't have
to pay taxes and you didn't experience police brutality or
going to so pretty important stuff there. The free bakery
at the encampment made fifteen loaves an hour. The brand
usually came right out of the oven and was immediately

(47:35):
served to camp residents, As residents usually got only one
hot meal a day because of funding. Stuff in the kitchen.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference camp organizers were really impressed
by the bakery, and they even moved their own coffee
shop next door to it. Coffee again, I know, always coffee.
Now live in a world where we have to stay awake,
you know.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, I'm awake right now.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
I know I'm awake too, But I've also had two
cups of coffee. And I actually took my ADHD medicine
today because I was like, this is probably the one
day we're being really chatty. Is good?

Speaker 2 (48:09):
So this is my socializing for the week.

Speaker 4 (48:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
So Digger bread also spread throughout the counterculture and recipe form.
The recipe was originally distributed as a Digger leaflet entitled
Free Bread. It included a list of where to buy
wholesal flower cheaply in the Bay, and instructions for making
twelve loaves at once. Since they assumed the people using
the recipe would be doing so to open other free bakeries,
it also included the stipulation that although anyone was welcome

(48:40):
to use the recipe, you always had to give the
bread away for free. Hell yeah, I know, awesome, right,
But later versions of the recipe don't even mention the
free bakeries. So there's one that's printed in both the
underground newspaper Northwest Passage in nineteen sixty nine, and in
the first ever nineteen seventy issue of Mother Earth News

(49:00):
that makes no mention of the bakeries and it totally
relocates the bread just to like the domestic sphere. So
the head note. Do you know what a head note is? No?

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Wait, is it the main thing that you taste in wine?

Speaker 3 (49:15):
No, it's that little paragraph before a recipe that people
love to complain about.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
You mean, the eighteen pages of.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Okay, well that happens on Google because it has to
do with like Google algorithm.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
It has to do like copyright stuff, right, because you
can't copyright a recipe, but you can so in order
to I'm not even mad about it. I just click
the skipt a recipe thing.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
But headnotes can be really cool in like a formerly,
you know, when people are thoughtful about them and are yeah,
fair enough information. Yeah, But this headnote just says, every
time we make this bread, it's a big hit around
the house. Have a big hit around your house. And
in a nineteen seventy one Berkeley Barber article that does
mention free bakeries, the article says that a small town

(49:58):
of weed California would be a great place to open one.
And then it says in fight the local sheriff's deputy
over for coffee and show him you have nothing to
Oh my.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
God, it's gone full circle. Oh my god, that's so heartbreaking.
This is this is the encapsulation of what happened to
the hippies all in one moment, and it happens with
any Just you strip away all of the radicals, create
something new, and then other people strip away the then
they only take the ephemera, right, because the bread is

(50:32):
the yeah, the product that is created by a revolutionary process.
And so then people are like, fuck the revolution, we
just want the bread.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
Yeah. And now, unless you're looking at the Digger Archive,
Sight or a few other places that are specifically focused
on the Diggers, you can like google around for the
Digger bread recipe and you literally just find it as
this like fun hippie recipe and it never mentions anything
more about the Diggers, which is really disappointing.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
Can we put the good version in the show notes?

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Yeah? I think I can. Yeah, I can send it
to you for sure, with the caveat that This whole
coffee camp thing makes me really nervous.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
That's a good point. You know what people have to get. Yeah,
people google yourself. We told you how to find it.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Do that well, very easy if you just google digger
bread recipe. All the recipes themselves are good, they just
don't always have information about, right, you know who the
diggers were.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Which you are providing right now. So consider that you're.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
Note, Yeah, giant head note to a recipe. Yeah, so
you know.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
This whole transcript. Let's just a head note on it anyway.

Speaker 3 (51:39):
Sorry, honestly, like there's a lot of writing projects I
thought about that would just be something like that, And uh,
it's hilarious and also I've spent more time thinking about
it than i'd like to. Yeah, fair enough, so to
wrap to wrap up our diggers. While free bakries persisted
into the seventies, including in other places across the country,
and there were digger groups in other places across the country,

(52:01):
even though San Francisco was the main place. The San
Francisco Diggers disbanded as a recognizable group in nineteen sixty nine,
So even though they only existed for three years, they
had a really profound impact on food based mutual aid
in the United States. The same year they disbanded. In
nineteen sixty nine, a group occupied an empty lot that
became Berkeley's People's Park, which I know more recently has

(52:25):
had some challenges around it. Yeah, and I know that
people are like struggling to keep it being a people's park.
I don't know what the latest is on that. But
at the People's Park, occupants plated a garden and, influenced
by the Diggers, shared free community meals, often making stews
improvised from whatever people brought that day. The Diggers were

(52:46):
also a major inspiration for Food Not Bombs, which you've
also done an episode on previously and people should check out.
But in case people didn't catch that one, Food Not
Bombs is an international decentralized organization that serves free meals
primarily from donated and dumpstered ingredients in public places. It
started in nineteen eighty as part of the anti nuclear movement,

(53:09):
and then in Hawaii there's a group called Eating in
Public that holds dinners inspired by the Diggers and gay
Channon Adiita Sharma, who founded it, wrote about the project
sorry for a plug for an anthology I edited called
Nurishing Resistance, but it was just like too perfect of
a tie in. I wanted to make sure it made
it into this episode, especially because there's this one paragraph that,

(53:31):
throughout the entire multi year process of editing this book,
would put such a huge smile on my face, Like
sometimes when things would get tough with editing, I'd like
go read this paragraph to remember why I was doing
what I was doing. I want to share it with
you as a note to end on. So this is
from the article by Chan and Sharma. Diggers dinners have

(53:53):
taken place in small settings among friends, as well as
in spaces open to all. The events are basically potlock,
but with one rule designed to keep capitalist markets at bay.
Each participant's contribution must be primarily made from ingredients that
they have either grown, hunted, fished, foraged, gleaned, bartered, found,
been gifted or stolen. At the start of each dinner,

(54:15):
participants are invited to explain the backstory of the ingredient
and our largest Diggers dinner. Among the last of the
participants to speak was a tiny eighty year old woman
stepping up onto a stool to reach the microphone. She
began by saying, I read about this in the newspaper
and realized I've been waiting for this my whole life.
So I went to the store and stole these bananas
and these apples.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah. No, it's so interesting to me that diggers, because
they're obviously the lesser known diggers, right, but there was
more of them, and they lasted longer, and they also
had more impact the original diggers. I don't think they
ever saw a harvest. I don't think they ever actually
got any food out of the land. And that's not

(54:58):
to say what they didn't. What they did, I mean,
what they did was revolutionary, right, the original seventeenth century
diggers or whatever, but it but it didn't actually have
as much of a material impact on as many people's lives.
And so it's just interesting to me that these are
the like, the like, lesser known diggers, right, even though
they had this like massive impact on culture, but also

(55:18):
just directly fed so many people for so long.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
Totally, that is interesting. And yeah, I'm not entirely sure
why that is. I do not that the diggers, really,
that San Francisco Diggers really resisted this whole like I'll
call it the famous man notion because it's almost always
a man. But they were like very resistant to giving interviews,
to you know, to identifying themselves as individuals, not in

(55:44):
like a hiding their identity way, but they were just
like really focused on the collective. And I wonder if
not having you know, there's not like a famous digger. Yeah,
he's like famous mostly for being a digger in the
way that you have with some other movements, and I
do wonder if that's part of why they're less.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
I also think that just like when you get in first,
when you're the first the diggers, and also anything you
do in like Renaissance era England is going to have
more impact on history than like any other time or
place to be a person, you know, to like because colonialism, but.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
Especially within like the anglosphere right where we're reading and
writing in English.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah, yeah, totally, Well, thank you so much. And what's
gonna One what are we going to hear about on
Wednesday so people can be excited? And two tell us
more about you and plug things cool?

Speaker 3 (56:42):
So we're going to talk about food co ops, which
doesn't sound very exciting and wouldn't have sounded very exciting
to me before I did research, but I promise you
it will be exciting. There are some very cool radical
roots that have been pretty intensely covered up with food
co ops in this country. And then as far as plugs,
I did want to mention that anthology I edited, Nourishing Resistance,

(57:05):
which is available from PM Press. It has incredible contributors.
People should buy it if you can, or like see
if your library has it. And yeah, I recommend reading it,
not because I edited it, but because the contributors are
so incredible, and specifically two pieces in that the gay
Channon Nandida Sharma article that I quoted remaking the Commons

(57:27):
a history of eating in Public and then another essay
by Madeline Lane McKinley called notes on Utopian Failure and
Commune Kitchens, which while it didn't like directly go into
my research, it did influence a lot of the background
thinking around gender in this era. So yeah, those are
my plugs. I exist only on the Instagram at at

(57:48):
ren Arai, which is my name. You can follow me there, yay.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
And that's been part one of Ren explains things to me.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
We'll be Backdesday Wednesday. Bye.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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