COMMENTARY | An article at Bites earlier this week describes the privately funded, independently operated, food source for protesters in Zuccotti Park, aptly called The People’s Kitchen.
The People’s Kitchen is staffed with volunteers, including professional cooks, and is stocked and funded by donations from the public and local business owners. There’s no registration or waiting period and no requirement to be living below the national poverty rate. Young, old, rich, poor, protesting or not, the only requirement seems to be that you have to be hungry. Best of all, there’s no grumpy, apathetic, government employees asking you for your completed paper work and treating you as just another inconvenience in their taxpayer funded, eight-hour shift. This is one soup kitchen in which the funds are not being filtered through some government agency where the money is lost or unfairly distributed, rather every dime is going straight to the operation and thus feeding up to 2,000 people everyday, healthy, fresh, whole, and in some cases organic, meals at the cost of $1.50 to $2.00 per person.
Shame on the New York Post for shining a negative light on The People’s Kitchen. This movement is proving the power of community and that people are capable of coming together and helping each other without bringing the government in to screw it up, slow it down, and lower the overall quality of our humanity as Americans. It’s too bad that The Occupy Wall Street movement, at its core, is fighting for more government, because it’s actually proving to the world how little we need an entity that attempts, more or less, to force us to help one another when the proof is in the organic pudding, that it’s the true culture of America to do so without it.
Source(s):
Feeding the movement: How Occupy protesters are eating
bites.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/25/8484204-feeding-the-movement-how-occupy-protesters-are-eating?google_editors_picks=true
Protest mob is enjoying rich diet
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/occu_pie_the_kitchen_PIZ7EsDJEZqzPgzzEWKX7I