Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your
Speaker 2: weekly reminder that people can do cool stuff when they're
Speaker 2: cool people. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. I'm your host sort of.
Speaker 2: Usually this time it's a reverse episode that I like
Speaker 2: to call Ren explains things to me, eh eh, instead
Speaker 2: of the book men explain things to me.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, I'll take it. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 3: do like explaining things on occasion when I know about them.
Speaker 2: Excellent. That's Reren ren or I who is the author
Speaker 2: of Nourishing Resistance, which is a book available from PM Press,
Speaker 2: And basically, Ren is the person that whenever I have
Speaker 2: like food history related questions, is a very strange life
Speaker 2: that I lead that this comes up regularly, that I
Speaker 2: have food history related questions and I ask Gren. So
Speaker 2: Ren has agreed to do a whole reverse episode for us.
Speaker 3: Hi Ren, Yes, And I should just mention I'm the
Speaker 3: editor of Nourishing Resistance, not the author. Okay, just because
Speaker 3: there's so many different contributors, I want to make sure
Speaker 3: to highlight that. But yes, thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool? So wait, I want to I have to
Speaker 2: introduce everyone else first too, Yeah yeah cool? Okay, because
Speaker 2: Sophie Sophie Lichterman, Hey is our uh producer? I forgot
Speaker 2: your title for a moment, I don't have a title.
Speaker 2: God King and our audio engineers Ian, everyone say Hi, Ian, Hi,
Speaker 2: Ian Hienne, Hi, everybody, We're here in a surprise twist.
Speaker 2: I really love this. Yeah, but bye bye bye. I
Speaker 2: have a good recording.
Speaker 3: I'm honored to be here on the day that that
Speaker 3: Ian makes a.
Speaker 2: And our theme music was written for us by an
Speaker 2: woman and now Wren, I have no idea what this episode.
Speaker 2: I have a vague idea because you you tell me
Speaker 2: things that I'm not allowed to research, because I tell
Speaker 2: other people when they come on what they're not allowed
Speaker 2: to research, but I try not to give it away. Totally. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't quite know what's going to happen.
Speaker 3: Great love that so I was wondering Margaret and Sophie.
Speaker 3: First off, a question when you think of revolutionary movements
Speaker 3: and countercultures in like the nineteen sixties and seventies, what
Speaker 3: comes to mind?
Speaker 2: Hippies?
Speaker 3: Yeah, hippies, Yeah, great answer.
Speaker 2: Free love, black panthers.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, you're like naming a lot of things that
Speaker 3: are going to be in this episode. Community community, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: So I'm glad I asked you all this question. Great start,
Speaker 3: But when you think of these things, do you think
Speaker 3: of food?
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm always thinking about food, but that's just me.
Speaker 4: But to this specific question, I don't think the first
Speaker 4: thing I thought of was food totally.
Speaker 3: But when you do think about food, like food of
Speaker 3: the sixties and seventies, what comes to mind?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I I briefly covered because of a thing
Speaker 2: you sent me on an episode. I briefly covered whole
Speaker 2: wheat bread as relates to this, And I also think
Speaker 2: of soup and those are it? And then like pretending
Speaker 2: that drugs are food.
Speaker 4: Hmmmm, totally, yeah, I think I think fondu.
Speaker 3: You know what fondu is not everything else is in
Speaker 3: this episode, which I think actually probably has more to
Speaker 3: do with the fact that Margaret and I talk about
Speaker 3: history too much, so that like, even though you don't
Speaker 3: know what this is about, you've kind of gotten a
Speaker 3: little bit of a head start. But everything that you
Speaker 3: said is going to make an appearance except for fondue.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna have to like really go back to
Speaker 3: the drying board on.
Speaker 2: That well, reconvenience.
Speaker 3: I also don't know if I've ever had fondue, So
Speaker 3: maybe I need to go like try it or something. Anyway,
Speaker 3: this episode is going to be about what I would
Speaker 3: like loosely call counter cuisine. Counter cuisine is what Warren Blasco,
Speaker 3: who wrote a book on the subject called Appetite for Change,
Speaker 3: calls the food of the hippie movement and counterculture of
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties and seventies. And we're going to focus
Speaker 3: on food and the leftist and anarchistrans of the broader counterculture.
Speaker 3: But it's still kind of going to be about hippies,
Speaker 3: and it's a the two parter actually has a different
Speaker 3: focus on each each side of the part. But we're
Speaker 3: going to start by talking about the Diggers. Oh so,
Speaker 3: I'm your response, Sophie made me think you had no.
Speaker 1: No, I just got excited.
Speaker 2: I want to make over the topic.
Speaker 3: I yeah, So I want to start with the San
Speaker 3: Francisco the English. I'm pretty sure they no, I do. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I did mention that you have done an episode on
Speaker 3: the English Jiggers before and that people can go back
Speaker 3: and listen to it. And then it's with John dar
Speaker 3: Now from the Mountain Goats. But no, we're going to
Speaker 3: talk about the San Francisco Diggers and the San Francisco Diggers,
Speaker 3: they actually were inspired by the original Diggers, And just
Speaker 3: in case listeners haven't heard that episode, the original Diggers
Speaker 3: were seventeenth century English communalists. They occupied a hill outside
Speaker 3: London and planted it with beans, carrots, and other veggies,
Speaker 3: and they wrote these really radical pamphlets about how quote
Speaker 3: unquote the earth should be a common treasury for all.
Speaker 3: And the San Francisco Diggers named themselves after these original Diggers,
Speaker 3: and they drew a lot of influence from them. I
Speaker 3: should say that you could do like an entire episode
Speaker 3: on the San Francisco Diggers. They did so much in
Speaker 3: the three short years they existed. But as a food
Speaker 3: history nerd, I mostly interested in their outsized impact on
Speaker 3: food based mutual aid. So this segment is going to
Speaker 3: focus on that. But I do want to start with
Speaker 3: a little bit of background so we know, like who
Speaker 3: the Diggers are and how they showed up on this scene.
Speaker 3: So the Diggers were first and foremost a theater and
Speaker 3: they were formed by members of the San Francisco Meme Troop,
Speaker 3: which apparently is spelled like mime but pronounced like meme
Speaker 3: and I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, well, like mimetic right, No, I don't know how
Speaker 2: use no eight memetic is spelled like meme, the internet thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have no idea, but I've heard it pronounces
Speaker 3: the San Francisco Meme Troop, which is interesting to me. Okay,
Speaker 3: but they were but they were like mimean they Yeah,
Speaker 3: they did other street theater as well.
Speaker 2: Okay, they weren't just like putting like captions under photos
Speaker 2: and then posting them up around places.
Speaker 3: I mean no, but they kind of were doing like
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties version of those sick Okay, cool, you know,
Speaker 3: and the Diggers will too, Like they're all about like
Speaker 3: thinking about how the message gets across. I admittedly don't
Speaker 3: know as much about the Meme Troop as I do
Speaker 3: about the Diggers, but from what I can tell, they
Speaker 3: that is a through line in both of these projects. Okay,
Speaker 3: So they were formed by members of the Meme Troop
Speaker 3: in fall nineteen sixty six. The Troops started nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 3: It performed free political satire and it still exists actually
Speaker 3: and continues to perform around California. Peter Coyote, one of
Speaker 3: the founders of the Diggers, credits the troupe with introducing
Speaker 3: him to a way of looking at the world and
Speaker 3: analyzing it according to inherently Marxist principles. And he said
Speaker 3: that this education was it wasn't necessarily doctor naire but
Speaker 3: analysis class capital. Who owned what, who did what, who
Speaker 3: worked for what? Okay? So, in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty six, members of the Meme Troop established an organization
Speaker 3: working with others called the Artists Liberation Front. The ALF,
Speaker 3: not to be confused with the ALF, opposed the established
Speaker 3: art worlds and big art foundations, and they were planning
Speaker 3: a street art fair and some future Diggers were involved
Speaker 3: in these planning efforts, and while called the Digger contingent,
Speaker 3: got really upset when other members of the ALF wanted
Speaker 3: to let vendors sell things like food at these fairs.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, everything's free.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They were like everything should be free. Yeah. They
Speaker 3: believed in a gift economy where everything should be given
Speaker 3: away for free. And that was like the line in
Speaker 3: the sand that they drew. So they split off. And
Speaker 3: one of the first things they did, is Diggers, was
Speaker 3: to circulate these mimeograph broadsides. And no one is entirely
Speaker 3: sure what the first broadside was, but the Digger Archives
Speaker 3: website argues that it was one called time to Forget,
Speaker 3: and Time to Forget, Like many of their broadsides, is
Speaker 3: pretty snarky and sarcastic. It starts with a list of
Speaker 3: things that the reader should quote unquote forget, such as
Speaker 3: forget the war and Vietnam flowers are lovely, and forget
Speaker 3: police brutality. The cops are your friends. All sarcastic, of course.
Speaker 3: Then in all caps it reads You're free to forget,
Speaker 3: so forget follow the calm business tactics of the Psychedelic Shop,
Speaker 3: the I Am Thou and all other marketeers of expanded
Speaker 3: consciousness and dig yourself tech reality only for sex, only
Speaker 3: to eat, and only to join the Artists Liberation Front
Speaker 3: for your own.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it was all basically like fuck sellout hippies
Speaker 2: is where it comes from.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yeah, So it starts with that as sort
Speaker 3: of the root. Yeah, and I should mention here that
Speaker 3: some of the Digger broadsides use what we might cultated language.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to share any of it in this episode,
Speaker 3: but it feels important to acknowledge, and it's also like
Speaker 3: a broader thing you see within contraculture movements of the
Speaker 3: sixties and seventies, where largely though not exclusively white, groups
Speaker 3: like the Diggers would reclaim words in the service of
Speaker 3: what they saw solidarity, but they weren't really like their
Speaker 3: words to reclaim right. And there was plenty of misogyny
Speaker 3: within these movements too. This is kind of my disclaimer section.
Speaker 3: We'll talk more about misogyny later. It's something that'll come
Speaker 3: up more in Part two when we're talking about food
Speaker 3: co ops. Just a few things to be aware of.
Speaker 3: And while this doesn't come up directly, there's also just
Speaker 3: in general, a lot of cultural appropriation happening in the counterculture,
Speaker 3: especially appropriation of religious practices from South and East Asia,
Speaker 3: So that feels important to acknowledge too.
Speaker 2: Well. Like the guy's name that you started with was
Speaker 2: like something coyote, and was he a white guy or
Speaker 2: was he indigenous?
Speaker 3: Like he was not? No, And yeah, and you see
Speaker 3: that a lot of the people who started the Diggers
Speaker 3: actually were like working class kids from New York City.
Speaker 3: And I don't go into that too much because one
Speaker 3: thing I really wanted to do is sort of destabilize
Speaker 3: this idea of like figureheads around the Diggers because that
Speaker 3: happens a lot, and it's just like the small handful
Speaker 3: of men. So I mention a few of them, but
Speaker 3: I don't talk about them. But that is where a
Speaker 3: lot of them, yeah from ok so, yeah, and I
Speaker 3: believe that was true of Peter Coyote as well, but
Speaker 3: I would fact check me on that. So. So, around
Speaker 3: the same time the Diggers started distributing these broadsides, a
Speaker 3: police officer murdered Matthew Johnson, a black teenager in the
Speaker 3: San Francisco neighborhood of Hunter's Point. This led to what's
Speaker 3: now called the Hunter's Point Uprising, which included six days
Speaker 3: of revolts, and Hunter's Point is often just decribed as
Speaker 3: a forgotten uprising, but it did inspire two young radicals
Speaker 3: to form what would become a very well known organization.
Speaker 3: Any idea what that might be?
Speaker 2: This is the Black Panthers. Yep, yeah, the community college kids, right, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seal formed the
Speaker 3: Black Panthers in October nineteen sixty six, partly in response
Speaker 3: to the Hunter's Point Uprising pretty much immediately after it,
Speaker 3: and the Panthers will come up again in this episode.
Speaker 3: It's basically impossible to talk about nineteen sixties radical politics,
Speaker 3: especially in the Bay Area, without mentioning them. But I
Speaker 3: also know that you've done a whole episode on them before,
Speaker 3: so listeners can go find that as well. And during
Speaker 3: the Hunter's Point uprising, the Diggers performed puppet shows on
Speaker 3: the street making fun of the National Guard, and they
Speaker 3: also gave way free food.
Speaker 2: And they're making fun of the National Guard. I can't
Speaker 2: remember if this is before or after the Kent stayed upright,
Speaker 2: it must be before Kent still, yeah, but it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're making fun of armed people who are going to
Speaker 2: shoot some people and their move in pretty soon, so
Speaker 2: it's like, not a it's not nothing when you talk
Speaker 2: about making fun of like the National Guard in the street.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, And I don't know more about this because
Speaker 3: I found it as like one one thrower wayline in
Speaker 3: one source. But they yeah, it wasn't nothing, for sure.
Speaker 3: And while they technically began before Hunter's Point, a lot
Speaker 3: of people cite this uprising is when the Diggers really
Speaker 3: started to gain traction and really started to do the
Speaker 3: work that they would become known for. So soon after
Speaker 3: two Diggers, Billy Murcott and Emmitt Grogan started daily free
Speaker 3: meals that they called feeds in the panhandle of Golden
Speaker 3: Gate Park. They had both lost their sources of income
Speaker 3: and they wanted access to food and figured other people
Speaker 3: might too. It's always nice to have food. They went
Speaker 3: to the produce market and got donations of chicken, turkey,
Speaker 3: and leftover vegetables, but didn't have access to a kitchen
Speaker 3: and they needed to find a place to cook the food,
Speaker 3: so they went and stole two twenty gallon milk cans
Speaker 3: from an industrial dairy and cooked a stew right there
Speaker 3: in the panhandle. Hell yeah. They also created a flyer
Speaker 3: to advertise this first feed, which included what's now perhaps
Speaker 3: the most famous Digger slogan, which is it's free because
Speaker 3: it's yours.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, Yes, I really like the idea of like, man,
Speaker 2: we're hungry. I've got an idea, let's feed everyone by
Speaker 2: getting donations. Like I love that, like can do attitude,
Speaker 2: and I also love the like instead of it being
Speaker 2: like other people are hungry, it was like, what are
Speaker 2: we going to eat today? I know, let's start a movement.
Speaker 3: Totally And yeah, it really came from them, you know,
Speaker 3: not having a source of income and really wanting to
Speaker 3: eat as well. Right, So it starts in this very
Speaker 3: true mutual aid based moment, not like a yeah, not
Speaker 3: this charity kind of model. So at one early feed,
Speaker 3: some diggers jumped out of a fan and as they
Speaker 3: distributed meat, produce, and bread, they yelled, food is the medium?
Speaker 3: Does this phrase or mind you of anything? Uh?
Speaker 2: The medium is the mess? No, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yes it actually is that. Yeah, okay. So
Speaker 3: it's an echo of Marshall mclewin's the medium is the message.
Speaker 3: He was a Canadian media theorist who became really popular
Speaker 3: within the counterculture, which is funny because he was also
Speaker 3: this stodgy Catholic dude who is like much older than
Speaker 3: everyone else. But he argued that, to quote www dot
Speaker 3: Marshall mcluwin dot com, the message of any medium or
Speaker 3: technology is the chain of scale or pace of pattern
Speaker 3: it introduces into human affairs. So Free Digger Meals used
Speaker 3: the excess of waste of capitalism to nourish and modeled
Speaker 3: a slower pace of life and a coming together of community.
Speaker 3: They also reclaimed anti capitalist patterns of space use by
Speaker 3: feeding people in a public park outside of the framework
Speaker 3: of for profit restaurants and grocery stores. So they're really
Speaker 3: taking these media theory ideas from mc lwin and from
Speaker 3: other people and trying to put them into Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're very like they're sort of like relationship between theory
Speaker 3: and on the groundwork is really it's like firing.
Speaker 2: To me, the most cliche word is practice, but this
Speaker 2: is just like literally it. It is where theory and
Speaker 2: practice meet. They're not like, oh, we should just do
Speaker 2: things or we should just think about things. They're like,
Speaker 2: we should think about things and then do things.
Speaker 3: Yeah good, exactly, yeah, yeah yeah, and constantly be thinking
Speaker 3: and rethinking about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah coo.
Speaker 3: The Diggers incorporate it, so they incorporate other aspects of
Speaker 3: their cultural work into the feeds. These included theater. They
Speaker 3: would screw on stupids really tightly to force diners out
Speaker 3: of passivity. They'd have to like grapple with them to
Speaker 3: open the stupids.
Speaker 2: Fucking nerds, I know.
Speaker 3: And then Emmitt Grogan and Billy Murcott also built a
Speaker 3: giant frame of reference. So it was this giant doorway
Speaker 3: painted a golden orange that diners had to walk through
Speaker 3: before they were able to eat nerds, and the idea
Speaker 3: is that the feeds, they'd have to leave quote unquote
Speaker 3: consumer culture at the door and instead fully participate pat
Speaker 3: in the ideals of the gift economy. Yeah, they were
Speaker 3: total nervous.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And Digger papers were also distributed at the feed
Speaker 3: These Digger papers were made by secretly using the mimeograph
Speaker 3: machine in the Students for a Democratic Society offices in
Speaker 3: a building that belonged to the San Francisco Meme troop,
Speaker 3: which is really funny to me. Did Yeah, It's like,
Speaker 3: fuck you, dad, we're using the minograph.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So one of my favorite papers is called take a
Speaker 3: Cop to Dinner, And I'm kind of cheating because it
Speaker 3: was printed in September nineteen sixty six before the feeds began,
Speaker 3: but it's food related, so I'm going to talk about it.
Speaker 3: So the background is the owner of a psychedelic shop
Speaker 3: in the hate Ashbury posted a take a Cop to
Speaker 3: Dinner sign in his store window in an attempt to
Speaker 3: try and build bridges with the cops, which inspired other
Speaker 3: neighborhood business owners to do the same. The diggers, Yeah,
Speaker 3: who understandably hated the cops, and critiqued the local merchants
Speaker 3: for their continued investment in consumer cap decided to respond,
Speaker 3: and you can see a scan of this broadside on
Speaker 3: the Digger's Archive, which is a website that has a
Speaker 3: ton of Digger materials on it, and it starts with
Speaker 3: a very strange poem about genitals and hydrogen bombs, which
Speaker 3: I'm not going to read because why. But then the
Speaker 3: broadside lists the boys various people and organizations from racketeers
Speaker 3: to unions to the Catholic Church and Department of Justice
Speaker 3: bribe cops to encourage them to turn a blind eye
Speaker 3: to things that were technically illegal but in the service
Speaker 3: of upholding power. So the Broadside becomes more and more
Speaker 3: specific and ultimately calling out Theelin Psychedelic Shop and then
Speaker 3: nearby I Thou Coffee Shop, before ending the list with
Speaker 3: cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots. And this
Speaker 3: is printed and distributed in the weeks before the Hunter's
Speaker 3: Point uprising, which seems to gesture the fact that there was,
Speaker 3: you know, this feeling in the city even before this
Speaker 3: uprising happened about what was going on with the police.
Speaker 3: They also distributed leaflets for other events at their feeds,
Speaker 3: such as is the one for the Intersection game, which
Speaker 3: was held on Halloween nineteen sixty six. They invited pedestrians
Speaker 3: to walk in geometric shapes at the intersection of Hate
Speaker 3: Nashbury to disrupt the flow of automobile traffic. And this
Speaker 3: is really successful. Around six hundred people showed up to play.
Speaker 3: It caused a giant traffic jam, and five diggers were arrested.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is like so they're like writing sigils
Speaker 2: with their bodies in motion, like in the street. Is
Speaker 2: that the I think so?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of yeah, walking in these funny shapes
Speaker 3: in order to, yeah, just to like tie up traffic.
Speaker 2: He there's that like kind of meme of like the
Speaker 2: circle of protection from a self driving car where you
Speaker 2: like drive the like yellow line, you like paint the
Speaker 2: yellow line around the car and then the car can't
Speaker 2: leave because it can't cross the yellow line or whatever.
Speaker 3: You know. I haven't seen that, but that's brilliant.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, and this just feels like that for
Speaker 2: the six Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, they really do feel like even though we're
Speaker 3: talking about food and how their predecessor of you know,
Speaker 3: spoiler alert things like food, not bombs. They're also kind
Speaker 3: of a predecessor of meme culture, so that's like an
Speaker 3: interesting tie in. So I've read a bunch of times
Speaker 3: that the Digger Feeds inspired the Black Panther breakfast program.
Speaker 3: It's always felt like a stretch to me, or like
Speaker 3: the story was more complicated. And then I found a
Speaker 3: video of Digger Kent Minnault where he talks about meeting UEP.
Speaker 3: Newton in fall nineteen sixty six. Newton did tell him
Speaker 3: he had heard of the Digger Feeds and implied that
Speaker 3: he found them inspired, but followed that up by taking
Speaker 3: Minault around Oakland and talking about the Black panthers plans
Speaker 3: to serve kids a fortifying breakfast before school. Newton also
Speaker 3: pointed out the yards of certain houses and mentioned that
Speaker 3: he'd been talking to the women who own them about
Speaker 3: using them to grow fresh food. So it's possible that
Speaker 3: the Black Panthers took some inspiration from the Diggers, but
Speaker 3: as Minault says in the video, the Panthers' ideas were
Speaker 3: much more system than those of the Diggers, and the
Speaker 3: Panthers definitely inspired the Diggers in turn, so it's definitely
Speaker 3: a two way street.
Speaker 2: And you know what else is a two way street
Speaker 2: that's alts wrongcoming from you. I know, I loved it.
Speaker 2: Medium is the message as relates to advertising. Help me
Speaker 2: out here.
Speaker 1: It's time for ad breaks unless you have coolers on media.
Speaker 2: So yeah, here's ads maybe, and we're back.
Speaker 3: So the feats continued regularly until February nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 3: when they started to peter off. There are a lot
Speaker 3: of reasons why this happened. There were population pressures as
Speaker 3: young people from around the country flocked to the hate Ashbury,
Speaker 3: which is what would result in the Summer of Love
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 2: Which I totally knew was nineteen sixty seven. I totally
Speaker 2: didn't have to completely change my brain to.
Speaker 3: Be sixty nine, right, but apparently sixty seven.
Speaker 2: I'm a good history I'm not a historian. I'm a
Speaker 2: pop his history writer. Anyway.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing the thing too, is like the thing
Speaker 3: about doing a lot of food history is often I'll
Speaker 3: know about the food stuff, but not about everything else. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so there's actually not too much more I could tell
Speaker 3: you about the Summer of Love besides the fact that
Speaker 3: it was in nineteen sixty seven. So yeah, okay, no worried.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we all knew. Everyone knew that it was
Speaker 2: sixty seven, not sixty nine. Absolutely, Okay, now that actually
Speaker 2: makes sense because then it was like, yeah, that's like
Speaker 2: where it because it kind of, as I'm under the impression,
Speaker 2: a lot of hipie stuff sort of like really started
Speaker 2: in the Bay Area and spread out, so it was
Speaker 2: like probably more generalized by sixty nine or something. This
Speaker 2: is me talking out of my ass totally.
Speaker 3: That is Yeah, that is the impression I get, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that it spread out, and then you're getting to sixty nine,
Speaker 3: you're getting a lot of repression, You're getting a lot
Speaker 3: of breakdown in the Bay Area. But then again, there
Speaker 3: are like many people in this world who know way
Speaker 3: more about this than me, So I'm just making it,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of making an educated guest based on
Speaker 3: what I know about the Diggers and related projects.
Speaker 2: I'm like annoyed because I've done like probably yeah, probably
Speaker 2: like twenty episodes total, like including like multiple parts or
Speaker 2: whatever related to late sixties early seventies movements in the US,
Speaker 2: but I haven't covered this, like the Summer of Love stuff,
Speaker 2: So I'm like, I don't know, I haven't read those
Speaker 2: books yet.
Speaker 3: Maybe it needs to happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, ye yeah.
Speaker 3: I actually had a bunch of places in the script
Speaker 3: where I was like, you could do a whole episode off,
Speaker 3: and then I like edited most of them out.
Speaker 2: No, because I thought you should pitch it to me.
Speaker 3: It's actually just me me pitching other episodes. Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 3: another reason that there was a crackdown. City authorities were
Speaker 3: cracking down on free food distributions and ordered produce suppliers
Speaker 3: a stop donating to the diggers, whoa classic repression for
Speaker 3: the city government. But there is another reason that regular
Speaker 3: feeds stopped. Can you think of what group of people
Speaker 3: might have done most of the cooking and had to
Speaker 3: do a disproportionate amount of the labor.
Speaker 2: It's probably some group that I wouldn't even be able
Speaker 2: to think of, because no one ever thinks of, like yeah,
Speaker 2: like whatever the opposite of men is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't even know what that is. No or no, Sophie, do.
Speaker 2: You happen to know any of this? Never heard of it?
Speaker 3: Okay? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, yes, as we're jokingly gesturing
Speaker 3: at it was the women who were involved.
Speaker 4: Women.
Speaker 3: You do say there were women?
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so cool?
Speaker 3: I know right. Women were responsible for cooking as well
Speaker 3: as procuring food for the feeds, which at one point
Speaker 3: were daily and regularly served up to two hundred people,
Speaker 3: which is a ton of work.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: As I was researching this, I was thinking about how
Speaker 3: I'm part of Autonomous Community Center here in Tucson, the BCC,
Speaker 3: where we do weekly meals that feed up to forty
Speaker 3: or fifty people, and every one's in a blue moon.
Speaker 3: I sign up to cook and it feels like a lot.
Speaker 3: So I can't imagine doing that every single day.
Speaker 2: No, So for like your shitty boyfriend who's just on drugs,
Speaker 2: who's like, come on, don't you care about the cause?
Speaker 3: Totally? Yeah, who's making all the broadsides? And you know,
Speaker 3: there definitely was this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the men got to be thinkers and the women
Speaker 3: had to do a lot of the grunt work.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker 3: So a great example of this is that even though
Speaker 3: Emmett Grogan claimed that he got all the food for
Speaker 3: the feeds, Our Pale Peter Coyote wrote about how the
Speaker 3: digger women would actually collect the donations because the produce
Speaker 3: venders were more inclined to give food to them than
Speaker 3: to the men. Yeah, and yeah, It's also really funny
Speaker 3: because a lot of the things that I saw were
Speaker 3: like these burly Italian men at the produce market only
Speaker 3: want to give food to the women, which I thought
Speaker 3: was kind of hilarious in a vague like leaning into
Speaker 3: ethnic stereotypes way, but it might have happened. I read
Speaker 3: an oral history with a digger named Judy Goldhoff, who
Speaker 3: is one of the women who would go down to
Speaker 3: the produce market. She also talks about gleaning in nearby
Speaker 3: agricultural fields, so they would go out and gather produce, yeah,
Speaker 3: like zucchini and onions that get left behind during the
Speaker 3: mechanical harvesting process. And she also mentions a number of
Speaker 3: women who were involved in the feeds, including a group
Speaker 3: of students either like from Antioch College on break or
Speaker 3: dropouts that wasn't totally clear to me but had come
Speaker 3: from Antioch College, as well as someone named Nina Blasenheim.
Speaker 3: And Blasenheim comes up a bunch of times in these
Speaker 3: oral history interviews as bottom lining the feeds, but I
Speaker 3: haven't been able to find out more about her, but
Speaker 3: I do want to name her again, Nina Blasenheim, because
Speaker 3: according to these women, she did really important work making
Speaker 3: these feeds happen. The poet Dianda Primo was also involved
Speaker 3: in the Diggers, and I will admit that I wrote
Speaker 3: more about this in an article for gastro Obscura, but
Speaker 3: I'm not going to go a ton into it for
Speaker 3: contractual reasons.
Speaker 2: Ah fine, I needed you. You wrote one of my
Speaker 2: favorite pieces of poetry ever. The it takes all of
Speaker 2: us pushing on this from every direction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, her revolutionary letters are amazing. You should read them.
Speaker 3: She's one of my favorite poets. I have a tattoo
Speaker 3: of one of her lines of poetry. So I'm a
Speaker 3: huge dand a Prima fan. And her involvement with the
Speaker 3: Diggers was pretty peripheral, but it is interesting and you
Speaker 3: can find stuff about that online. I was like working
Speaker 3: on that piece and this at the same time and
Speaker 3: got into kind of sticky like they need to be
Speaker 3: different scopes kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Is that piece out yet that people can read it is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's on gastro Obscura, so you should be able
Speaker 3: to find it just googling like gastro Obscura Diggers.
Speaker 2: Or yeah or run awry, Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know whatever you want to google. So even after
Speaker 3: the feed started to wane in spring nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 3: The Diggers continue to do mutual aid. In addition to
Speaker 3: their spectacles, parades, and other theatrical events, they open free
Speaker 3: stores that offered clothing and products that were procured both
Speaker 3: through donation and theft. Oh yeah, and when police would
Speaker 3: inquire about who was in charge of these stores, the Diggers,
Speaker 3: in true anarchist fashion, would tell them that if they
Speaker 3: wanted to see someone in charge, they'd have to be
Speaker 3: the one in charge. They'd basically be like, there are
Speaker 3: no managers, you're the manager. They would also invite people
Speaker 3: to take turns being the manager of the store, which
Speaker 3: from what I can tell, mostly meant helping customers find
Speaker 3: what they were looking for, suggesting clothing, things like that.
Speaker 3: They also operated at least one crash pad to house
Speaker 3: the young people pouring into the hate ashbery, so a
Speaker 3: housing space that people could stay at and living.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned because earlier the only specific political ideology
Speaker 2: you've named with them as like Marxism from the alf
Speaker 2: the thing they came before. In my research, which was
Speaker 2: very minimal, but I read about the Diggers as an
Speaker 2: explicitly anarchist organization. Do you know like when that shift happened,
Speaker 2: or if it was like a little bit more loose
Speaker 2: than that, it was just like whatever, we clearly don't
Speaker 2: want anyone in charge, and we just use marks for
Speaker 2: like a way of understanding the way that like economics works.
Speaker 3: Or Yeah. So from my reading, which I think once
Speaker 3: again somebody else could go way more into this side
Speaker 3: of things. But they were a lot of what they
Speaker 3: were doing was really rooted in everyday life, right, and
Speaker 3: so they were very anarchist in their approach. But a
Speaker 3: lot of the writing they were doing, a lot of
Speaker 3: the theory and discussions they were having had more to
Speaker 3: do with what was happening on the ground in San Francisco. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I would say that from what I can glean,
Speaker 3: they were definitely an anarchist project. They were also, like
Speaker 3: so many radicals at the time, super Marxist influence. I
Speaker 3: would say that they were they were mostly anarchists. I
Speaker 3: would define them. That is the label that makes the
Speaker 3: most sense. Okay, but it does feel a little bit
Speaker 3: loosey goosey, like I'm not sure if every digger would
Speaker 3: identify that way, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that that makes sense to me, And yeah,
Speaker 2: that that tracks, And this is an interesting I like
Speaker 2: that everyone's the manager, but I like how it like
Speaker 2: runs up against this hard wall when you're like you're
Speaker 2: the manager and like, no, don't make a cop the manager.
Speaker 2: I have one rule, I know, totally. Yeah, but also
Speaker 2: it probably like scares that no cop is going to
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, that's right, I am the manager here now, right,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel like they had this really like a
Speaker 3: whole huge thing about disorientation, right, so they're disorienting this guy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, just throwing him into confusion.
Speaker 2: No, I like it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they also continued food based projects. A lot
Speaker 3: of the work that Dan Daprima did was from this
Speaker 3: later era. She moved after the feeds had ended. Flyers
Speaker 3: from this era show free distribution of lettuce and information
Speaker 3: about Digger sponsored spaghetti dinners held at local churches. A
Speaker 3: lot of the flyers were handwritten on one B yob
Speaker 3: stands for bring your own bowl, which I thought was
Speaker 3: pretty funny. And also during their feeds they would often
Speaker 3: ask people to bring their own bowl. And there's lots
Speaker 3: of ideas about why this was. Some people are just
Speaker 3: like they didn't have bowls, and other people are like
Speaker 3: they wanted to make sure people were like active participants
Speaker 3: and not passively eating.
Speaker 2: I can tell you why. I think it was. So
Speaker 2: there's all I used to eat at and cook for
Speaker 2: a lot of different food up bombs, and the one
Speaker 2: that I went to that eventually was like, now, whatever,
Speaker 2: you have to bring your own dish was so that
Speaker 2: they didn't have to wash all the dishes.
Speaker 3: See that makes so much sense, And it's so funny
Speaker 3: to me because I also have done similar things throughout
Speaker 3: my life and I was so deep in the history
Speaker 3: that that never.
Speaker 2: Occurred to me. No, No, I mean yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sure. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's participatory, yes,
Speaker 2: participatory doing the fucking dishes. Like yeah. I was like, however,
Speaker 2: I was like really angry about it. I was like
Speaker 2: I was probably twenty one, and I was like, this
Speaker 2: creates a barrier, you know, and like yeah, because you know,
Speaker 2: not everyone who's going without a house is like carrying
Speaker 2: around a bowl or whatever. But honestly, most people are.
Speaker 3: And in a lot of photos, there's some amazing photos
Speaker 3: in the Digger archives, the early feeds, and you see
Speaker 3: people eating out of like soup cans all sorts, of
Speaker 3: recycled material. I do think they did down the line
Speaker 3: start providing things for people to eat out of. But yeah,
Speaker 3: people were very improvisational with what was a bowl.
Speaker 2: Cool. I've definitely eaten food ut bombs on a car
Speaker 2: on a piece of cardboard, oh totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, or the like empty bean can.
Speaker 2: Yeah totally.
Speaker 3: So now we're going to get to bread, and we're
Speaker 3: going to touch a little bit on some whole wheat
Speaker 3: bread stuff, although I think different from what you went
Speaker 3: into before. So we're going to talk about digger bread.
Speaker 3: Have you ever heard of the digger bread recipe?
Speaker 2: Is it involved dipping it in melted cheese. This is
Speaker 2: my attempt to bring spot.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're not having a font you were trying
Speaker 1: to bring up doing to it all.
Speaker 2: The only thing I know about digger bread is I
Speaker 2: have this I have this understanding that could be totally
Speaker 2: wrong that the reason that like old grain and whole
Speaker 2: wheat bread is popular in like healthy food in the
Speaker 2: United States period is because of some weird anarchists in
Speaker 2: the Bay and the sixties, along with Tide. Those are
Speaker 2: like the things that I'm like aware of or have
Speaker 2: been told that they influenced.
Speaker 3: I'm so glad you brought that up, because admittedly, when
Speaker 3: I was writing this script, there were definitely things that
Speaker 3: had to stay on the cutting room floor. And I
Speaker 3: have read about the influence of the Diggers and wholl
Speaker 3: weat bread and then was struggling to like find it
Speaker 3: again and didn't want to put something in. I couldn't
Speaker 3: one hundred percent cite.
Speaker 2: Okay, well I'll claim it apocryphaly.
Speaker 3: But I'm pretty sure that that, Yeah, they had this
Speaker 3: huge influence on whole wheat bread across the country. The
Speaker 3: Diggers also had a huge they like popularized tide in
Speaker 3: within the United States. It did draw on more traditional
Speaker 3: forms of dying I believe from Southeast Asia, but I'm
Speaker 3: not totally sure. But yeah, that's also another thing that
Speaker 3: someone could look into excited about.
Speaker 2: I can never be excited about that.
Speaker 3: I don't know, well, I know, and.
Speaker 2: I feel like so it's like all the like metal
Speaker 2: heads I know are really into tight I and I'm
Speaker 2: I'm like just slightly too old because I was around
Speaker 2: the worst era of hippies, which is the early nineties
Speaker 2: and like mid nineties hippies, the like yeah, pale end
Speaker 2: of the Grateful Dead the most like consumerist, burned out,
Speaker 2: like apolitical, misogynist hippies in the world. It from my
Speaker 2: point of view, and so I have this like really
Speaker 2: deep like fuck that version of hippie. And so the
Speaker 2: version of hippie that I like is when you like,
Speaker 2: look and they all look like medieval peasants. I'm like
Speaker 2: that shit rules. You could be in a cult, you know,
Speaker 2: I say, with my hood on, I'm wearing all black.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I think that from what I can tell,
Speaker 3: the Diggers look exactly like what we think of as
Speaker 3: the worst kind of hippie, which is interesting to think
Speaker 3: about because because they're awesome, that they're awesome. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: a lot of people, a lot of hippies of that
Speaker 3: era were awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And you know, like all things, it gets co opted
Speaker 3: and watered down, yea, all things within the you know,
Speaker 3: within our like super capitalist United States. Yeah, it gets
Speaker 3: becomes this other thing totally.
Speaker 2: And the fact that I'm angry about what happened when
Speaker 2: I was fourteen should have no influence on whether or
Speaker 2: not a doom metal band wants to make a tid
Speaker 2: eye version of their shirt. And I actually think, I
Speaker 2: actually think it's cool that it's coming back. I'm just like,
Speaker 2: it's like not quite for me, even though I love
Speaker 2: natural dying and all that stuff. Like I have a
Speaker 2: whole bucket of black walnut rhinds that I'm going to
Speaker 2: die some of my dresses with next.
Speaker 3: Week, but they're not going to be like black walnut
Speaker 3: tied addresses.
Speaker 2: No, although I'm like, what if I just tried to
Speaker 2: get over it by like, No, I probably won't. I
Speaker 2: don't think that's going to happen anyway.
Speaker 3: Then this is a great time waiting. This is a
Speaker 3: great time to talk about my boots. I'd like to
Speaker 3: talk about my boots.
Speaker 2: Is that okay, Le's talk about your So.
Speaker 3: I have this pair of boots that I originally got
Speaker 3: because a friend's kid was having her bot mitzvah and
Speaker 3: she asked everyone to wear like flowery things. And I
Speaker 3: really really love a clothing assignment from a child. It's
Speaker 3: one of my favorite things. And so I went all
Speaker 3: out and I found at a thrift store these Doc Martin's,
Speaker 3: except that they have like hippie paisley flower print all
Speaker 3: over them, and I don't wear them very much because
Speaker 3: anyone who knows me knows that I mostly wear all black,
Speaker 3: but I put them on today because it felt appropriate.
Speaker 1: Don Are you going to at some point for us,
Speaker 1: because because.
Speaker 3: Yeah I can, I can totally wait, I'm really clumsy,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to try to do this.
Speaker 2: I see the side they do. They look really fucking cool.
Speaker 2: Enough about it, now, you'll know that I've finally gotten
Speaker 2: over self consciousness. When my hair is just in a
Speaker 2: crown braid with flowers in it. That's when you know
Speaker 2: I'm just like finally just like see, you would look
Speaker 2: really fucking cool.
Speaker 3: I know totally you would. I highly recommend. Anyways, Yeah,
Speaker 3: we'll support. So back to bread. In June nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 3: a few months after the feed stopp happening regularly, some Diggers,
Speaker 3: who were baking alongside Ruth and Walt Reynolds, who were
Speaker 3: volunteers at All Saints' Church, turned four hundred pounds of
Speaker 3: flour and a bunch of other ingredients into a whole
Speaker 3: wheat bread, which they distributed to residents of they hate Ashbury.
Speaker 3: The event was super successful, and the Diggers soon opened
Speaker 3: a regular free bakery out of the church. It distributed
Speaker 3: about two hundred loaves each on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: I've been challenged to do an ad break by my
Speaker 3: very charming and clever podcaster friends, but I feel like
Speaker 3: the diggers would just be like, it's free because it's yours.
Speaker 3: So maybe as you listen to these ads, if they're
Speaker 3: for anything that you have to pay for, I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe you think about how you don't have to pay
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, I couldn't.
Speaker 1: As somebody who recently can't eat gluten, and all gluten
Speaker 1: things are more expensive than non gluten things, I think
Speaker 1: non gluten bread should be free too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right, this this podcast is brought to you by
Speaker 2: free bread of glutenous and non glutenous varieties. And if
Speaker 2: any other ad creeps in and it's not for something free,
Speaker 2: that was a mistake and we're back. Oh okay, but wait,
Speaker 2: so you're talking about all this. I think what's really
Speaker 2: interesting you talk about how like there was like cross
Speaker 2: they didn't influence the Black Panther's free breakfast program, but
Speaker 2: both were aware of each other, right, yes, yeah, and
Speaker 2: both of them well the feed wasn't, but the both
Speaker 2: were out of churches. And this is the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that I feel like sometimes gets left out of history.
Speaker 2: Is like when when radicals go over it, it's like, no,
Speaker 2: that's actually that, that's not nothing, that's not a meaningless detail,
Speaker 2: you know that. It was totally It was out of
Speaker 2: this church that was like, sure, you all can come
Speaker 2: bake four hundred loaves of bread a week here.
Speaker 3: Totally. Yeah, And I can't remember what kind of church
Speaker 3: it was, but it was some kind of I grew
Speaker 3: up in New York, where there the Protestant population is
Speaker 3: not huge, and growing up, I used to call them
Speaker 3: love your neighbor Protestants.
Speaker 2: So like instead of the Evangelicals or whatever.
Speaker 3: No, but like the you know, social justice oriented like
Speaker 3: really awesome sort of uh, you know, I don't know
Speaker 3: that much about it, but like theologies that are centered
Speaker 3: around liberation of all people's versus like trying to take
Speaker 3: away everyone's right and that. I don't remember exactly what
Speaker 3: the All Saints' Church was, but they were certainly of that.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, yeah, at.
Speaker 3: Least said the time. Yeah. So, but but the kitchen
Speaker 3: and the church didn't have baking trays. So Reynolds had
Speaker 3: this idea that they could use coffee cans to bake
Speaker 3: the bread. Oh and I find this part really interesting
Speaker 3: because even though it seems like it was just a
Speaker 3: practical solution to lack of baking trays, and it probably was,
Speaker 3: it meant that the bread was literally made in packaging
Speaker 3: for a beverage that played an intrinsic part in the
Speaker 3: rise of capitalism, the very capitalism that the Diggers so apused.
Speaker 3: And so I kind of wanted to do a brief
Speaker 3: coffee and capitalism.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's do it as a non coffee drinker. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna feel so good at the end of this, or
Speaker 2: I'm gonna feel really bad. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like neither. I feel like we're all the
Speaker 3: products of history in such complex ways.
Speaker 2: No, I don't do anything literally, she said after introducing ads.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Sorry, go ahead, this is like the one paragraph
Speaker 3: version of like books have been written about this. So
Speaker 3: coffee came to Europe from the Arab world, and it
Speaker 3: caught on in the seventeenth century in like Western Europe,
Speaker 3: it started to replace alcohol as the everyday drink, so
Speaker 3: instead of being slightly drunk all the time, people in
Speaker 3: Europe were caffeinated and able to work longer hours and
Speaker 3: also talk really fast. Coffee houses.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Do you like that? I wrote a joke into the
Speaker 3: script because I was like, Sophie and Margaret are so
Speaker 3: good at jokes, I'm gonna have to, like, you know,
Speaker 3: keep up with the Joneses. No, No, it's good, my
Speaker 3: very very cheesy coffee joke. Yeah. Coffee houses became popular
Speaker 3: in London under Cromwell and the London Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2: No, he's a demon. He comes up as is evil
Speaker 2: every single time. I'm like, is there something I don't Yeah,
Speaker 2: just signed Ireland. Well, yeah, anyway, you already do that.
Speaker 3: Anyway I already knew that. Yeah, And he became coffee
Speaker 3: become He didn't become popular in London. Coffee becomes popular
Speaker 3: in London under Cromwell, the London Stock Exchange, and the
Speaker 3: contemporary insurance industry grows out of these coffee Do not
Speaker 3: ask me to tell you more, because I don't remember
Speaker 3: any of it, but fascinating. And Adam Smith literally wrote
Speaker 3: The Wealth of Nations in a coffee house. And then
Speaker 3: during the Industrial Revolution, coffee allowed workers to grind harder
Speaker 3: and for things like night shifts to exist because they
Speaker 3: could drink coffee and stay awake, and the coffee concept
Speaker 3: of The coffee break comes from a factory owner in
Speaker 3: Denver in the nineteen fifties who gave his workers two
Speaker 3: mandatory coffee breaks a day to increase productivity.
Speaker 2: So what you're saying is to be anti capitalist, everyone
Speaker 2: should be drunk all of the time.
Speaker 3: I like how you came to this conclusion. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to answer that. This is too big
Speaker 3: of a question. I wout two cuffs of coffee this morning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I'm not actually anti Yeah.
Speaker 3: Do what makes you feel good and stand against oppression everyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you could be awake while you stand against
Speaker 2: a You can be productive in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: you know, there is good productivity. That is like one
Speaker 2: thing that people are like, Well, I understand all of
Speaker 2: the like, don't work so much. Capitalism wants you to
Speaker 2: work so much. I'm like, but we could also work
Speaker 2: to fight it too. That'll still work, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, and people have different levels of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I love getting shit done, So I'm I think we're
Speaker 3: on a similar wavelength that way. But yeah, So the
Speaker 3: Diggers baking holy bread and coffee cans really kind of
Speaker 3: in my mind, fits with their whole using the excess
Speaker 3: of capitalism for revolutionary means thing both practically and metaphorically.
Speaker 3: And it also kind of fits with that food as
Speaker 3: the medium thing, right, because bakers and eaters are thinking
Speaker 3: about the relationship between capitalism and food by baking coffee cans.
Speaker 3: I know that this is a stretch, but like so
Speaker 3: much of what they did was a stretch too, like
Speaker 3: trying to convince people of things that I feel okay
Speaker 3: about making this connected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they literally had people walk through a
Speaker 2: frame of reference before they like, it's fine, it's good,
Speaker 2: even total.
Speaker 3: And then I should also say I have actually not
Speaker 3: tried baking the diggerbread recipe. And it's because now a
Speaker 3: lot of coffee cans are aligned with toxic material. Oh
Speaker 3: there are some that aren't, and you can do research
Speaker 3: into it, but I'm like a very anxious person, and
Speaker 3: I would just like somehow convince myself even if I
Speaker 3: had like completely checked that it was fine with a
Speaker 3: certain coffee can, that it somehow was it. So I
Speaker 3: haven't actually had a chance to make this bread. You
Speaker 3: could also just make it not in a coffee can.
Speaker 3: That's another option. There are recipes out there online.
Speaker 2: Okay, see now, I'm like, but we could make like
Speaker 2: a you could we could make and sell a bespoke
Speaker 2: coffee can that doesn't have anything bad in it. That's
Speaker 2: for making your bread.
Speaker 3: You can buy that. Oh really is okay, But it
Speaker 3: just seemed too far. No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also it yah goes against the concept to
Speaker 2: some degree. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I
Speaker 2: wouldn't be mad at myself. I like kitchen gadgets, like
Speaker 2: totally seen. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So these free bakries, but around the Bay. This was
Speaker 3: helped by coverage in the Berkeley Barb, which was an
Speaker 3: underground newspaper that had a circulation of eighty five thousand readers,
Speaker 3: which is huge for an underground Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's not so underground. That's amazing. Uh huh.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the Barb covered the free bakers extensively, including
Speaker 3: one that sprang up at the Olem Poly Ranch commune.
Speaker 3: I hope I'm saying that correctly. In one article, journalist
Speaker 3: for the bar Brightes, a bakery owner decided to drop
Speaker 3: out and lay the ovens, mixers, and other accessories on
Speaker 3: the ranch. In turn, the residents of the ranch are
Speaker 3: baking bread and distributing it free throughout the Bay Area,
Speaker 3: and the photo that ran with the article, there are
Speaker 3: topless young people, mostly women, needing bread on a table
Speaker 3: covered with empty coffee cans. This seems like regular Hippi shit,
Speaker 3: but I do want to acknowledge there's this really complex
Speaker 3: intertwining of sexual liberation and the patriarchal male gaze that
Speaker 3: women in the nineteen sixties and seventies communes faced in
Speaker 3: a pretty intense way. So I just want to say that.
Speaker 3: Speaking of photos, there's a pretty amazing one of kids
Speaker 3: cutting into Digger bread at the Free Hueye rally in
Speaker 3: February nineteen sixty eight. The photo was taken by Ruth,
Speaker 3: Mary and Baruch. It was in support of Huey Pan Newton,
Speaker 3: whom in Nault had toured Oakland with, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: and who was accused of allegedly killing a police officer
Speaker 3: in the midst of defending himself from police violence. And
Speaker 3: based on print materials I've seen, like flyers, it seems
Speaker 3: like at least some of the Diggers were pretty active
Speaker 3: in this free hue campaign, so this continued. Sometimes. I
Speaker 3: think that the relationship between the Diggers, from what I've seen,
Speaker 3: it seems like the relationship between the Diggers and the
Speaker 3: Black Panthers was overstated and a bit of wishful thinking
Speaker 3: on the Digger's part, But there was like actual, real
Speaker 3: tangible solidarity that was happening as well. And then in
Speaker 3: May nineteen sixty eight, Ruth and Walter Reynolds start a
Speaker 3: free bakery at the Resurrection City encampment. Have you heard
Speaker 3: of Resurrection City? No?
Speaker 2: This sounds amazing, So I.
Speaker 3: Hadn't heard about it until I started researching the Digger.
Speaker 2: Chris Christian hippie homeless commune, not exactly, although I was
Speaker 2: just going on the names Resurrection makes me think Christian.
Speaker 3: It was Christian. Yeah, so Resurrection City. It was a
Speaker 3: six week tense city on the National Mall in Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. That was part of the Poor People's Campaign,
Speaker 3: which is a multiracial movement for economic justice that in
Speaker 3: particular brought together to cano black and white Appalachian activists.
Speaker 3: And there's way more to say about Resurrection City than
Speaker 3: I can in this episode. This is another one of
Speaker 3: those you should do an episode about, but here's a
Speaker 3: brief snapshot. The Poor People's Campaign was started by Martin
Speaker 3: Luther King Junior, and other members of the Southern Christian
Speaker 3: Leadership Conference. After King was assassinated in April nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: organizers carried on the campaign and demanded a quote unquote
Speaker 3: economic bill of rights that included a living wage for
Speaker 3: all workers and an adequate income for those unable to work.
Speaker 3: The camp was ultimately evicted on June twenty fourth of
Speaker 3: that year, the day after its permit expire, but it
Speaker 3: did lead to more money for social services, including an
Speaker 3: expansion of the food Stamps program and more funding for
Speaker 3: head Start, as well as free and reduced lunch in
Speaker 3: Mississippi and Alabama, and it was also described by participants
Speaker 3: as practice for living together in a largely collectively run city.
Speaker 3: Residents described it as a city where you didn't have
Speaker 3: to pay taxes and you didn't experience police brutality or
Speaker 3: going to so pretty important stuff there. The free bakery
Speaker 3: at the encampment made fifteen loaves an hour. The brand
Speaker 3: usually came right out of the oven and was immediately
Speaker 3: served to camp residents, As residents usually got only one
Speaker 3: hot meal a day because of funding. Stuff in the kitchen.
Speaker 3: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference camp organizers were really impressed
Speaker 3: by the bakery, and they even moved their own coffee
Speaker 3: shop next door to it. Coffee again, I know, always coffee.
Speaker 3: Now live in a world where we have to stay awake,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm awake right now.
Speaker 3: I know I'm awake too, But I've also had two
Speaker 3: cups of coffee. And I actually took my ADHD medicine
Speaker 3: today because I was like, this is probably the one
Speaker 3: day we're being really chatty. Is good?
Speaker 2: So this is my socializing for the week.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Digger bread also spread throughout the counterculture and recipe form.
Speaker 3: The recipe was originally distributed as a Digger leaflet entitled
Speaker 3: Free Bread. It included a list of where to buy
Speaker 3: wholesal flower cheaply in the Bay, and instructions for making
Speaker 3: twelve loaves at once. Since they assumed the people using
Speaker 3: the recipe would be doing so to open other free bakeries,
Speaker 3: it also included the stipulation that although anyone was welcome
Speaker 3: to use the recipe, you always had to give the
Speaker 3: bread away for free. Hell yeah, I know, awesome, right,
Speaker 3: But later versions of the recipe don't even mention the
Speaker 3: free bakeries. So there's one that's printed in both the
Speaker 3: underground newspaper Northwest Passage in nineteen sixty nine, and in
Speaker 3: the first ever nineteen seventy issue of Mother Earth News
Speaker 3: that makes no mention of the bakeries and it totally
Speaker 3: relocates the bread just to like the domestic sphere. So
Speaker 3: the head note. Do you know what a head note is? No?
Speaker 2: Wait, is it the main thing that you taste in wine?
Speaker 3: No, it's that little paragraph before a recipe that people
Speaker 3: love to complain about.
Speaker 2: You mean, the eighteen pages of.
Speaker 3: Okay, well that happens on Google because it has to
Speaker 3: do with like Google algorithm.
Speaker 2: It has to do like copyright stuff, right, because you
Speaker 2: can't copyright a recipe, but you can so in order
Speaker 2: to I'm not even mad about it. I just click
Speaker 2: the skipt a recipe thing.
Speaker 3: But headnotes can be really cool in like a formerly,
Speaker 3: you know, when people are thoughtful about them and are yeah,
Speaker 3: fair enough information. Yeah, But this headnote just says, every
Speaker 3: time we make this bread, it's a big hit around
Speaker 3: the house. Have a big hit around your house. And
Speaker 3: in a nineteen seventy one Berkeley Barber article that does
Speaker 3: mention free bakeries, the article says that a small town
Speaker 3: of weed California would be a great place to open one.
Speaker 3: And then it says in fight the local sheriff's deputy
Speaker 3: over for coffee and show him you have nothing to
Speaker 3: Oh my.
Speaker 2: God, it's gone full circle. Oh my god, that's so heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: This is this is the encapsulation of what happened to
Speaker 2: the hippies all in one moment, and it happens with
Speaker 2: any Just you strip away all of the radicals, create
Speaker 2: something new, and then other people strip away the then
Speaker 2: they only take the ephemera, right, because the bread is
Speaker 2: the yeah, the product that is created by a revolutionary process.
Speaker 2: And so then people are like, fuck the revolution, we
Speaker 2: just want the bread.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And now, unless you're looking at the Digger Archive,
Speaker 3: Sight or a few other places that are specifically focused
Speaker 3: on the Diggers, you can like google around for the
Speaker 3: Digger bread recipe and you literally just find it as
Speaker 3: this like fun hippie recipe and it never mentions anything
Speaker 3: more about the Diggers, which is really disappointing.
Speaker 2: Can we put the good version in the show notes?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think I can. Yeah, I can send it
Speaker 3: to you for sure, with the caveat that This whole
Speaker 3: coffee camp thing makes me really nervous.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. You know what people have to get. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people google yourself. We told you how to find it.
Speaker 3: Do that well, very easy if you just google digger
Speaker 3: bread recipe. All the recipes themselves are good, they just
Speaker 3: don't always have information about, right, you know who the
Speaker 3: diggers were.
Speaker 2: Which you are providing right now. So consider that you're.
Speaker 3: Note, Yeah, giant head note to a recipe. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: This whole transcript. Let's just a head note on it anyway.
Speaker 3: Sorry, honestly, like there's a lot of writing projects I
Speaker 3: thought about that would just be something like that, And uh,
Speaker 3: it's hilarious and also I've spent more time thinking about
Speaker 3: it than i'd like to. Yeah, fair enough, so to
Speaker 3: wrap to wrap up our diggers. While free bakries persisted
Speaker 3: into the seventies, including in other places across the country,
Speaker 3: and there were digger groups in other places across the country,
Speaker 3: even though San Francisco was the main place. The San
Speaker 3: Francisco Diggers disbanded as a recognizable group in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: So even though they only existed for three years, they
Speaker 3: had a really profound impact on food based mutual aid
Speaker 3: in the United States. The same year they disbanded. In
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine, a group occupied an empty lot that
Speaker 3: became Berkeley's People's Park, which I know more recently has
Speaker 3: had some challenges around it. Yeah, and I know that
Speaker 3: people are like struggling to keep it being a people's park.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the latest is on that. But
Speaker 3: at the People's Park, occupants plated a garden and, influenced
Speaker 3: by the Diggers, shared free community meals, often making stews
Speaker 3: improvised from whatever people brought that day. The Diggers were
Speaker 3: also a major inspiration for Food Not Bombs, which you've
Speaker 3: also done an episode on previously and people should check out.
Speaker 3: But in case people didn't catch that one, Food Not
Speaker 3: Bombs is an international decentralized organization that serves free meals
Speaker 3: primarily from donated and dumpstered ingredients in public places. It
Speaker 3: started in nineteen eighty as part of the anti nuclear movement,
Speaker 3: and then in Hawaii there's a group called Eating in
Speaker 3: Public that holds dinners inspired by the Diggers and gay
Speaker 3: Channon Adiita Sharma, who founded it, wrote about the project
Speaker 3: sorry for a plug for an anthology I edited called
Speaker 3: Nurishing Resistance, but it was just like too perfect of
Speaker 3: a tie in. I wanted to make sure it made
Speaker 3: it into this episode, especially because there's this one paragraph that,
Speaker 3: throughout the entire multi year process of editing this book,
Speaker 3: would put such a huge smile on my face, Like
Speaker 3: sometimes when things would get tough with editing, I'd like
Speaker 3: go read this paragraph to remember why I was doing
Speaker 3: what I was doing. I want to share it with
Speaker 3: you as a note to end on. So this is
Speaker 3: from the article by Chan and Sharma. Diggers dinners have
Speaker 3: taken place in small settings among friends, as well as
Speaker 3: in spaces open to all. The events are basically potlock,
Speaker 3: but with one rule designed to keep capitalist markets at bay.
Speaker 3: Each participant's contribution must be primarily made from ingredients that
Speaker 3: they have either grown, hunted, fished, foraged, gleaned, bartered, found,
Speaker 3: been gifted or stolen. At the start of each dinner,
Speaker 3: participants are invited to explain the backstory of the ingredient
Speaker 3: and our largest Diggers dinner. Among the last of the
Speaker 3: participants to speak was a tiny eighty year old woman
Speaker 3: stepping up onto a stool to reach the microphone. She
Speaker 3: began by saying, I read about this in the newspaper
Speaker 3: and realized I've been waiting for this my whole life.
Speaker 3: So I went to the store and stole these bananas
Speaker 3: and these apples.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's so interesting to me that diggers, because
Speaker 2: they're obviously the lesser known diggers, right, but there was
Speaker 2: more of them, and they lasted longer, and they also
Speaker 2: had more impact the original diggers. I don't think they
Speaker 2: ever saw a harvest. I don't think they ever actually
Speaker 2: got any food out of the land. And that's not
Speaker 2: to say what they didn't. What they did, I mean,
Speaker 2: what they did was revolutionary, right, the original seventeenth century
Speaker 2: diggers or whatever, but it but it didn't actually have
Speaker 2: as much of a material impact on as many people's lives.
Speaker 2: And so it's just interesting to me that these are
Speaker 2: the like, the like, lesser known diggers, right, even though
Speaker 2: they had this like massive impact on culture, but also
Speaker 2: just directly fed so many people for so long.
Speaker 3: Totally, that is interesting. And yeah, I'm not entirely sure
Speaker 3: why that is. I do not that the diggers, really,
Speaker 3: that San Francisco Diggers really resisted this whole like I'll
Speaker 3: call it the famous man notion because it's almost always
Speaker 3: a man. But they were like very resistant to giving interviews,
Speaker 3: to you know, to identifying themselves as individuals, not in
Speaker 3: like a hiding their identity way, but they were just
Speaker 3: like really focused on the collective. And I wonder if
Speaker 3: not having you know, there's not like a famous digger. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's like famous mostly for being a digger in the
Speaker 3: way that you have with some other movements, and I
Speaker 3: do wonder if that's part of why they're less.
Speaker 2: I also think that just like when you get in first,
Speaker 2: when you're the first the diggers, and also anything you
Speaker 2: do in like Renaissance era England is going to have
Speaker 2: more impact on history than like any other time or
Speaker 2: place to be a person, you know, to like because colonialism, but.
Speaker 3: Especially within like the anglosphere right where we're reading and
Speaker 3: writing in English.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally, Well, thank you so much. And what's
Speaker 2: gonna One what are we going to hear about on
Speaker 2: Wednesday so people can be excited? And two tell us
Speaker 2: more about you and plug things cool?
Speaker 3: So we're going to talk about food co ops, which
Speaker 3: doesn't sound very exciting and wouldn't have sounded very exciting
Speaker 3: to me before I did research, but I promise you
Speaker 3: it will be exciting. There are some very cool radical
Speaker 3: roots that have been pretty intensely covered up with food
Speaker 3: co ops in this country. And then as far as plugs,
Speaker 3: I did want to mention that anthology I edited, Nourishing Resistance,
Speaker 3: which is available from PM Press. It has incredible contributors.
Speaker 3: People should buy it if you can, or like see
Speaker 3: if your library has it. And yeah, I recommend reading it,
Speaker 3: not because I edited it, but because the contributors are
Speaker 3: so incredible, and specifically two pieces in that the gay
Speaker 3: Channon Nandida Sharma article that I quoted remaking the Commons
Speaker 3: a history of eating in Public and then another essay
Speaker 3: by Madeline Lane McKinley called notes on Utopian Failure and
Speaker 3: Commune Kitchens, which while it didn't like directly go into
Speaker 3: my research, it did influence a lot of the background
Speaker 3: thinking around gender in this era. So yeah, those are
Speaker 3: my plugs. I exist only on the Instagram at at
Speaker 3: ren Arai, which is my name. You can follow me there, yay.
Speaker 2: And that's been part one of Ren explains things to me.
Speaker 3: We'll be Backdesday Wednesday. Bye.
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