 | COOKING for
PEACE Cultivating Community, Reaping Revolution Preface Page 10 While hunger, homelessness and poverty increase, military spending is at an all time high. World military expenditures were estimated to be $1.531 trillion in 2009. The United States spent over $900 billion on its war against Iraq, while it increased its spending to $6.7 billion in Afghanistan per month in 2010. Over 40 million Americans depended on food stamps as their country spent billions on its military. The global environment and economy are in crisis. We are facing unimaginable horrors under the current corporate and political leadership. Corporations are free to buy American elections. European governments are following America's example, cutting essential services while bailing out the transnational corporations. Chaos rules in every corner of the earth. There has never been a more important time for people to participate in the work of Food Not Bombs. This book is intended to replace the first book, Food Not Bombs, How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community. It is completely rewritten and renamed to reflect many of the changes Food Not Bombs has experienced over the past three decades. Food Not Bombs has grown to a global movement, so the details that once focused on the United States now seek to include all areas of the world from the ingredients in our recipes, legal issues that Food Not Bombs volunteers might face, to the data about hunger and food waste. Since we published our first book, there have been many changes in technology so this book includes information on how it is possible to use the web, internet and mobile phones as tools in the organizing of your local Food Not Bombs chapter. People have also suggested that the book would be more useful if it included recipes for smaller numbers of people, therefore we have included recipes for groups of four to six people. Another change is the inclusion of vegan food where our food was once only considered vegetarian. I have included more details on the history of Food Not Bombs to reflect the progress we have made since the 20th Anniversary edition of our first book. Finally, my good friend and former co-author, C.T. Butler, has moved on to be one of the world's top experts in the use of Formal Consensus and is busy teaching this process to people all over the globe. I can't thank him enough for his help in co-writing the original book in 1992 and 2000. |
