For nearly a month, Riot Ribs has served grills, tacos, jalapeños, everything they had on hand, from a series of tents near the ongoing protest site in Portland, Oregon. Then, on Tuesday, the food collective announced a sudden closure. Someone who pretends to be the organization and scamming money, the members said.
The Riot Ribs component of an emerging network of self-help equipment to distribute loose food to protesters and homeless people in Portland and Seattle, where anger over murder through George Floyd police, racism and U.S. law enforcement led to months of marches.
But Riot Ribs’ sudden dissolution—the result of a former member allegedly going rogue—highlighted the challenges of the mission. Beset by local police, federal authorities, right-wing trolls, and friendlies-turned-grifters, the Pacific Northwest’s protest food groups have spent the past month struggling to do what should be one of the least controversial jobs there is: handing out free food.
Launched on July 4, Riot Ribs is the newest in a series of food teams that appears to be around racial justice protests. Some, like Seattle’s Riot Kitchen, began operating even earlier. It began as an initiative to feed homeless people and demonstrators around the police-free transitional protests at the Capitol (CHOP, formerly CHAZ), but survived the autonomous zone in the short term and continues to distribute food to the demonstrators.
Maehem, the founder of Riot Kitchen (who, like many interviewees for this article, asked for anonymity amid police activists across the country), said the assignment was born in the early days of George Floyd’s protests. It was then that she and her friends walked for hours without food and, after learning that other activists were also fasting, the former chef created a fund to make and distribute loose sandwiches.
He exploded.
“So many other people sought to donate to my sandwich fund that I turned it into a kitchen project. I was an excellent chef, so I had the skills and resources to supply hot food to others,” Maehem told the Daily Beast. . When the CHOP started, “other people chose to sleep outside, so I think the least I can do is make them breakfast.
Riot Ribs presented with a similar mission, opening with a single grid. Its only operator, an original Black Panther, gassed through police while cooking the first night, the organization told Bon Appetit.
Tear fuel would become a general feature of the Portland protests, as federal agents clashed with demonstrators every night as a component of an offensive to protect federal buildings, which were more productive and known for throwing others into unmarked vans.
But Riot Ribs seemed to be a specific issue of police anger. Unlike Riot Kitchen and some other Portland organization called Resistance Assistance, which lately collects food offsite and takes it to protests, Riot Ribs is a full-time camp. On July 16, the collective tweeted that members had been arrested by police, who said the park where they were camping “in the process of renovation.” Police ruled out their expansion operation, which had expanded with several grills, refrigerators and donations of money.
A few days later, Riot Ribs tweeted that police intentionally had their food and supplies.
“Everyone wants to know that they’re attacking us. They have reduced our boxes of water bottles; they broke a single tent (one of our cooks); they broke our sandwiches and also sprayed them with tear gas,” the organization tweeted. “All our grills were sprinkled with pepper internally last night. We want new grills.
Other self-help teams in the Pacific Northwest have also reported ill-treatment through police.
A member of The Witches, a Portland organization that distributes food and first aid, said its tents and tents used through homeless people were intentionally destroyed overnight.
“They were brought a type of blade, cut beyond any repair, and chemicals were poured into the sleeping bags,” he told Daily Beast R, a member of the witches who refused to give his name. “There’s no right way to put it, but it definitely feeds the troops.” But, they added, “even before that, we had full carts of snacks and water taken from the Portland Police Department.”
The witches tweeted a picture of what they said a tent ransacked through federal agents.
The Portland Police Department and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
But some antagonism has come from right-wing civilians.
“The white supremacists followed us home, ” said R about the witches. And on social media, the right has accused Riot Ribs of terrorism, and some threaten to call the group’s fitness branch. Several fraudulent accounts have been filed online: in a case noticed through The Daily Beast, impostors used a fake Riot Ribs account to prove the handling of a Portland journalist recently attacked by the right. Members of Riot Kitchen and Portland Resistance Assistance also reported some online harassment points.
Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University and Against the Fascist Creep, said the right-wing opposition saw teams like Riot Ribs not only as tough symbols of demonstrations for racial justice, but also as economic left-wing projects.
“I think anger is largely directed at the motion of protest rather than loose food, yet the repugnance of communism is at the center of both,” Reid Ross told the Daily Beast.
Ross noted that left-wing food teams are a long-standing lightning rod for the controversy, referring to Food Not Bombs, a 40-year-old self-help organization. The organization, which served loose food in both protests and homeless people, has been the subject of decades of repression. His co-founder recently told Teen Vogue that he had been arrested about a hundred times in incidents similar to Food Not Bombs. In a move that announced President Donald Trump’s anger against alleged anarchists in Portland, the FBI investigated some members of Food Not Bombs for their ties to the anarchist criminal organization Anarchist Black Cross in 2004.
“If you look at examples from the afterlife like Food Not Bombs, which serves loose food for anyone who needs it in public places like parks around the world, they have been attacked by the police and, to a lesser extent, by the right- Handers, for their contribution. to some kind of social disturbance, ” said Reid Ross.
The problems multiplied in late July, when a Riot Ribs volunteer went rogue, the collective alleges. Riot Ribs hasn’t named the man (many participants in the ongoing protests do not believe in calling police), but accuse him of “verbally, physically, and/or sexually abusing other volunteers.”
On Twitter, a former Riot Ribs volunteer accused the man of taking over the Riot Ribs tent “by force,” making unwanted advances on fellow volunteers, constantly using cocaine, screaming in colleagues’ faces, and secretly pocketing donations.
The alleged embezzlement occurred at a delicate time for Riot Ribs. The collective had kept meticulous open records of its source of income and expenses since July 7. With expanding advertising, donations have skyrocketed to more than $300,000. On July 24, Riot Ribs announced that it was postponing donations because it had earned more than it could use. (The organization tweeted an urgent call for a business attorney that day.)
But the dishonest volunteer allegedly created social media accounts and online counseling jars under the so-called Riot Ribs, sending all new donations. “This individual started looking “to manage “Riot Ribs” and set up some other CashApp and Twitter nick to continue operations in the park,” the organization said in a statement. To make matters worse, members of the right who had attacked the Twitter Riot Ribs mentions began to announce the account of the imposter, who has since replaced his call.
Riot Ribs said they abandoned their tents—and a plan to transfer ownership to the nonprofit Don’t Shoot PDX—due to the rogue’s presence.
“We were violently assaulted when this individual forcibly evicted everyone who was interested in the outside of the park,” Riot Ribs said in his dissolution. “For this reason, all the original Members of Riot Ribs are no longer in the park and do not feel the need to feed others in Portland.”
Since then, the organization has turned to a couple of food vans, called Revolution Ribs, and distributed some of its budget to other self-help teams in the Pacific Northwest, of which $25,000 went to Seattle’s Riot Kitchen. Some of these teams have also expressed a preference to launch their food projects. Maehem, from Riot Kitchen, said he was considering buying a caravan truck in his food truck to feed activists out of town.
The dissolution of Riot Ribs also came here amid an announcement, and some initial evidence that federal agents would withdraw from Portland, the main points remained untransparent, as Trump and Acting National Security Congressman Chad Wolf advised otherwise. As the city prepares for the next phase of protests, activists have made it clear that they will not leave the streets, even if the federal government has, some Riot Ribs staff members are taking the allocation of cell food in their new vans.
Others “are still in Portland and will return to mutual help and direct action,” the organization said in a statement, and “some of us will take a much-needed break.”
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