Food Not Cops with Sam Bliss

Transcript:

Dr. Sam Bliss  (00:00):

To hear my neighbors who are more well off. Blame, homelessness and addiction on people who are experiencing.

Cassie Gillespie (00:07):

homelessness and addiction.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (00:08):

Homelessness and addiction. And, and to me that’s victim blaming.

Cassie Gillespie (00:14):

Hello, this is Cassie Gillespie and you’re listening to the Social Work Lens. The Social Work Lens is a collaboration between the University of Vermont Child Welfare Training Partnership and the State of Vermont. And today we are in the studio with Dr. Sam Bliss. Hi Sam.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (00:31):

Hello.

Cassie Gillespie (00:32):

Hi. So, Sam is an ecological economist and highly relevant to our conversation today, a member of Food Not Cops. So thank you for coming in.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (00:41):

Yeah, I’m happy to be here.

Cassie Gillespie (00:42):

I’m glad you’re here too. We wanna dive in, I think, pretty quickly to what Food Not Cops is, but also if as you’re describing that tell us a little bit about how you got involved with it and, you know, what’s your journey to being part of Food? Not Cops.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (00:56):

Food Not Hops is the Burlington chapter of an international movement called Food Not Bombs. And Food Not Bombs has chapters in cities and towns around the world that all share food as a gift for anyone who’s hungry for any reason in public space. And they do that as a protest against the use of public resources for weapons of war instead of meeting basic human needs.

Cassie Gillespie (01:19):

Very Cool.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (01:20):

And so the Burlington chapter’s called Food Not Cops, because at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the Food Not Bombs chapter, that was like a regular Food not Bombs chapter. We got food donations and made a big meal once a week that we served in downtown Burlington. We teamed up with a group called BTV Cop Watch that trains people to film the police with their phones. We might say for police accountability, they like to say for community self-defense. And because of the work of both Cop Watch and Food Not Bombs, we both knew a lot of unhoused people and we were worried with the stay at home order and the pandemic what people who didn’t have a home to stay at were going to do. So we started doing meal distributions and distributing other basic necessities every day from one to 2:00 PM And we’ve been doing that every day in downtown Burlington since for the last five plus years.

Cassie Gillespie (02:12):

Can you believe that? Like if you knew that in 2020, would you

Dr. Sam Bliss  (02:15):

Oh, we would not have started

Cassie Gillespie (02:17):

<Laugh>. I bet

Dr. Sam Bliss  (02:19):

It’s been immense

Cassie Gillespie (02:20):

<Laugh>. Okay. And so for people who are listening in other parts of either the state or the country, you know, and just heard us speaking pretty specifically about Burlington. I wanna offer and jump in if you agree or disagree with this, but I think what we’re gonna talk about is relevant even if you’re not a Burlington resident. ’cause We’re seeing these types of social issues and then community responses in jurisdictions all over the United States and beyond. Does that feel like a fair statement?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (02:48):

Yeah, I mean, in Burlington we’re seeing a lot of homelessness, a lot of addiction a lot more right now than has ever been the case before.

Cassie Gillespie (02:59):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (03:00):

and I, and I don’t think Burlington’s unique in that regard, especially in the, the way that people in leadership positions in the business community and city government and other social positions are concerned about the state of Burlington.

Cassie Gillespie (03:14):

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (03:15):

That looks bad.

Cassie Gillespie (03:17):

Optics.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (03:17):

Yeah. The, optics of the thing and that homelessness and drugs and petty crime are bad for business. It seems to be a real, real theme. And business is important ’cause it’s jobs for Burlington and tax revenue to do the sorts of social programs that the city government needs to carry out. So it all kind of hinges on people having to live outdoors, being bad for business.

Cassie Gillespie (03:42):

The visibility of people living outdoors, being bad for business. Okay. Well if we back it up a little bit. How did you originally get connected with Food and Bombs? Food? Not Hop, both of them <laugh>.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (03:53):

Do you want the long version <laugh>?

Cassie Gillespie (03:56):

I don’t know. <Laugh> <laugh>

Dr. Sam Bliss  (03:59):

Growing up in the suburbs, food came from the store. And I went to college at Western Washington University and studied economics and learned that markets are efficient way to allocate society’s resources because they go to the people who are willing to pay money for them. And that avoids waste. And I didn’t question a lot of that, even as I felt kind of like a political radical in some ways. But in, at the same time in college, I had a crush on this master’s student in anthropology who was studying dumpster divers in Bellingham, Washington, where I went to college. And she was way older than me and outta my league, but I followed her around taking perfectly good food out of dumpsters of local grocery stores and other retailers. And that definitely made me question the story that markets are an efficient way to organize a economy or a food economy. But also it was just so aligned with me to like, not just save money on food, but like use food that already had, you know, water and human labor and fertilizer and fuel for growing it and transporting it, invested into it and traveled a long way to a grocery store and then got thrown away before it even rotted. Yeah. And then to be able to take that out and then feed myself and my household with it and my friends was really aligned. And, and so dumpster diving was like a big practice for me for, for some time. And I, and I could feel like my diet had very little environmental impact or even like a positive environmental impact because instead of buying new food that would take new resources and new additional lands to grow I could eat this way. And so that was just kind of like a thing that I did that aligned with my, like ecological values for a long time. By the time I started a PhD at the University of Vermont, I was an ecological economist when ecological economics may sound like it’s a subdiscipline of economics, but really it’s like a critique or like competing way of thinking about the environment. And for a conversation here, one of the things that’s relevant about ecological economists is they are skeptical of this story that markets are the one best way to efficiently run an economy.

Cassie Gillespie (06:13):

Is That really the definition of an ecological economist? I’m just thinking for people, even me. Yeah. Like I don’t, I don’t know an ecological economic, I can’t even pronounce it.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (06:22):

Yeah. I know ecological economists study the economy as like a biophysical social, cultural, historical thing. So rather than just thinking of the economy as money moving around we think of the economy as material, like resources are extracted, materials are extracted from the earth. It all takes energy and it all creates waste at the end. And the ways that those resources move around among humans are all social relationships. And it’s all quite political too because the big questions of economics are what do we make, what do we make it out of? Who makes it, who gets it? Who profits from the whole process? And those questions are all inescapably political.

Cassie Gillespie (07:06):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (07:06):

And so instead of seeing them as technical questions like economists tend to or at least the way they teach economics at universities, ecological economics acknowledges the inescapably political material, cultural nature of these questions.

Cassie Gillespie (07:22):

That’s really helpful.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (07:23):

As I was beginning my PhD in ecological economics partly inspired by the work of my advisor, professor Josh Farley I realized that markets are for food actually have really terrible consequences. ’cause If you don’t have money for food, then you starve If markets are the only way to get food. And then on the production end of things like markets coerce farmers into prioritizing the financial viability of their farms over anything else they might care about, like the health of the soil or the land or their animals or their workers. And so I was really curious about do non-market food systems exist? And I was like read about communist food systems, but there wasn’t that many like proposals for that I could find for like how to do a food system without markets, even though there was all these critiques of markets as a type of institution for governing the production and distribution of food. But then I’d been living in Vermont for a couple years and I realized that non-market food, food that’s not for sale is all around me. The national pastime of Vermont is clearly vegetable growing.

Cassie Gillespie (08:24):

Yeah. <Laugh>.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (08:25):

in your yard.

Cassie Gillespie (08:26):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (08:27):

And I was like volunteering at a food shelf at the time and which is what we call food pantries here in Vermont. Yes. <laugh>. And  people are like having potlucks and sharing food all around me and fishing.

Cassie Gillespie (08:41):

We have a community sharing shed in my small rural town where people who grew extra food or just bought extra ended up with extra food, put it in and other people take it out.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (08:51):

You know, and that’s the kind of beautiful stuff that exists here in Vermont. Now I’ve got, as I’ve gotten further into my research, I realized that things like this exist almost everywhere, even in, you know, the heart of industrial capitalism here in the United States. And so non-market food exists. But, so as I was starting to study non-market food practices for my doctoral dissertation, I also, as part of that research, got really involved in practicing those things.

Cassie Gillespie (09:14):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (09:14):

And so I was growing vegetables for the first time in my life. My PhD advisor Josh taught me how to spearfish. And so getting involved in.

Cassie Gillespie (09:23):

<laugh> That’s awesome.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (09:24):

Just restarting the local Food Not Bombs chapter in Burlington was, was sort of part of my research as I was imagining it at the time. And, and so food not bombs in small cities like Burlington, 45,000 people tend to sort of arise when there’s like a local group of activists who have the energy and skills and resources for it. And then they kind of dissipate as those people and resources dissipate and then they arise again. There’s been multiple IT iterations. There’s, you can see on you can see on community access tv, like a video of food not bombs. People protesting McDonald’s back when there was a McDonald’s in Burlington in the nineties. And then there was a Food Not Bombs in Burlington around Occupy in 2011. Anyway, so we got it started in 2018.

Cassie Gillespie (10:08):

So there’s Ebbs and flows.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (10:09):

Yeah. This part can probably be cut out ’cause it’s not that interesting. <Laugh>.

Cassie Gillespie (10:12):

No, I think it’s interesting <laugh>.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (10:14):

So anyway, that’s how I got involved. That’s my story.

Cassie Gillespie (10:17):

All right, cool. And you talked a little bit about how Food Not bombs connected with BTV Cop watch to turn into food, not cops. Tell me about how you do or don’t think about food, not cops as a mutual aid organization. And maybe, I guess actually even before that, my question is like, can you tell us a little bit about mutual aid organizations and what they are?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (10:37):

Mutual Aid is neighbors helping neighbors to meet their needs. And mutual aid is kind of the, the base state for being a human being that now the term was, I don’t like that the term was popularized by a renounced Russian prince named Peter Kin. And his, his story is really interesting. So he was the son of nobility, like a big land owning family in c cist Russia in the 18 hundreds. And he was kind of a rebellious teenager, and they’re like, we’re gonna send you away to Siberia, so you stop causing trouble around here, <laugh>. And so he was like part of the SS army in, in Siberia and went on these geographical expeditions for science, basically studying the flora and fauna in Siberia. And this was in like the 1860s, 1870s after the publication of Charles Darwin’s book, the Origin of Species that explained how evolution worked. Super controversial at the time because it went against what people believed from the Bible about the origins of species. Yeah. but the most common interpretation of Charles Darwin’s theory at the time was evolution as the survival of the fittest. So the, like strongest and most competitive individuals of a species would survive and pass on their genes. And that way species would become more fit to their environments over many generations. And what Kropotkin saw in his studies in Siberia was cooperation among flocks of birds and herds of mammals and villages of indigenous siberians was like different species of animals taking care of the sick, collaboratively hunting, feeding the young. And so he came up with this theory that the most cooperative groups of animals actually survive to pass on their genes. And that’s at least as important as competition and evolution. So his book was published in 1902 called Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (12:45):

And Kropotkin today is known as like an anarchist thinker because this experience of mutual aid helped form him into an anarchist dissident. And he’s got a whole story about, about that. But he, he was actually quite a scientist in his day. So anyway,

Cassie Gillespie (12:59):

that’s very cool.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (13:00):

As a big aside but like, that’s why I say mutual aid is the base state of, of being human, in part because today scientists accept this, the evolution acts, natural selection acts at the level of the individual selecting for the fittest individuals, but it also acts at the level of the group. The mo the group with the individuals who are best at collaborating.

Cassie Gillespie (13:21):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (13:21):

Is more likely to survive. And, and that’s really a big part of the story of human evolution. Like that’s why language developed in all of our interesting social practices, <laugh>, because humans have to collaborate to survive. Humans can’t survive alone. And so when you look at the evidence of societies before and outside of capitalism, the idea of buying and selling each other food is, is sociopathic. Like if, if you wouldn’t share food with your neighbor, you are mocked in most cultures. Yeah. and, and then eventually probably ostracized or just seen as a total menace to the community. If you think about like hunting and foraging societies, if you are relying for your protein on harvesting large animals, your meat’s coming in packages that are like too big for your family to eat before it rots. Right. And, but you don’t know when your next one’s coming. And so it only makes sense to share with your community. And, and so you see across cultures that there’s like institutionalized sharing of, of meat especially. And so today under capitalism, it’s not that we live in the harsh tundra of Siberia.

Cassie Gillespie (14:32):

Right.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (14:32):

Or that, or that there’s not enough food to go around. In most cases it’s that access to the things we need. Food, shelter, healthcare is not universal. And so mutual aid is helping each other out with already existing resources, making sure they flow from people who have more than they need to, people who have unmet needs in your community. And so Mutual Aid is typically used for like less formal organizations than the nonprofit complex of organizations that exist to often f funnel government resources or philanthropic money Yeah. To, to help people meet their basic needs. Mutual aid is, is a little bit more grassroots and informal though the, the sort of, the boundaries are hazy. You know, there’s mutual aid groups that become incorporated as a nonprofit for whatever reason. Sure, sure. And, and there’s like more formal organizations that use government grants that might call themselves mutual aid and, and not kind of just be co-opting that term.

Cassie Gillespie (15:28):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it’s really interesting for a lot of our listeners who are social workers in particular attending to how to collaborate with and how to also acknowledge your own power as a practitioner, like being curious about the US versus them dynamics. So I think a mutual aid framework is really interesting for people who are professionalized helpers to think about. ’cause Your organization may utilize that framework, but very often they do not. They’re hierarchical.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (15:57):

Oh, that’s super interesting.

Cassie Gillespie (15:59):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (15:59):

Yeah. How do we treat people in more professional settings like they’re are neighbors and like we could be in their situation even if we don’t think that’ll happen.

Cassie Gillespie (16:06):

Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (16:07):

Like nonprofit and government programs, it’s actually important that they’re bureaucratic and impersonal and that you like don’t have to, you know, be grateful for receiving the services to which you’re entitled to. And everybody’s treated equally. Like you might have to do some paperwork to prove you’re poor, to qualify mutual aid plays, favorites. Mutual aid is actually helping out your friends who you know and you care for, or people who are in your neighborhood who you’re going to become closely connected to.

Cassie Gillespie (16:34):

Right.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (16:34):

In a lasting relationship through the process of helping each other out. And so in mutual aid type relationships, it’s not like taking turns buying rounds of beers at the bar with your friend, like a reciprocal giving thing, which is great. It’s more like fairness is we’re equally willing to give in theory if we’re in the position to be able to give, to have extra resources to share.

Cassie Gillespie (16:56):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (16:57):

And like a, a common form of mutual aid you see is neighborhood kids just happening to end up at mealtime at the best resourced houses in the neighborhood.

Cassie Gillespie (17:10):

For sure. I did that as a kid.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (17:11):

Yeah, totally.

Cassie Gillespie (17:12):

Right. Like I know who had the best snacks and we went there, but if we’re talking about food, not cops, so you all have been in the news like quite a bit lately. So you’ve been operating since 2020 a meal a day, which is a herculean feat at this point because it is a mutual aid organization. So you’re all unpaid. Right. And do, do all the meals run on donations, basically food donations or monetary donations?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (17:36):

Totally. Great question. So let’s step back is food, not cops, mutual aid because I never, I never really answered your question <laugh>. And so we like to say in the food not bombs and world solidarity not charity.

Cassie Gillespie (17:52):

Okay.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (17:53):

And charity is helping people who are inferior to you basically. And it sounds uncomfortable to say it, but.

Cassie Gillespie (17:59):

it does make me feel uncomfortable. But it’s true.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (18:01):

But that’s what it is.

Cassie Gillespie (18:02):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (18:02):

And mutual aid is supposed to be different and they’re supposed to be like a baseline of quality to it. But in my research on non-market food practices in Vermont, what I find is that well, what mutual aid groups like Food not Bombs are doing and church basement food pantries run all by retired ladies who are volunteering their time are actually doing something that’s not that different. Yeah. But there’s a few practices at Food not cos that, that we’re like really, really adamant about.

Cassie Gillespie (18:31):

Okay.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (18:32):

One is everybody eats, so we’re eating a lot of food that’s been recovered that was gonna be discarded. Sometimes some of it comes from supermarket dumpsters. A lot of it is just workers at farms, restaurants, retailers, other food related businesses gathering up the edible but not sellable excess. Okay. That just doesn’t make financial sense for the business to market, but is still quite edible and bringing it to us. What’s an example of something like that for someone who’s not familiar with it? A bunch of tomatoes that were left over at the end of the day at the farmer’s market that are gonna perish before the next farmer’s market. Whoever’s working the market for that farm will bring them to us. Okay. That’s an example. Yogurt that’s beyond the sell by date, but it’s been refrigerated the entire time since it was created. It’s still fine. It’s still sealed.

Cassie Gillespie (19:22):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (19:22):

Those are some typical examples. Day old bread, you might have to toast it to make it soft enough to really want to eat it if you have bad teeth.

Cassie Gillespie (19:29):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (19:29):

But there’s nothing wrong with it’s not moldy.

Cassie Gillespie (19:31):

Sure, sure, sure.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (19:32):

And so every food related business in the world creates edible but not sellable food.

Cassie Gillespie (19:36):

Okay.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (19:37):

And so that’s like where the charitable food system of food banks and food pantries and soup kitchens gets a lot of their donations. That’s where mutual aid groups like food Not bombs, get a lot of their donations as well. And so some of the food is purchased mostly by people who are just responding to a call, Hey, businesses don’t throw out a lot of cooking oil or rice, can you bring us bags of rice? You know,

Cassie Gillespie (20:00):

it’s a olive oil.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:00):

yeah. But it’s still mostly the foods. It’s not that we’re raising money to go buy bags of rice for the most part. Yeah. It’s almost always that we’re making, putting out a call into the community That we’re short on 25 pound sacks of rice. And so sometimes someone goes and makes Costco run other times like Vermont bean crafters always giving us 25 pound sacks of dry black beans.

Cassie Gillespie (20:20):

Oh, cool.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:21):

For example, so sometimes it’s the business itself that’s donating, sometimes it’s just a worker acting autonomously.

Cassie Gillespie (20:27):

Okay.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:27):

That donates the food. So we’re mutual aid because everybody eats and it would be insulting to direct the discarded food from the market economy to the people who’ve basically been discarded.

Cassie Gillespie (20:39):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:39):

By the market economy. But if everybody there is eating, then like I see it personally as a, as a act of public service that we’re eating this food that would otherwise get thrown away instead of demanding that the world create fresh food.

Cassie Gillespie (20:52):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:52):

For us to purchase.

Cassie Gillespie (20:53):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (20:55):

so everybody eating makes us all equals. The second really important practice is that really low barriers to help out. Like we have folks who are homeless and struggling with substance use issues come to the side of the table where we’re setting things up or serving or helping clean up lunch all the time. People come help do the dishes all the time. Folks who don’t have access to a kitchen but like cooking come and help cook for food, not bombs all the time. And so it’s mutual in the sense that there’s huge overlap between the people doing the labor and the people who are in this, in the position where they really have to receive the gifts that food knock bombs has on offer. And sometimes that overlap is simultaneous. Sometimes it’s like people going through like better resourced and more difficult periods throughout the years.

Cassie Gillespie (21:44):

Yeah, no, that makes sense there for sure. There’s seasons of life where I was better able to engage in, you know, all kinds of things. Not just volunteer work, but even like hobbies, activities. Right. And there’s seasons of life where you’re just, your head’s down, you’re getting through it.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (21:56):

Yeah. There’s people who might have money for groceries but don’t have time to cook who benefit a lot from us providing ready meals for lunch every day for packaging up the leftovers from those lunches and putting it in a publicly accessible fridge outside my house called the People’s Fridge. Every day.

Cassie Gillespie (22:13):

Very cool. And I’m, I’m just struck listening to you to think about this might also be a whole other like side quest, but people’s attitudes towards, what word did you say? Rescued food or repurposed food. Right. As sort of like taking things out of dumpsters, being like taboo or, you know, dangerous in some way.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (22:35):

Yeah. Nobody really knows how much food is wasted in, in this country, but researchers pretend to know and they say it’s like 30 to 40% and it’s mostly by industry and distributors and retailers, but there’s also a lot of household food waste too. Yeah. Training, training people how to dumpster dive as has been a big part of the Food not bombs experience. Yeah. Because it’s a really affordable way to get lots of food sometimes before you go into the front of the grocery store, you can check in the back to see if the things on your list are already there for $0.

Cassie Gillespie (23:12):

I Think that is just such a boring concept to so many people <laugh>, but I love it. Okay. So food, not Cops, mutual aid in these distinct ways that you were saying over the past couple years, have you seen the way the community responds to you all shift?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (23:27):

Yeah. The name Food, not Cops for one. So we use Food Not Bombs and food, not Cops, basically interchangeably because Food Not Bombs connects with this worldwide movement of groups who do pretty much what we do. I think we do it really well. Most groups are once a week, not every day. But there’s that connection. Food Not Cops is our specific group. And in 2020 when we got started, the idea that police can cause lots of harm that we might do well to give less resources, you know, something less than the 20, 30% of city budgets that go to police departments might be a better idea than spending more and more on militarizing them. That was like the sort of standard understanding of where we were at during the George Floyd protests and the Jacob Blake protests and the ah, Maud Arbery protests for liberal and progressive Americans. That’s changed. I get asked all the time now, why do you call it food Not cops that seems really divisive or controversial. I think what people miss is that the police in the United States killed more people in 2021 than in 2020 more people in 2022 than 2021. More people in 2023 more people in 2024. It’s going up every year and it’s over a thousand. There’s three police killings a day or more on average in the United States. And so why certain ones make the news and spark protest movements and why a lot of others don’t is kind of beyond me. I’m actually not sure about that. Yeah. But what I do know is that that’s super far from the public consciousness right now as people in Burlington and I think in other places in the United States are seeing this housing crisis drive people to have to live in the streets and then they’re doing their daily lives, which might include drug use, it might include defecation, it might include sleeping on a mattress.

Cassie Gillespie (25:16):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (25:16):

Things that a lot of us do in our homes.

Cassie Gillespie (25:18):

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (25:19):

Drugs, pooping, sleeping on a mattress. Right. But they do it outdoors and it makes the city look really bad to, to a lot of these folks like I was talking about at the beginning. And that’s bad for business. And so the response is, is more police and, and in Burlington we might get to see how that plays out. It seems like there’s been a lot more police on the, on the streets since we got a new police chief a few months ago and see if that really helps. I have my doubts, but what’s bummed me out the most over the past few months especially, is to hear my neighbors who are more well off blame, homelessness and addiction on people who are experiencing homelessness, and addiction. Homelessness and addiction. And to me that’s victim blaming. So it’s, it’s both really sad to see the, the dehumanization in, in their language when they’re talk about people as if they’re like undesirable features of a park. That’s a bummer. But it also is, is bad analysis and therefore can’t lead us to like, measures to address the problem that are actually gonna work.

Cassie Gillespie (26:23):

Yeah. Yeah. No, I really <laugh> I really appreciate you calling out both that it is like deeply disappointing as a human and like a fundamentally flawed analysis of what’s going on.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (26:32):

Yeah. That’s what’s been bumming me out in my town. And so’

Cassie Gillespie (26:38):

Can I pause you there though? Because so you come to my class sometimes right? And chat with my students and oftentimes when we’re talking about people experiencing homelessness and addiction, the students are bringing with them a set of beliefs that they have been given as young people, as affluent young people that, you know, people who are living on the streets are them. That, that they did something that we wouldn’t do. Right. And that we would not be in that position. That there’s like a fundamental divide between who’s outside and who’s inside. And often I think I hear people attributing that to like a morality like that people who are on the street aren’t working hard enough or they didn’t try hard enough to get clean or they didn’t try hard enough to keep their housing or whatever. It’s I work hard to debunk, you know, those notions. And I, and I know we’ve had many conversations about it, but what do you think is behind that when people believe that?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (27:33):

I mean, how, how homeless people are presented in the news is as like a type of being, like the, the language is often similar to like the, the flock of seagulls that’s pooping on the park.

Cassie Gillespie (27:45):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (27:47):

when a, a few prominent members of the business in real estate owning class in Burlington started a campaign to get food, not cops to move away from our lunch location at the marketplace garage or behind the public parking garage. They were implying that us serving lunch attracted homeless people to the area <affirmative>. And if we didn’t give them food, they would just go away the way, the way that seagulls do.

Cassie Gillespie (28:17):

Yeah. I think you hear lots of jurisdictions talk about that. Right. In some ways it’s this idea of serving the people who are vulnerable brings in more vulnerable people and criminalizing those services creates less of a problem. And we see that kind of play out over and over.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (28:35):

Totally. Yeah. And it’s, it’s a misunderstanding of how homelessness works. To think that helping homeless people survive is enabling them to be homeless because the vast majority of homeless people aren’t homeless by choice. Yeah. And, and to get at the, the point you were talking about, about the othering of homeless people, like low income Americans living paycheck to paycheck are like a few strokes of bad luck away from being evicted and homeless. And depending on how strong your social networks are, you might be able to be crashing on couches for a good amount of time. You might have family elsewhere to go to and live with. And you might run out of goodwill eventually, especially if you’re dealing with addiction and some of these things that, that can make us hard to be around. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so imagining yourself in in others’ shoes helps us humanize others. And, and for me the best way to do that has been to talk to homeless people, become friends with them,

Cassie Gillespie (29:31):

share meals.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (29:32):

Share meals, yeah. Understand their experience. Yeah. And I come from a middle class background in the suburbs of Seattle and, and had many of those same beliefs about homeless people being a different class of human beings than I belonged to. And it’s been a new experience for me to have a lot of people I know and love dive things other than old age. Yeah. Because, because of both overdoses and just typical deaths of poverty

Cassie Gillespie (30:06):

And lack of access to healthcare and other things that would help keep you well.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (30:09):

Yeah. Those things.

Cassie Gillespie (30:12):

I mean one of the things I I wonder about is if believing that people who are outside, who are homeless, who are using drugs, believing that they’re different and that they’re unhealable sort of like absolves people from feeling guilty about not helping.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (30:26):

Yeah. We all enforce homelessness every day by not in inviting unhoused people into our homes to sleep.

Cassie Gillespie (30:33):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (30:33):

We, we all who are housed are like making this problem in part every day. You know, there’s like, we can blame it on policy and the housing crisis and the greed of landlords and those things definitely all are all to blame. Yeah. There’s like the empty nester couple in the five bedroom house who just two people still live there and they don’t rent out those bedrooms.

Cassie Gillespie (30:57):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (30:58):

But there’s also us with couches and floor space.

Cassie Gillespie (31:00):

Yeah. And it, that’s where it gets so complicated, right? Like, I could sit here right now and make all these arguments about like, well I have young kids, I’m sorry, we can’t have people in our home. We can’t have people with mental, I like we’re out on the, but it’s true that we’re all part of these systems and then like depending on your social location in the system you play a part in it,

Dr. Sam Bliss  (31:18):

it’s actually hard to have homeless people over just to visit or share a meal because when it’s time for them to go, they don’t have anywhere to go to. It’s really, it’s really hard to be like, Hey, I, I think I, I think I’m gonna go to bed. Are you gonna go to your cold outdoor spot now?

Cassie Gillespie (31:33):

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (31:34):

You Know, and I’ve been in this situation over and home

Cassie Gillespie (31:37):

Again. Well, your home is really visible as part of the food knock hops prep. So Yeah. I imagine you’re in that situation a lot. Yeah. It must be really hard to not have many, many roommates.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (31:47):

Yeah. I luckily I have housemates who have firm boundaries ’cause I think it would be a wild experience if <laugh>.

Cassie Gillespie (31:55):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (31:56):

If it was my decision whether to invite people in. ’cause I have a pretty optimistic attitude about how things are gonna turn out <laugh> and I’m, and I’m quite extroverted as well . But yeah, I live in a house with seven other adults that has two kitchens. And so we use one of those kitchens for our daily meals. And then the other one is food Not Bombs prep and cleanup seven days a week from 12 to 1:00 PM and from two to 3:00 PM before and after our distribution. That happens every day. And it’s, and we’ve been able to, as a house, provide tons of different forms of help to neighbors who are struggling or in need. And very rarely has one of those forms of help been, Hey, come sleep in indoors at our house.

Cassie Gillespie (32:42):

Yeah. Yeah.

Cassie Gillespie (32:44):

It’s interesting.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (32:45):

It’s actually, it’s actually the fact that like, people think of us as some sort of punk house and we’re mostly boring, stable adults most of the time.

Cassie Gillespie (32:51):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (32:51):

That like allows us to hold this big important community project without totally falling apart.

Cassie Gillespie (32:57):

Yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting. And we shouldn’t know miss an opportunity to kind of share, like if people are listening and they’re like, well, I actually wanna come prep and deliver food and serve food, can people just join? How should they reach you?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (33:14):

Yeah, food Not Cops always needs labor because folks contribute a lot during a few months of unemployment or then life circumstances change, work schedules change, they move away. They, you know and even like people contribute a lot to daily distro.

Cassie Gillespie (33:31):

What’s Distro?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (33:32):

Oh, daily distro. It’s just one of the many phrases we use to describe the daily lunch that we serve. Good question. People contribute a lot to making daily lunch happen for a while, and through doing that they make connections with others who want to take action on issues that they’re passionate about and they form little side projects and then we need to replace their labor For lunch.

Cassie Gillespie (33:56):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (33:56):

So for all these different reasons, recruiting is constant and so you should definitely come help out.

Cassie Gillespie (34:02):

Okay, cool.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (34:02):

And you can show up to 32 Hungerford Terrace, come up the driveway, knock on the driveway side door any day around noon if nobody’s there. Just hang on. We’re not always prompt <laugh>, but around noon to, to start heating up food that’s been prepared, start preparing a little more food, transporting it down to City Hall Park where we’re sharing lunch these days. And then come back and especially we need help afterwards from two to 3:00 PM.

Cassie Gillespie (34:24):

doing the dishes,

Dr. Sam Bliss  (34:25):

the dishes and anyone can show up. There’s no, there’s no signup. We have ways to like communicate. You can reach out via DMS to the Food Not Bombs, BVT Instagram if just showing up at an address that you heard on a podcast is a little intimidating. We can get some more instructions on ways to contribute. But, but yeah,

Cassie Gillespie (34:43):

we Can share the link too.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (34:44):

Totally. And, and we also, we do raise money and we use most of the money to buy tents, sleeping bags, phone cards, other sort of like basic essentials that people need to survive out there. And you can become a money donor to Food Not cops@opencollective.org, open collective.com. Open Collective Food, not Cops. Search that. And you’ll find it. And, and that’s where we collect money through our fiscal sponsor with this cool nonprofit in Chicago called Lucy Parsons lab.

Cassie Gillespie (35:16):

So I referenced earlier that you’ve been in the news a lot lately and that’s due in large part to this sort of concerted effort to move where Food Not Cops does your distribution and, and serves the meals. Can you tell us a little bit about, about like what happened?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (35:32):

So food, not Cops served lunch every day from one to 2:00 PM for over five years along a low brick wall adjacent to a sidewalk behind a public parking garage in downtown Burlington. And it was both centrally located and also kind of out of the way. We weren’t competing with other activities that were happening there ever. And folks would come there because they knew we were there and we were there every day and people would disappear for months at a time and they would know that we would still be there every day with lunch and also, you know, with access to other types of help if people needed it. But because that public parking garage is the main place that the church street shopping class parks their vehicles before they go to shop at the upscale boutiques and fancy restaurants of Church Street, a small number of members of the business owning community and the, and the real estate community started a campaign to try to get us to leave that spot because they thought that people having to view poor people suffering in the walk from their vehicles to where they’re gonna shop was bad for business and they might be Right.

Cassie Gillespie (36:43):

I was gonna say, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (36:45):

Yeah. I they might be right. I think it is uncomfortable to be well off and be about to spend $70 on lunch or whatever it is, and then have to look at poor people suffering for lack of money mostly.

Cassie Gillespie (36:58):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (36:59):

on your way. So I think it’s a very small number of people who that would dissuade them from going to spend the money that they already had planned to spend. But you do hear a discourse in rural Vermont that’s like downtown Burlington scary now. It’s not what it used to be here.

Cassie Gillespie (37:13):

I hear a ton about this.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (37:14):

It’s pretty dangerous. Now, listeners in other parts of the world who might have been to a place like Philadelphia or Detroit, Chicago, any other real city might laugh at that and you probably should. It’s statistically not dangerous in downtown Burlington.

Cassie Gillespie (37:29):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (37:30):

But it is quite uncomfortable to be approached pretty aggressively by people asking you for money repeatedly on a short walk through downtown.

Cassie Gillespie (37:38):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (37:38):

And so they got a letter signed asking, so these, the small group of business owners got a letter signed ask asking like the city to force us to move by 170 different local business owners. But that letter, what gets lost is that letter had like 10 different demands about the construction on Main Street and the way that Church Street is policed enforcement about shoplifting, I think a a bunch of different things.

Cassie Gillespie (38:04):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (38:05):

Asking the marketplace garage lunch distribution program to move, which is what they called us was a minor one. And we talked to some of these business owners that signed the letter who didn’t even realize that that was about food not cops. And so the idea that the whole group of business owners was against what we were doing was fabricated. It was a, a small group of people who were against, but small group of very powerful people. And so the mayor had already been, when that letter was released, the mayor had already been meeting with members of Food, not Cops. And we sent different members to each one of these meetings with Americas, we’re a non-hierarchical group. No one’s in charge. And we needed her to know that there’s no one, there’s no one to negotiate with who has the power to move this thing. It’s gonna take like creating a decision making process that we don’t even have.

Cassie Gillespie (38:47):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (38:48):

To figure out how to move. But she had already been meeting and trying to get us to move. She didn’t really have anywhere else for us to go to offer. The mayor, but she was doing her due diligence. And then the city council came up with a resolution that basically mirrored this, this business owner’s open letter with all these demands but the only thing really with teeth in that resolution from the city council was that it was going to force the mayor by July 15th, I think to make us move away from our spot at the marketplace garage. Now trying to ban or corral ungovernable public food sharing projects like Food Not Bombs is something that happens in cities across the United States.

Cassie Gillespie (39:28):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (39:29):

And what that does is it’s an enforcement of this market regime where food is either a private affair, family picnic or a market transaction . Something you purchase. And there’s no third option where food is just the big public feast that doesn’t get a permit and have a like official organization sponsored event or something like that. and so I always thought that legally speaking Food Not Cops was just a family picnic that a lot of people came to and it happened to happen every day. We learned from a lawyer that it’s our like First Amendment protected Right. To share food as a political speech act, food not cops, clearly.

Cassie Gillespie (40:06):

Oh, it’s interesting.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (40:06):

A protest act. Interesting. At least one federal court has ruled in that direction one time in a case that involved a Food Not Bombs group in Fort Lauderdale.

Cassie Gillespie (40:17):

Okay.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (40:18):

But that was enough to convince the police department that they don’t wanna mess with our First amendment protected speech act of sharing lunch every day. And nobody’s asking us to leave our new spot at City Hall Park. So we did move, we didn’t negotiate with the city about doing it. We just up and moved one day, a couple weeks before the like deadline that they had set for the mayor to come up with a plan to make us move. The city had offered us $10,000 for relocation expenses. We haven’t taken the city up on that money. There’s internal disagreement about whether we should have or should still. In part because we never had permission to be where we were serving lunch in the first place. We never got permission to do it now. And that makes it way harder for the authorities to kick us out if they decide that we shouldn’t be doing that anymore. If we were to accept $10,000 from the city that might give them some power to continue pushing us around as the sort of like homelessness problem. I’m making little air quotes with my hand.

Cassie Gillespie (41:12):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (41:13):

moves miraculously to the spots where lunch outta happens to be being served.

Cassie Gillespie (41:18):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (41:19):

And, to get it outta sight, I think that, you know, we have this immense inequality in the city of Burlington and in the country of the United States. That’s a gap of wealth and income between the haves and the have nots that’s growing right now. And where some people would like that to go outta sight outta mind in their day-to-day lives. I think we should be looking that in the face and asking ourselves, can we actually live with that unequal and in my opinion, quite unfair distribution of resources.

Cassie Gillespie (41:45):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (41:46):

So we do it in public, in City Hall park in front of everyone and we offer food to not just, you know, our regular customers so to speak, but random pastors by

Cassie Gillespie (41:53):

Yeah. Anybody can come sit down and join.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (41:54):

Yeah.

Cassie Gillespie (41:55):

One of my students wrote a reflection about participating in one of those events. I just wanna share it, I’m paraphrasing now because it’s been a couple years, but she said something like when she sat down to eat the meal, she had a moment of doubt. She was worried. What if someone sees me and thinks I’m quote unquote one of them and then she realized I am one of them. Like I I’m just a person. Everybody here is just a person. We’re all the same. And she wrote about sort of that like conscious moment where she caught herself making the shift, you know?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (42:24):

Yeah. What I found in both my work with food not Bombs and giving away food more generally and, and also in my research is that when you offer people food as a gift and they’re strangers, they often say, surely someone else needs this more than me. Like, we catch people by surprise saying, Hey, would you like lunch? Sometimes they look at us like, oh, did I look homeless? Did I look like I’m poor?

Cassie Gillespie (42:45):

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (42:46):

Do they say, sure save it for someone who needs it more than me. And we say, no, it’s actually really important that people of all social classes are here eating this lunch.

Cassie Gillespie (42:53):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (42:54):

But the fact that people say surely someone needs this more than Me is a testament to humans’ generosity. And the way that the non-market setting, the fact that the food’s not for sale evokes that generosity within us and that and that like spirit of the gift because no one says surely needs, someone needs this more than me when there’s one bottle of olive oil left at the grocery store.

Cassie Gillespie (43:15):

Yes.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (43:15):

And you need it for a recipe right now.

Cassie Gillespie (43:18):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (43:18):

So people say, I got the last one. They go home and they say, I got the last bottle of olive oil. Or they say, I only paid $10 for a gallon of olive oil at the store. Look how little I gave and how much I got. So the market setting evokes this like selfishness.

Cassie Gillespie (43:32):

That’s interesting.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (43:32):

That’s super socially acceptable in that environment. Whereas the non-market setting evokes the exact opposite in us. Like, let’s make sure not to take the last serving.. Because that would be really rude.

Cassie Gillespie (43:42):

That would be really rude. I know we’re trying to wrap up, but there’s something else I’m just realizing we didn’t talk about at all, which is like, what about the community connection aspect for people?

Dr. Sam Bliss  (43:51):

Thanks for prompting that. I think the cross class relationships of solidarity are some of the most important things that food not cops engenders. Because when people who have extra resources or even just like have some income.

Cassie Gillespie (44:07):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (44:08):

Are genuine friends with people who are experiencing homelessness that helps a lot for the people who have less because Yeah. Food’s important and if you’re, especially if you’re struggling with addiction, it’s really hard to like prioritize spending the few dollars that you have on healthy food.

Cassie Gillespie (44:24):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (44:25):

And so having a $0 meal every day is super important, but like you need to make sure your cell phone doesn’t turn off so that when the housing coordinator who’s trying to help you get temporary shelter or an apartment calls, you receive that call and you don’t follow the, the bottom of the list. And so those relationships existing like, Hey, can you help me get a phone card? Is super important.

Cassie Gillespie (44:47):

Or even if someone’s waiting to get into treatment, you know? Yeah. Like when that opens up

Dr. Sam Bliss  (44:51):

All, all the time. And so we tend to left to our own devices segregate. You know, if you’re a professional class person who works in an office on a computer listening to this, ask yourself if you have friends who work with their hands, do you have friends who are construction workers? Do you have friends who are homeless? Like we left to our own devices tend to segregate and our lives, in my opinion are are like so much richer. It’s not just for the social benefit of the poor people. It’s like our lives are so much richer when we interact with people whose experiences are different than ours.

Cassie Gillespie (45:19):

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (45:19):

Like I think like school breeds a certain part of intelligence. I have a certain type of intelligence. I have a PhD and I love talking to other people who are nerds and scientists.

Cassie Gillespie (45:29):

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (45:29):

But I think there’s lots of things that they don’t know that my homeless friends do.

Cassie Gillespie (45:33):

Yeah. So we will share how people can find you if they wanna come join food, not cops either in a food prepping capacity or a serving or a cleaning or a donation. There’s all kinds of ways to help out and get involved. Thank you so much for your time and for your work the past five years.

Dr. Sam Bliss  (45:53):

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. This is like always talking about what is important about that work to me reinvigorates my motivation to do it. Alright,

Cassie Gillespie (46:02):

Have a good one. The Social Work Lens is produced by the University of Vermont’s Child Welfare Training Partnership and the State of Vermont. Our theme music is composed and performed by local band Brick Drop. And our sound production and engineering has been brought to you by Egan Media Productions. We’d also like to give a special thank you to our in-house administrative production assistant Emma Baird. For the social work lens, I’m Cassie Gillespie and we’ll see you next time.