Article 2- Revised Second Draft
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?
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While the rest of New York City is stocking up on candy and other indulgent treats for Halloween, the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park—the culinary base of the Occupy Wall Street protest—will actually be scaling back its food distribution for the weekend.
In what the OWS protest has labeled an effort to “strengthen” their operations, they will be reducing the daily meals they provide for free over the next three days, to more austere fare like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and rice and beans.
Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on for over a month, has received significant media attention for its cosmopolitan cuisine—one article by the The New York Times asked, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting”—organizers within the movement say that the energy currently required by the kitchen to feed protesters cannot continue at the same rate.
“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer that is taped to a plastic folding table in the OWS kitchen. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill our mission to feed the movement.”
But their public claims to the contrary have not stopped the press from reporting the move as an effort to stave off freeloaders. In an October 27th article by The Atlantic Wire, organizer Chris O’Donnell responded by saying, "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about 'freeloaders.’”
One member of the OWS kitchen, however, a volunteer named Nan Terrie, said that kicking out freeloaders is one of the aims of the People’s Kitchen.
Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since the start of the protest, described security issues at the kitchen as downplayed by the press and protest’s organizers.
Aside from dealing with daily grievances from visitors, such as griping and cutting in line, Terrie said that she was recently threatened by a patron who got angry at the kitchen staff for not catering to his needs. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man a special rice krispie snack, he pulled a knife on her, “and called [her] the ‘N word’ several times."
Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, voiced assurance that Terrie’s concerns were not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.
Clouette, who reaffirmed that the decision to scale back on food was not a strike, described the primary motivations as streamlining the kitchen, and giving organizers space to reflect on what direction the protest is headed in.
“Right now there’s a huge amount of energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook,” said Clouette. “That’s not really a sustainable practice.”
When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to operate in the event that the kitchen was closed, Clouette hesitated. “I think the whole shape of the thing would probably change,” he said.
Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at The New School who studies American political movements of the 60s and 70s and has written a book on the topic, said that shutting down the OWS kitchen would weaken the movement, both from a practical standpoint, as well as a symbolic one.
“At one level, folks need to eat, right? And the ability to offer food helps enable a permanent presence of people there,” said Varon. “Second, it is part of an effort to demonstrate that the encampment has the creativity, organization, and discipline to provide for itself.”
But Varon was careful to add that the practical strain of feeding a community is not something that the Occupy Wall Street protest can bear on its own.
“The very fact that there are homeless folks buzzing around the park is evidence of the problems if the US economy,” added Varon. “But it is unrealistic to believe OWS can, in itself, remedy those.”
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