As the scent of barley fills the room, steam emanating from two large pots on the stove moistens the air and fogs up the windows. People, mostly barefoot, weave in between each other, adding ingredients and discarding the extras in a compost bin.

As the stew simmers and the potatoes cool, volunteers transfer the food from the kitchen of Bellingham’s Alternative Library, a house with a library inside, to the corner of Cornwall Avenue and Magnolia Street.

These cooks represent a chapter of Food Not Bombs, a national organization that protests war, poverty and the destruction of the environment. The group of friends, loosely coordinated by Fairhaven junior Zac Robertson, collects donations of vegan food, prepares meals and serves them downtown each Friday. They protest waste and war but also promote peace through sharing.

While serving downtown Oct. 30, Robertson discussed the value of Food Not Bombs.

“We’re focusing on the food part,” Robertson said. “All the peace we can wreak in our lives helps get in that culture of sharing and not hoarding.”

Sharing the food is a response to the fact that there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world and yet American society, for example, hoards resources, Robertson said. Sharing the donated food cultivates a connection to the land that is lost on many people, he said.

Peace also comes through personal connections such as the ones the volunteers promote, he said. Robertson and his friends and roommates live in a tight-knit community that helps them become closer to people outside their group, he said.

The group consists of housemates and friends who all met one way or another over the years. A weekly sushi night with a few people ballooned into a diverse mixture of Bellingham residents and Western students who knew someone who knew someone else. 

“People in this house will meet new people and give them huge hugs and sort of freak them out,” Robertson said with a laugh.

Robertson employs different methods to establish this bond between people and their environment.

An avid barefooter, Robertson almost always lives and travels shoeless. He and fellow barefooter Western junior Eric Schmitz said they do this in part to connect with their environment by directly experiencing the sensations of the ground through their feet.

Walking into the entryway of the house that Robertson shares with several roommates, one is greeted by a mound of resident shoes and a polite request for guests to remove theirs as well.

While it is partly for the sake of keeping the house clean, many of the house’s residents practice the lifestyle of barefooting.

As a child, Robertson said he was constantly taking off his shoes and hiding them, even before he could walk. While he’s been going shoeless for 15 years, he began committing to the lifestyle six years ago, he said.

“[My parents] always accepted me being a little bit different than most folks,” he said.

One of the advantages Schmitz said he finds to barefooting is that it helps him interact with his more playful side.

“The world becomes more of a jungle gym,” he said.

Schmitz often went shoeless during the summer, and soon, he just stopped putting them back on.

When he moved from suburban Everett to Bellingham three years ago, Schmitz said he found his barefoot lifestyle attracted more attention in the city than back home.

Most onlookers were just curious but there were also the relatively infrequent instances where he was asked to leave a building such as a grocery store, he said.
“I believe in leading by example; I do it because it feels right for me,” Schmitz said.

 

At Oct. 30's Food Not Bombs, friends and volunteers sat and ate their meals as shouts of “Free food!” and “Food, not bombs!” encouraged passers-by to join in.
Western freshman Jamie Welch stopped to enjoy some of the home-cooked food.

“I love it; it’s so amazing,” she said of the protest. “It makes me want to support it. And I’d learn to cook delicious food!”

Not every passer-by is so enthusiastic, though. Some refuse, saying they are on their way to buy food while others ignore Robertson and his fellow protesters entirely, he said.
This was often the case when they held the protest in front of Starbucks on the corner of Railroad Avenue and Holly Street.

“It’s not a freaking handout!” Robertson said light-heartedly. “We share food in solidarity.”

As dessert was served in the form of six pies, one of the volunteers boisterously warned the waning crowd, “The cool whip is not vegan!”

The sky darkened and the leftovers were placed in cars to be offered to friends and visitors of the Alternative Library and anyone else who might stop by.

Back at the house, Robertson’s bare feet slap against the linoleum floor as he cleans pots and puts away leftovers.

“With both barefooting and Food Not Bombs, there are ways for us to connect with other people and soil,” Robertson said.

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