142.

THE FOOD CONSPIRACY.

"The Food Conspiracy - A People's Enterprise" by Sue Copperman (5pp., photo-illustrated) in TOUCH #5 (SF: White Panther Party Intercommunal News Service, July [?] 1974).

Newspaper format, folded, as issued. 32pp. Illustrated throughout.

The White Panthers were an anti-racist political collective founded in Detroit in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair and John Sinclair, inspired by the Black Panther Party who were already using their food co-op to agitate for more independent economic activity on the part of the Black community. A chapter of the White Panther Party later established itself in San Francisco and ran a successful Food Conspiracy throughout the Bay Area from 1974 up until the early 1980s. Touch was published erratically between 1971 and 1974, and this appears to be the last of only five issues produced.

The San Francisco group was a loose federation of autonomous buying clubs whose representatives 'conspired' with one another to purchase healthy food for the cheapest prices possible, both as a way to organise local neighbourhoods against price-gouging supermarkets and to raise consciousness about the irrationality of the profit system. Started in the late 1960s, in part by members of the Kaliflower commune, its volunteers were organised in various collectives - cheese collective, vegetable collective, grains collective - which purchased, packaged and distributed the produce, providing large numbers of people with healthy food in a non-capitalist, co-operative way.

Also: People's Ascension in the Haight: Haight Community Struggles with City Bureaucrats for Control of the Panhandle; The Good Earth Commune of Haight-Ashbury is a People's Enterprise; article on Ruchell Magee by Johnny Larry Spain; focus on the People's Ballroom; The Evaporation of Constitutional Rights; What Really Happened to the '74 California Marijuana Initiative?; On Withdrawal by George Jackson; What Kind of Communists are We Anyway?; Community Control of Police (White Panther Party Four Point Program); White Panther Party Defends Welfare Recipient's Rights in Marin; White Panther Party Statement on the Symbionese Liberation Army; more.

Some wear and creasing to edges, and small corner loss to back cover, o/w Very Good. Scarce.

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