"It's an opportunity to cooperate with another community group," Wesleyan student and Food Not Bombs member Abe Bobman said about the group's decision to accept the help of Middletown's First Church. "And it's an opportunity that's too good to miss."
On Sunday, Food Not Bombs shared it's Sunday meal for the first time in weeks without the threat of action from Middletown's Health Department, and Middletown Police.
"It's so much easier not having to worry," Bobman admitted. Last week Bobman was served with a summons to appear in court to answer to a misdemeanor charge of serving food to the public without a license.
Last week, First Church minister John Hall offered the group the ability to prepare the meal in the First Church kitchen, which is fully licensed.
"I think Food Not Bombs has a valid point about who is served by the food economy," Hall said Sunday after helping prepare and serve the food. "We feel this an act of prophetic witness. It's a comment about the system, and who is served better, those in wealth, or those in poverty. By helping we want to point it out and stand with those who are shortchanged by the system."
Bobman called the cooperation a temporary solution, motivated primarily by the prevailing atmosphere at the university which suffered through an unthinkable tragedy this week when a student was murdered in the Red and Black cafe.For First Church parishoner Lynn Shaw it was an opportunity to make a point too.
"There are too many people going without food," Shaw said. "And here we are in the wealthiest state, in the wealthiest country in the world."
Ann Marie Cannata, director of the Buttonwood Tree, who also helped organize the cooperative effort said that the Health Department would be satisfied as long as all volunteers signed in, and Food Not Bombs provide a list of their sources for the food distributed at each meal.
