This 1960s Anarchist Group Believed Food Should Be Free

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From Atlas Obscura

In 1968, the poet Diane di Prima moved from New York to San Francisco. She wanted to work with the Diggers, self-identified community anarchists who performed street theater and organized mutual aid projects, from free stores to free housing to the dissemination of produce, hot meals, and bread.

Shortly after her arrival, Di Prima’s Volkswagen van was enlisted to help with the Diggers’ food distribution efforts. For Di Prima, who had come of age during McCarthyism and the FBI repression of the 1950s, the opportunity to turn her ideals into action was thrilling. “Suddenly to be able to be out in public, delivering food, having be-ins,” Di Prima said in a 1999 interview, “it just took a weight off your heart about having kept your mouth shut too long.” Over the next year, her household delivered fish and vegetables to over 20 different communes weekly.

The San Francisco Diggers formed in the fall of 1966, nearly two years before Di Prima arrived. The group started when it split off from anti-establishment Artists’ Liberation Front for ideological reasons—the ALF thought it was okay to sell goods at their street fairs while the Diggers, who believed everything should be free, did not. The Diggers’ formation was further catalyzed by the Hunters Point Social Uprising, a response to the police murder of Matthew Johnson, a Black teenager, which drew attention to the systemic racism that permeated the city.

Naming themselves after the English Diggers, 17th-century socialists who occupied private land, planted it communally, and distributed pamphlets arguing that the earth should be “a common treasury for all,” the San Francisco Diggers believed, much like their forebears, in putting the ideas they wrote about into action.

The Diggers took inspiration and their name from a group of 17th-century English dissidents.
The Diggers took inspiration and their name from a group of 17th-century English dissidents. Homer Sykes / Alamy

That October, the Diggers began serving free food in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. For the first “Feed,” two recently unemployed Diggers, Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott, procured donations of vegetables and meat from the San Francisco Produce Market. They turned these donations into stew, cooked in and served out of 22-gallon milk cans stolen from an industrial dairy.

The meals that followed, which fed up to 200 people daily, were part of a broader wave of food-based activism in the 1960s. As Warren Belasco writes in Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, this included “the symbolic importance of interracial dining sit-ins at segregated restaurants” and “consumer boycotts in support of lettuce and grape pickers,” as well as the Black Panther breakfast programs, which began in nearby Oakland in 1969.

The Diggers’ goal, Belasco writes, was “as much to teach as to feed.” Theatrical stunts, including screwing stew lids on tightly to make them difficult to open, were incorporated into the meals to push diners out of apathetic consumerism. The group also asked attendees to walk through a life-size “Frame of Reference”—built and painted bright orange by Murcott and Grogan—before eating. Crossing this 13-foot threshold symbolized stepping into the communal, money-free world the Diggers strove to create. Mimeographed broadsides scrawled with revolutionary poetry and satire were handed out at meals, further strengthening the idea that eating together went hand-in-hand with sharing ideas.

As a largely white group, their solidarity with activists of color was often clumsy and imperfect. But the Diggers frequently used these broadsides, as Kera Lovell writes in “Free Food, Free Space: People’s Stews and the Spatial Identity Politics of People’s Parks,” to “shed light on the connections between institutionalized racism and anticapitalism—even calling out patterns of racial prejudice within their hippie community.”

They also used the papers to entice diners to take part in events like Halloween 1966’s Intersection Game, a spectacle-meets-direct-action protest of how city streets were built for automobile traffic rather than pedestrians. This game, according to Bradford D. Martin in The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Performance in 1960s America, drew in about 600 participants, disrupted traffic in the Haight-Ashbury, and led to the arrest of five Diggers.

A Digger doles out food in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.
A Digger doles out food in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. Ted Streshinsky/Getty Images

But by 1967, Digger Feeds were petering out. This could be explained by everything from a crackdown on food distribution by city authorities to population pressures in the Haight-Ashbury, which was filling with young people from all over the country in advance of the Summer of Love.

Another major cause was the burden these meals imposed on Digger women, including a group of former Antioch College students, who were responsible for sourcing food and cooking for the crowds that came to eat daily. This reflected the broader misogyny of the 1960s counterculture. While Digger men discussed politics, wrote broadsides, and staged theater, women tended to procure food stamps, cook, garden, and care for children. Digger broadsides were full of casual sexism, and Grogan’s manifesto “The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of the Free City” imagines an anti-capitalist utopia in which “chicks,” as he calls them, would be responsible for sewing homemade clothing. Despite this, as Madeline Lane-McKinley writes in “Notes on Utopian Failure in Commune Kitchens,” many women in counter-cultural communities were able to take advantage of living and working collectively to organize against the patriarchy. Some Digger women even split off to start their own projects and organizations.

Still, women continued to play a role within the Diggers, including Di Prima, who writes about picking up “free Digger meat / for Free City Convention” in the San Joaquin Valley in her late 1960s poem “Revolutionary Letter #11.” Women were also founders and active participants in Digger Free Bakeries. In June 1967, Diggers baking at All Saints Church turned 400 pounds of flour and other ingredients into whole wheat bread, which they distributed in Haight-Ashbury. This first distribution was so successful that the Diggers soon opened a regular Free Bakery at the church. They gave away “almost 200 loaves of bread for free every Wednesday and Saturday” wrote baker Mary McClain in a September 1967 letter to the Los Angeles Free Press. Because the All Saints Church kitchen didn’t have baking trays, they took to making the bread in recycled coffee cans.

Diggers operated free stores, such as this one in New York.
Diggers operated free stores, such as this one in New York. Jim Wallace/Getty Images

Free Bakeries proliferated throughout the Bay Area, including on nearby commune Olompali Ranch, where bread was made poolside on equipment donated by a bakery owner who had decided to, in hippie parlance, “drop out.” After baking around 300 loaves, Olompali residents transported the bread to San Francisco, where it was distributed in the Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore. In May 1968, Ruth and Walter Reynolds started a free bakery farther afield at Resurrection City, an encampment on the National Mall in Washington, DC that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial campaign for economic justice spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr and carried on, after his assassination, by other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At Resurrection City, the bakery made 15 loaves an hour that were, according to an article in The Berkeley Barb, “served fresh from the oven to the camp’s hungry residents … who usually only get one hot meal a day.”

Digger Bread also spread throughout the counterculture in recipe form. A leaflet offered a list of where to buy wholesale flour cheaply in the San Francisco area, instructions for making 12 loaves at once, and the stipulation that, although anyone was welcome to use the recipe, “you always give [the bread] away.” Versions of it were reprinted in underground newspapers and periodicals, including the very first issue of Mother Earth News, although, as the recipe proliferated, the message that the bread should always be free disappeared.

The San Francisco Diggers fizzled out in 1969, which Di Prima attributed to a combination of political repression, naivety, drug-related harm, and “a big revolutionary ego game.” Still, Free Bakeries and Digger-inspired projects continued throughout the 1970s in both the Bay Area and other cities, and their work has had an influence on mutual aid over the years. Lovell, Belasco, and Martin have all drawn connections between the Diggers’ food distributions and long-running free meals in Berkeley’s People’s Park, as well as the group Food Not Bombs. More recently, the Diggers have inspired dinners hosted by Hawai’i-based group Eating in Public.

In spite of the misogyny of many of the men involved, the Digger ethos was perhaps best chronicled in the poetry of Di Prima. During the years that she worked with the Diggers, Di Prima began writing her multi-decade poetry series Revolutionary Letters and, in them, capturing the subversive fervor of the 1960s Left. In “Letter #21,” she asks, “Can you / own land, can you / own house, own rights / to other’s labor, (stocks, or factories / or money, loaned at interest) / what about / the yield of same, crops, autos / airplanes dropping bombs, can you / own real estate, so others / pay you rent?” For Di Prima and the other Diggers, the answer was an emphatic “No.” Their distribution of free stew, bread, and produce brought that belief to life.

There are 14 Comments

I like this kind of utopian, prefigurative politics. Maybe we can do it better.

Well sort of if the "free" includes freedom to exchange in an agreed upon proportion. I mean, someone with 1 ton of potatoes may be approached by a family with 6 daughters and agree that they will accept 1 ton of potatoes as a 'dowry' for one daughter. The hippies seemed to embrace free polygamy so maybe dowries would be obsolete depending on the individual's level of commitment/devotion to unleashed desire.
Anyway, who is gonna police this "free food" policy? There will always be someone who wants something and who will make irresistable offers of produce to satisfy their desires and aspirations. Is "Utopia" an ideology? "Those who walked away from Omelas" by Leguin describes the totalitarianism of Utopias. But prefiguring must be the prerequisite to atleast display some genuine commitment to any cause.
I'm allover the place here, hippies annoy me, especially the Christian moralistic ones.

These hippies gave it a good old college try. Utopias are impossible dreams that live in the imaginary. Like Kawaii World, a place where everyone is cute, nice and happy. You can give away bread and potatoes to the kids who cry for it. UwU

I'm gonna dig like a digger today and make a whole bunch of sauce. Who's with me?

Yes, an occasional fist fight or tantrum venting is entertaining, healthy and authentic.

Love the world, fight the baddies. Join an activist group if you like. Face the absurdity. Enjoy yourself.

Before prisons folk settled things openly in the street, no weapons, just witty insult, song and satire, and fighting/wrestling to settle a score or plead one's case infront of the community. This "street theatre" was integrated into daily life, there was no stadium/stage, popstars then were your neighbours or the wandering troubadours and poets who followed a regional circuit.

Fossil Fueled Fordist fantasies and patriarchy adjacent parochialisms aside, they are vastly preferable to the identitarian politico faggotry that runs the milieu today. The complete opposite of radical sincerity.

We def need a new variation of this albeit without the Xian morality(though some Xian ethics is OK). Something like a radical neo-pagan agape movement 4 the streetz. Fuck these current puritanical activist hoes.

Nice distinction regarding Christian ethics vs morality. Certainly some of Jesus's ideas on social equity ring true and are radically generous.

Thanks. I have always been waiting for something like this doco. I guess that many of the species lack critical thinking or haven't read the author Orwell, or Huxley's Brave New World, and so have been dumbed down so completely that they volunteer to be enslaved. However I think that high population densities created a situation of food shortages and overcrowding which exacerbated an innate herding tendency to follow a leader, so the volunteering was a path of least resistance i.e. work or else face a difficult and perilous life on the streets. It is usually the child bearing members of the species who succumb and surrender to the burn out society for the sake of their offspring, and could be seen as a survival instinct.

And here we are, witnessing the journey, the pilgrimage that is the ‘utopia maker’. An arduous and challenging journey punctuated by the comparative respite of a ‘service centre’.
The species gather in droves at these places in search of sustenance and refreshments before continuing their highway travels.
Many fill up their steeds with the liquified remains of their dinosaur ancestors, and many more meander blankly through the bustling food courts in search of food. Abundant with food-like products, the food courts leave many of the travelers in a dazed and confused state, shuffling and bumping past each other for the ultimate prize…a burger, fries and milkshake,,,and perhaps even more coveted, the crispy cream donuts. Perhaps lost on these weary travelers is that they are neither crisp, nor contain real cream.
As we watch a little closer we can see the subspecies of the herds. Young adult hipsters easily recognized, as the females display ample butt cheek, and the male’s puffed chests and tattoos advertising their ability to mate, awkwardly mingle.
These service centers are not known as mating grounds but nevertheless the young adult hipsters are relentless self advertisers.
Then there’s the family species, with young in tow. The young ones make loud screaming noises to indicate that they’re slipping out of their previous sugar rush, and require another..now! Be sure the crispy creams are a popular choice!
Bedraggled and exhausted the ‘end of tether’ blank stares of the parents is indeed indication that the pilgrimage has taken its toll.
A bikie or three will also been seen amongst the herd. Generally lone wolves, their outward appearance of aggression and alpha male persona is mostly a front. Misunderstood and often abandoned as young these species carry large packets of pringles on their shoulders. They enjoy revving their noisy steeds to herald their arrival, another superficial mask of alpha-ness. Like hungry vultures, they ride in, make lots of noise, and leave again….usually punctuated with burning rolled leaves and inhaling the smoke.
And finally, muddled in with the herd are the old grey Boomers. Quietly going about their business of finding a weak milky tea or coffee and a piece of week old carrot cake, they make their way back to the chaotic parking lot. Like their distant cousins the hermit crabs, the Boomers too move very very slowly, but cleverly drag their home with them on the great journey.
These nomads so easy to spot on the open road, as one need only look for the long trail of vehicles held up behind them.
We thank these service centers for allowing us to witness the great utopia pilgrimage in all its glory.

I worked in the food court at the mall at a place called Tater Junction. We served soup, salads and baked potatoes with hot toppings. I mostly did prep in the kitchen but also worked the counter. I might scrub 10 - 15 boxes of potatoes in a day. My cousin and I used to roller skate in the mall and slide down the center strip of the escalators. This is the urban utopia of our dreams. Before they invented food courts the restaurants were scattered about the mall but now we enjoy a concentrated spectacle.

Some young members of the species have a symbiotic relationship with these food courts, and with frugal planning and by self-sufficient means can scrounge a satisfying existence and even have an expendable income left over after eating to purchase sex or drugs. They have cleverly managed to procure a lifestyle similar to that of billionaires, but without all the capital baggage.

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