Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting
By Jeff Gordiner
After nearly two weeks of living among the Occupy Wall Street protesters in downtown Manhattan, Ellis Roberts, 25, a Pennsylvania garbage collector laid off last year, looked scruffy and dazed.
He was not, however, hungry.
“I’ve been here for 12 days, and I’ve put on 5 pounds,” he said, sitting on the ground in front of a handmade sign that said “Class War Ahead.” “I’m eating better than I do at home.”
Like the rest of his anti-corporate comrades, Mr. Roberts learned soon after arriving in Zuccotti Park that his meals would be taken care of. All he had to do was amble toward a ramshackle cluster of tables and boxes in the middle of the park and, without paying a cent, grab a slice of pizza or a warm slab of homemade vegan casserole. Last Thursday he had encountered “a bunch of Katz’s Deli sandwiches,” he said. “That was good.”
The makeshift kitchen has fed thousands of protesters each day. Along the way, it has developed a cuisine not unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement itself: free-form, eclectic, improvisatory and contradictory.
Requests for food go out on Twitter and various Web sites sympathetic to the protesters. And somehow, in spontaneous waves, day after day, the food pours in. The donations are received with enthusiasm, even when they are not precisely what the troops might have desired.
Robert Strype, 29, a protester from the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area who was wearing a T-shirt that expressed his displeasure with Monsanto, said that anger about practices like factory farming and the genetic modification of vegetables was one of the factors that had roused him and some of his fellow occupiers. “Food plays a huge part in this movement,” he said. “Because people are tired of being fed poison.”
nytimes.com
Just an excerpt, the rest of the story is entertaining. Apparently orders for New York restaurant food to be delivered for the benefit of the protestors are coming in from all over the world -- Germany, France, England, Italy and Greece, as well as every region of the United States. “It’s been nonstop,” one restaurant owner said. “The phones don’t stop ringing. People from California order the most at one time.” Someone from the West Coast had called in the biggest delivery: he wanted 50 pizzas dispatched to the park.
Ah, that would be paid for via Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, no doubt? So what we have here is a great example of capitalism and the globalization of finance in action.
I also hear that the Starbucks across the street is doing phenomenal business. |
