Keith McHenry is one of the most recognizable humans in Santa Cruz. Burly, with an almost cherubic smile, combined with the steely reserve of a man on a mission.
If you’re looking for McHenry, he is easy to find. He’s in downtown Santa Cruz, feeding the hungry.
The nonprofit that McHenry started in 1980, Food Not Bombs, is now active in over 33% of the countries in the world. There are a thousand Food Not Bombs, every day, somewhere, feeding those who cannot feed themselves, with vegan or vegetarian meals.
This isn’t the kind of founder who starts a viral grassroots movement and retires in Fiji. McHenry has been on the street since 1980, tirelessly promoting compassionate exchanges between the haves and have-nots.
“We started on May 24, 1980, in Boston and Cambridge,” McHenry begins. “I was studying painting and sculpture at Boston University. And I had a job as a produce worker at Bread and Circus.” At the time, Bread and Circus was the biggest distributor of “natural foods” in the Northeast. But the term “bread and circuses” was a ploy that the Romans used to pacify citizens from rising up in rebellion, by giving them free grain. McHenry isn’t interested in making citizens docile, nor interested in corporate involvement.
Bread and Circus “is now run by Whole Foods,” McHenry says, laughing.
McHenry grew up in a literate household that valued ideas and philosophies. “I had dyslexia, but my dad gave me Walden by Thoreau in fifth grade. That’s how I learned to read. But I mostly read the shorter part, on ‘Civil Disobedience,’” McHenry says.
It’s no wonder that the rugged activist is also third-generation Natural Parks Service. “My grandfather was the chief naturalist of Yosemite. And, my grandfather, on my dad’s side, lived with the Hopi. He would take us to the Snake Dances before they started strip mining Black Mesa. So I saw the Hopi land before electricity and walked it when it was pristine. Then, I saw the destruction of that whole area. And that was the final thing where I said, ‘OK, I’m going to just do nothing but organize to change society,’” McHenry recalls.
The name Food Not Bombs, known to millions, came about when McHenry heard of a building in Cambridge that was being used by people designing nuclear bombs, while he was delivering food. It should be obvious, but the two-fold agenda, perhaps hidden by the delivery of food to the unsheltered or hungry, is to stop all wars.
“On May 24, 1980, I was at the Seabrook [nuclear plant site in New Hampshire] protests with my friends. And one of my friends got arrested and we found somebody with a bunch of money to bail them out,” McHenry says. This was the day that Food Not Bombs was born. You can almost hear Thoreau whispering through the decades: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he writes, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
From that protest, the young McHenry and friends had an epiphany that straddled the land of the Diggers/Yippies and Pranksters. A bake sale that fed the hungry. Which is a noble pursuit as long as one doesn’t have rent to pay.
Luckly, McHenry’s landlord at the time, who was owed back rent, was also a socialite who had heard of the nascent Food Not Bombs. “She said everybody loved what we were doing in Cambridge. Her husband was head of the French department at Harvard,” McHenry remembers. And like that, Food Not Bombs became a cause célèbre.
By 1992, the idea of Food Not Bombs was spreading quickly, and McHenry decided it was time to come up with the three principles of what the organization stood for. “The food is always free to anyone, rich or poor, drunk or sober. That there’s no headquarters, presidents or anything like that that we are dedicated to. Also, each Food Not Bombs must be decentralized and autonomous. And then the third thing was that we were not a charity, but that we were dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change societies,” McHenry says.
Now, in the middle of 2025, there are more hungry people than ever. While it might seem daunting to the average person, McHenry was never merely average. “The lines keep getting bigger at the meals. For three years now, I’ve been getting between ten to twenty calls a day from seniors looking for food, for home delivery. I mean, in the middle of the night, I get calls from Michigan and Alabama. The poverty is incredible. And the stories they tell me—it’s just heartbreaking,” McHenry concludes.
Find out more about Food Not Bombs at santacruz.foodnotbombs.net.
