A second Food Not Bombs group started in 1988 in San Francisco. It was the perfect city for Food Not Bombs with good weather and history of radical activism. Keith McHenry, along with two San Francisco activists, realizing there was no free lunch service for the homeless on Mondays, set up a food table at the entrance to the Golden Gate Park at the foot of Haight Street. There was always a nice little crowd of people sitting on the lawn and they welcomed the free lunch and message of peace. On August 15, 1988, this small group of dedicated Food Not Bombs activists was surprised when 45 riot police marched out of the woods and arrested 9 volunteers who were sharing food. Undaunted, they returned the next Monday and so did the riot police. By Labor Day, over 100 volunteers were arrested. News of these arrests made CNN, the London Times and many other media outlets. Facing a crisis, Mayor Art Agnos held two afternoons of meetings with members of Food Not Bombs, the ACLU, city officials and neighborhood activists. Under pressure, he issued a permit and Food Not Bombs returned to the park to share their ideas and food without police interference.

All went well with meals every Monday in Golden Gate Park until the next summer, when the police started a campaign to arrest the homeless for sleeping in the city parks. After several days of hearing stories about people on the street being soaked by fire hoses and losing their sleeping bags, blankets and personal belongings, Food Not Bombs decided to get involved in helping them organize against the police attacks. The homeless felt isolated and fearful living and sleeping in the city parks and streets so they started gravitating towards Civic Center Plaza across from City Hall. As a tent city began to grow in the Plaza, Food Not Bombs started a 24-hour a day on-site soup kitchen there. The volunteers shared free vegetarian meals for 27 days. The homeless organized concerts, dances and rallies every weekday at noon. In response, the mayor opened an additional shelter declaring that all the homeless now had a place to stay and ordered the arrest of any of the homeless unwilling to sleep in this shelter. For many, though, the shelter was not an option. Families, women and people with pets were not allowed to stay at the new shelter. Therefore, the tent city continued until Food Not Bombs was arrested (again) and homeless people were driven out, supposedly so a carnival, sponsored by the mayor's office could move into the park.

Following this experience, Food Not Bombs decided to continue serving food in Civic Center Plaza across from City Hall every day at lunch and dinner. The group organized a system where volunteers with a small amount of soup and bread would arrive and be arrested. Then another group of volunteers with a half bucket of soup and a few more loaves of bread would arrive and they would be arrested. While the police were busy dealing with the people they had arrested, the rest of the food would arrive and Food Not Bombs would feed everyone who came to eat. In a strategy designed to build community support, Food Not Bombs invited members of other groups to serve free food and risk arrest. Members of unions, church groups and other political organizations volunteered. Nuns and priests were arrested, labor organizers were jailed but when members of the National Lawyers Guild shared food, the police arrested the people eating and left the lawyers alone.

The arrests became virtually a daily event outside San Francisco City Hall. On October 5, 1989 at 5:05 pm San Francisco shook with the largest earthquake since 1909. Rice and beans were cooking on the stove at the time the gas and electricity went out. Food Not Bombs had propane tanks and stoves so the volunteers loaded up the truck and set up a field kitchen outside City Hall. This time when the police arrived, they joined the soup line and had a bite to eat and the arrests ended for the rest of Mayor Agnos1s term.

In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the new world, Food Not Bombs held its first national gathering. At the time, there were approximately 30 cities with Food Not Bombs chapters, mostly on the west coast. Around 75 people came to the gathering including several volunteers from Food Not Bombs chapters in Canada. Also at this time, the book Food Not Bombs, How to Feed The Hungry and Build Community was published. Grassroots punk rock bands, such as Good Riddance, Propagandi, MDC, Green Day and other bands put information about Food Not Bombs in their lyrics and liner notes. And on top of all this grassroots dissemination and organizing, the Internet was just becoming popular and became a major tool for spreading the word about Food Not Bombs. Chapters started everywhere, almost like magic. The national contact list grew and became an international contact list. Groups started in Melbourne, Australia, Prague, Czechoslovakia, Montreal, Canada and London, England, to mention a few places.

Not long after the first Food Not Bombs gathering in 1992, there was an election in San Francisco and the former Chief of Police, Frank Jordan, was elected mayor. He started what he called the "Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program." Although claiming to be a program to "help" homeless people achieve a better quality of life, in actuality, it was just another attempt to rid the city of homeless people by harassing them, often arresting them or fining them for things like sleeping in public. Often, the police would take their belongings. It became clear that the goal of this program was to create a climate where out of fear the homeless would leave the city. Food Not Bombs volunteers were horrified to see this abuse of police power so they started organizing protests. In retaliation, the mayor ordered the arrest of Food Not Bombs activists, even though it was not actually illegal to feed the homeless. In a stroke of legal manipulation, the City was able to get a restraining order against Food Not Bombs and the volunteers started being arrested and charged with "felony conspiracy to share free food in violation of a court order."

Because local media outlets would not report on Food Not Bombs side of the story, some volunteers arranged a meeting with Steven Dunnifer, who was an electrical engineer operating a low-power FM radio station called Free Radio Berkeley, from the hills surrounding Berkeley, California. From this meeting, two additional unlicensed, low-power or "pirate"radio stations were started by Food Not Bombs volunteers in San Francisco. The Federal Communications Commission tried to shut down the stations but this only encouraged more people to start their own stations. At one point there were over 350 unlicensed low-power FM radio stations in the United States, many started by Food Not Bombs activists.

Food Not Bombs also started a squatter1s movement with the San Francisco Tenants Union called Homes Not Jails. The first Homes Not Jails action was occupying an empty hotel across from Glide Memorial Church on Thanksgiving. As the mayor arrived to cut the turkey at Glide1s soup kitchen, activists dropped banners declaring housing as a human right, as stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Homes Not Jails was able to house many homeless people in empty buildings, including occupying abandoned buildings in the Presidio, a former army base near Golden Gate Park.

Keith McHenry was arrested and beaten regularly and generally released without any charges being filed. On January 1, 1994, the state of California instituted a law known as "Three Strikes," which meant that anyone convicted of three major felony charges was automatically sentenced to at least 25 years in jail with a maximum of life in prison. On January 4, 1994, Food Not Bombs cofounder Keith McHenry was arrested on a bogus felony charge. In May, he was charged with another two bogus felony charges and faced 25 years to life in prison.