When I submitted my last column on the issue of Food Not Bombs’ (FNB) recent legal assault on the Middletown Health Department, I expected it would be the last I would hear of the issue. Indeed, even after the usual angry comments began flooding the article’s URL (most of them citing factual inaccuracies—yes, there were inaccuracies—that had nothing to do with the larger point of the piece), I was still tempted to let the issue slide. However, someone then invited me to “take another go at it; only this time take the time to do some good research.”

At the risk of admitting that the sources I used—namely, The Argus’ recent coverage of the controversy, as well as articles by the Middletown Eye—do not provide “good research” options, I think this is only appropriate. Besides, the issue is still very much alive and my original conviction has only been strengthened by the new facts I have learned.

Now, for the sake of clarity, let us review what is at stake in the case. If my readers would like sources on these facts, I will happily provide them. Middletown Food Not Bombs, a group apparently with no discernible leader, given that the students respond to the question of who is in charge with “we all are,” currently stands accused of violating health regulations that prevent them from serving food that has not prepared in a Health Department-approved kitchen (most Food Not Bombs members prepare the food in question in their own homes). Despite having toiled in obscurity for ten years prior to the accusation, the group was originally served with a cease-and-desist order in February of this year, but continued serving food in knowing defiance well into May, during which time the city began arresting the participants and confiscating the food. The group is currently engaged in a legal battle to have the law invalidated or amended by the Court in respect to their situation. They claim that the law infringes on their first amendment rights, and that it is too vague to be applied fairly. In this latter respect, they have been joined by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has formally requested that the law in question be amended.

As was stated in the original column, I agree that the law is vague. However, I still do not concede that the case of Food Not Bombs touches an area of vagueness. Moreover, I think the group is either hopelessly naïve about its own cause or willfully disingenuous when it claims that it merely wishes to be left alone. To begin with the legal question, a few points of clarification are necessary. Yes, the food is privately prepared (contrary to my previous assumption that it was prepared at the site), but it is still served on public property. FNB Member Abe Bobman ’11 points out (I now admit, correctly) that the draconian nature of the law’s current application could forbid one from handing off a privately-prepared pot of stew to a friend on a public sidewalk. Absurd as such a result would be, however, we must still ask ourselves whether it is the province of the Courts to dictate which laws are absurd and which are not. I contend, along with former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, that while a law may be “uncommonly silly” (as the one presently under investigation is), that silliness is a prudential concern for the legislature, not a substantive question of jurisprudence. Moreover, I contend that the law itself is a thin smoke screen for the larger issue of the group’s unjustified disobedience.

Suppose Mr. Bobman’s hypothetical situation were to occur, and I were to be arrested for passing a pot of stew to my friend on the street. I would be quite surprised, and I might write an angry letter to my representative, but one thing I can promise the reader I would not do is continue to pointedly pass out pots of stew to passers-by in the same place and protest loudly when the police showed up. Moreover, if a friend of mine offered me a safe “stew exchange” spot at which I could pass my pots of stew to my friends with the blessing of the State, I would use this exchange spot peacefully and without lawsuits. I would, in short, behave as though this was a reasonable misunderstanding and not a chance to parade all over the front page.

Is the analogy unfair? Yes, but not in the respect FNB believes it to be. You see, in the example above, the hypothetical victim of the law is not a member of any group which openly encourages its members to be as visible and vocal as possible, and to use hunger as a prop through which to complain about the “injustice of the military/industrial economic system,” as the Food Not Bombs website does in multiple places, for instance, by encouraging people to “Pick areas which have high volume and diverse pedestrian traffic” for their little breadline-style cookouts because “part of our mission is to help make the invisible homeless more visible to those better off, economically.” Ironically, for a group which complains of the injustice of the modern economic system, this same website actually sells Food Not Bombs memorabilia “to help you in your work for peace.” The prices for some of these products stretch into the hundreds of dollars.

If Middletown’s chapter of FNB is truly willing to continue toiling in obscurity, as it has for ten years, and is genuinely unaware of this media-hungry aspect of the national organization to which it belongs, I hope they will distance themselves from it, as well as withdraw their lawsuit, given that the law in question shows every sign of being changed, and rightfully so. For my part, this is my last word.