You bring what you have. Nobody assigns the menu. Somebody brings rice and somebody brings greens and somebody brings a cake they made at midnight because they could not sleep and baking felt better than lying in the dark. The table is a folding table borrowed from the church basement and the plates are paper and the forks are plastic and none of that matters because the food is not the point. The gathering is the point. The room full of people who showed up with something in their hands is the point.

The Black Panthers served free breakfast to children before school every morning in Oakland and Chicago and cities across the country starting in nineteen sixty nine. They fed tens of thousands of kids. Eggs and toast and orange juice and grits served by people the FBI called the greatest internal threat to the security of the United States. J. Edgar Hoover did not fear the guns. Hoover feared the breakfast. He said the breakfast program was the most dangerous activity of the Black Panther Party because it was the one the community loved the most. You cannot call someone a threat when they are feeding your children at seven in the morning.

In Detroit after the city went bankrupt in twenty thirteen the streetlights went out in whole neighborhoods. The garbage trucks stopped coming. The ambulance took forty minutes. The people on the block did not wait for the city to come back. They mowed the vacant lots themselves. They boarded up the abandoned houses. They started gardens in the empty spaces where houses used to be. They shared what they grew. Collard greens and tomatoes and peppers passed across fences and over porches. The city had given up on them so they became the city. Nobody elected them. Nobody paid them. They just did what needed to be done because nobody else was going to do it.

The Diggers in San Francisco gave away free food in Golden Gate Park every afternoon at four o clock in nineteen sixty six. They called it free because it was free. No strings. No sermon. No membership card. They cooked stew in a borrowed kitchen and carried it to the park and fed anybody who showed up. They built a frame out of wood and called it the Free Frame of Reference and you had to step through it to get your food. The frame was the art. The food was the politics. The act of feeding a stranger without asking for anything in return was the most radical thing happening in a city full of radical things.

You sit at the folding table and the woman next to you brought potato salad and she tells you her name and you tell her yours and by the end of the meal you know where she works and where her kids go to school and what she thinks about the vacant lot on the corner. The potluck is not a dinner party. The potluck is an organizing meeting disguised as a meal. Every revolution in history started with people sitting down together and eating and talking about what they were going to do next. The table is the first meeting room. The food is the first agenda. You bring what you have and you share it and that is how everything begins.