East Bay Food Not Bombs
East Bay Food Not Bombs has been sharing free vegan and vegetarian meals in Berkeley and Oakland since February 1991. The collective got started with volunteers from Seeds of Peace, Copwatch, and the Berkeley Free Clinic, and quickly established a presence at People’s Park, the occupied stretch of Ohlone land on Telegraph Avenue that had already been at the center of Bay Area political struggle for two decades. That connection to People’s Park has held for more than thirty years.
Food Not Bombs, as a network, operates without leaders, hierarchy, or central direction. Each chapter is autonomous and makes decisions by consensus. The East Bay chapter runs on the same model: all-volunteer, horizontally organized, and committed to food justice alongside the broader principle that resources should flow to people, not be locked behind markets or state permission. The collective recovers food that would otherwise be discarded from grocery stores and farmers’ markets, cooks it at community kitchens scattered across Berkeley and Oakland, and serves hot meals outdoors most days of the week. Since January 2024, their primary daily serve is near People’s Park at Telegraph and Haste in Berkeley, around 3 pm. Mobile outreach reaches houseless encampments across Oakland and Berkeley three to four days a week.
The collective’s base is the CALLI Omni building in Oakland, a collectively owned space that has anchored East Bay radical organizing since its days as Omni Commons, itself born from the Occupy movement in 2014. East Bay FNB’s work on any given day pulls in people from across the political and social spectrum: longtime organizers, students, unhoused neighbors, punks, and anyone who shows up hungry. The food is always free and unconditional. The work sits inside a web of long-running Bay Area mutual aid and resistance efforts, and has for more than three decades.
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