RESTAURANTS

In a country such as Amerika, there is bound to be a hell-of-a-lot food lying around just waiting to be ripped off. If you want to live high off the hog without having to do the dishes, restaurants are easy pickings. In general, many of these targets are easier marks if you are wearing the correct uniform. You should always have one suit or fashionable dress outfit hanging in the closet for the proper heists. Specialized uniforms, such as nun and priest garb, can be most helpful. Check out your local uniform store for a wide range of clothes that will get you in, and especially out, of all kinds of stores. Every movement organization should have a prop and costume department.

In every major city there are usually bars that cater to the New Generation type riff-raff, trying to hustle their way up the escalator of Big Business. Many of these bars have a buffet or hors-d’oeuvres served free as a come-on to drink more mindless booze. Take a half-empty glass from a table and use it as a prop to ward off the anxious waitress. Walk around sampling the free food until you’ve had enough. Often, there are five or six such bars in close proximity, so moving around can produce a delightful “street smorgasbord.” Dinner usually begins at 5:00 PM.

If you are really hungry, you can go into a self-service cafeteria and finish the meal of someone who left a lot on the plate. Self-service restaurants are usually good places to cop things like mustard, ketchup, salt, sugar, toilet paper, silverware and cups for home use. Bring an empty school bag and load up after you’ve cased the joint. Also, if you can stomach the food, you can use slugs at the automat. Finishing leftovers can be worked in even the fanciest of restaurants. When you are seated at a place where the dishes still remain, chow-down real quick. Then after the waitress hands you the menu, say you have to meet someone outside first, and leave.

There are still some places where you can get all you can eat for a fixed price. The best of these places are in Las Vegas. Sew a plastic bag onto your tee-shirt or belt and wear a loose-fitting jacket or coat to cover any noticeable bulge. Fried chicken is the best and the easiest to pocket, or should we say bag. Another trick is to pour your second free cup of hot coffee into the plastic bag sewed inside your pocket and take it with you.

At large take-out stands you can say you or your brother just picked up an order of fifteen hamburgers or a bucket of chicken, and got shorted. We have never seen or heard of anybody getting turned down using this method. If you want to get into a grand food heist from take-out stands, you can work the following nervy bit: from a pay phone, place an order from a large delivery restaurant. Have the order sent to a nearby apartment house. Wait a few minutes in the booth after you’ve hung up, as they sometimes call back to confirm the order. When the delivery man goes into the apartment house to deliver the order, you can swipe the remaining orders that are still in his truck.

In fancy sit-down restaurants, you can order a large meal and halfway through the main course, take a little dead cockroach or a piece of glass out of your pocket and place it deftly on the plate. Jump up astonished and summon the headwaiter. “Never have I been so insulted. I could have been poisoned” you scream slapping down the napkin. You can refuse to pay and leave, or let the waiter talk you into having a brand new meal on the house for this terrible inconvenience.

In restaurants where you pay at the door just before leaving, there are a number of free-loading tricks that can be utilized. After you’ve eaten a full meal and gotten the check, go into the restroom. When you come out go to the counter or another section of the restaurant and order coffee and pie. Now you have two bills. Simply pay the cheaper one when you leave the place. This can be worked with a friend in the following way. Sit next to each other at the counter. He should order a big meal and you a cup of coffee. Pretend you don’t know each other. When he leaves, he takes your check and leaves the one for the large meal on the counter. After he has paid the cashier and left the restaurant, you pick up the large check, and then go into the astonishment routine, complaining that somebody took the wrong check. You end up only paying for your coffee. Later, meet your partner and reverse the roles in another place.

In all these methods, you should leave a good tip for the waiter or waitress, especially with the roach-in-the-plate gambit. You should try to avoid getting the employees in trouble or screwing them out of a tip.

One fantastic method of not only getting free food but getting the best available is the following technique that can be used in metropolitan areas. Look in a large magazine shop for gourmet digests and tourist manuals. Swipe one or two and copy down a good name from the masthead inside the cover. Making up a name can also work. Next invest $5.00 to print business cards with the name of the magazine and the new “associate editor.” Call or simply drop into a fancy restaurant, show a copy of the magazine and present the manager with your card. They will insist that the meal be on the house.

Great places to get fantastic meals are weddings, bar-mitzvahs, testimonials and the like. The newspaper society sections have lists of weddings and locations. If your city has a large Jewish population, subscribe to the newspaper that services the Jewish community. There are extensive lists in these papers of family occasions where tons of good food is served. Show up at the back of the synagogue a few hours after the affair has begun with a story of how you’d like to bring some leftovers of “good Jewish food” back to your fraternity or sorority. If you want to get the food served to you out front, you naturally have to disguise yourself to look straight. Remarks such as, “I’m Marvin’s cousin,” or learning the bride’s name, “Gee, Dorothy looks marvelous” are great. Lines like “Betty doesn’t look pregnant” are frowned upon. A man and woman team can work this free-load much better than a single person as they can chatter back and forth while stuffing themselves.

If you’re really into a classy free meal, and you are in a city with a large harbor, check out the passenger ship section in the back pages of the newspaper. There you find the schedule of departures for ocean cruises. Most trips (these kind, anyway) begin with a fantastic bon voyage party on board ship. Just walk on a few hours before departure time and start swinging. Champagne, caviar, lobster, shrimp and more, all as free as the open seas. If you get really bombed and miss getting off, you can also wiggle a ride across the ocean. You get sent back as soon as you hit the other side, but it’s a free ocean cruise. You should have a pretty good story ready to go, or you might end up rowing in the galley.

Another possibility for getting a free meal is to go down to the docks and get friendly with a sailor. He can often invite you for dinner on board ship. Foreign sailors are more than glad to meet friends and you can get great foreign dinners this way.

FOOD PROGRAMS

In Amerika, there is a national food stamp program that unfortunately is controlled by the states. Many states, for racist reasons, do not want to make it too available or to publicize the fact that it even exists. It is a much better deal than the food program connected with welfare, because you can use the stamps to buy any kind of food. The only items excluded are tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. In general, you can qualify if you earn less than $165 per month; the less you earn, the more stamps you can receive. There is minimal hassle involved once you get by the first hurdle. Show up at your local food stamp office, which can be found by calling the Welfare Department in our city. Make an appointment to see a representative for your area. They will tell you to bring all sorts of receipts, but the only thing you need are a few rent stubs for the most recent months. An array of various receipt books is a nice supplement to one’s prop room. If the receipts are for a high rent, tell them you rent a room from a group of people and eat separately. They really only want to prove that you have cooking facilities. Once you get the stamps, you can pick them up regularly. Some states even mail them to your pad. You can get up to a hundred dollars worth of free purchases a month per person in the most liberal states.

Large amounts of highly nutritional food can be gotten for as little as three cents per meal from a non-profit organization called Multi-Purpose Food for Millions Foundation, Inc., 1800 Olympic Ave., Santa Monica, California. Write and they will send you details.

SUPERMARKETS

Talking about food in Amerika means talking about supermarkets-mammoth neon lighted streets of food packaged to hoodwink the consumers. Many a Yippie can be found in the aisles, stuffing his pockets with assorted delicacies. We have been shoplifting from supermarkets on a regular basis without raising the slightest suspicion, ever since they began.

We are not alone, and the fact that so much stealing goes on and the supermarkets still bring in huge profits shows exactly how much overcharging has occurred in the first place. Supermarkets, like other businesses, refer to shoplifting as “inventory shrinkage.” It’s as if we thieves were helping Big Business reduce weight. So let’s view our efforts as methods designed to trim the economy and push forward with a positive attitude.

Women should never go shopping without a large handbag. In those crowded aisles, especially the ones with piles of cases, all sorts of goodies can be transferred from shopping cart to handbag. A drop bag can be sewn inside a trench coat, for more efficient thievery. Don’t worry about the mirrors; attendants never look at them. Become a discriminating shopper and don’t stuff any of the cheap shit in your pockets.

Small bottles and jars often have the same size cap as the larger expensive sizes. If they have the price stamped on the cap, switch caps, getting the larger size for the cheaper price. You can empty a pound box of margarine and fill it with sticks of butter. Small narrow items can be hidden in the middle of rolls of toilet paper. Larger supermarkets sell records. You can sneak two good LP’s into one of those large frozen pizza boxes. In the produce department, there are bags for fruit and vegetables. Slip a few steaks or some lamb chops into the bottom of a large brown bag and pile some potatoes on top. Have a little man in the white coat weigh the bag, staple it and mark the price. With a black crayon you can mark your own prices, or bring your own adhesive price tags.

It’s best to work shoplifting in the supermarket with a partner who can act as look-out and shield you from the eyes of nosy employees, shoppers and other crooks trying to pick up some pointers. Work out a prearranged set of signals with your partner. Diversions, like knocking over displays, getting into fist fights with the manager, breaking plate glass windows and such are effective and even if you don’t get anything they’re fun. Haven’t you always wanted to knock over those carefully constructed nine-foot pyramids of garbage?

You can walk into a supermarket, get a few items from the shelves, and walk around eating food in the aisles. Pick up some cherries and eat them. Have a spoon in your pocket and open some yogurt. Open a pickle or olive jar. Get some sliced meat or cheese from the delicatessen counter and eat it up, making sure to ditch the wrapper. The cart full of items, used as a decoy, can just be left in an aisle before you leave the store.

Case the joint before pulling a big rip-off. Know the least crowded hours, learn the best aisles to be busy in, and check out the store’s security system. Once you get into shoplifting in supermarkets, you’ll really dig it. You’ll be surprised to learn that the food tastes better.

Large scale thievery can best be carried out with the help of an employee. Two ways we know of work best. A woman can get a job as a cashier and ring up a small bill as her brothers and sisters bring home tons of stuff.

The method for men involves getting a job loading and unloading trucks in the receiving department. Some accomplices dressed right can just pull in and, with your help, load up on a few cases. Infiltrating an employee into a store is probably the best way to steal. Cashiers, sales clerks, shippers, and the like are readily available jobs with such high turnover and low pay that little checking on your background goes on. Also, you can learn what you have to do in a few days. The rest of the week, you can work out ways to clean out the store. After a month or so of action you might want to move on to another store before things get heavy. We know one woman working as a cashier who swiped over $500 worth of food a week. She had to leave after a month because her boss thought she was such an efficient cashier that he insisted on promoting her to a job that didn’t have as many fringe benefits for her and her friends.

Large chain stores like Safeway throw away day-old vegetables, the outer leaves of lettuce, celery and the like. This stuff is usually found in crates outside the back of the building. Tell them you’re working with animals at the college labs, or that you raise guinea pigs. They might even get into saving them for you, but if they don’t just show up before the garbage is collected, (generally early in the morning), and they’ll let you cart away what you want.

Dented cans and fruit can often be gotten free, but certainly at a reduced rate. They are still as good as the undamaged ones. So be sure to dent all your cans before you go to the cashier.

Look up catering services and businesses that service factories and office buildings with ready-made sandwiches. Showing up at these places at the right times (catering services on late Sunday night and sandwich dealers at 5:00 PM on weekdays) will produce loads of good food. Legally, they have to dispose of the food that’s left over. They would be more than happy to give it to you if you spin a good story.

Butchers can be hustled for meat scraps with meat scraps with a “for my dog” story, and bakeries can be asked for day-old rolls and bread.

WHOLESALE MARKETS

Large cities all have a wholesale fruit and vegetable area where often the workers will give you tons of free food just for the asking. Get a good story together. Get some church stationery and type a letter introducing yourself “to whom it may concern,” or better still, wear some clerical garb. Orchards also make good pickings just after the harvest has been completed.

Factories often will give you a case or two of free merchandise for a “charitable” reason. Make some calls around town and then go pick up the stuff at the end of the week. A great idea is to get a good list of a few hundred large corporations around the country by looking up their addresses at the library. Poor’s Register of Companies, Directors and Executives has the most complete list. Send them all letters complaining about how the last box of cereal was only half full, or you found a dead fly in the can of peaches. They often will send you an ample supply of items just to keep you from complaining to your friends or worse, taking them to court. Often you can get stuff sent to you by just telling them how good their product is compared to the trash you see nowadays. You know the type of letter – “Rice Krispies have had a fantastic effect on my sexual prowess,” or “Your frozen asparagus has given a whole new meaning to my life.” In general though, the nasties get the best results.

Slaughterhouses usually have meat they will give away. They are anxious to give to church children’s programs and things like that. In most states, there is a law that if the slab of meat touches the ground, they have to throw it away. Drop around meat houses late in the day and trip a few trucks.

Fishermen always have hundreds of pounds of fish that have to be thrown out. You can have as much as you can cart away, generally just for the asking. Boats come in late in the afternoon and they’ll give you some of the catch, or you can go to the markets early in the morning when the fishing is best.

These methods of getting food in large quantities can only be appreciated by those who have tried it. You will be totally baffled by the unbelievable quantities of food that will be laid on you and with the ease of panhandling.

Investing in a freezer will allow you to bi-weekly or even monthly trips to the wholesale markets and you’ll get the freshest foods to boot. Nothing can beat getting it wholesale for free. Or is it free for wholesale? In any event, “bon appetit.”

FOOD CONSPIRACIES

Forming a food cooperative is one of the best ways to promote solidarity and get every kind of food you need to survive real cheap. It also provides a ready-made bridge for developing alliances with blacks, Puerto Ricans, chicanos and other groups fighting our common oppressor on a community level.

Call a meeting of about 20 communes, collectives or community organizations. Set up the ground rules. There should be a hard-core of really good hustlers that serve as the shopping or hunting party and another group of people who have their heads together enough to keep records and run the central distribution center. Two or three in each group should do it. They can get their food free for the effort. Another method is to rotate the activity among all members of the conspiracy. The method you choose depends upon your politics and whether you favor a division of labor or using the food conspiracy as a training for collective living. Probably a blend of the two is best, but you’ll have to hassle that out for yourself. The next thing to agree upon is how the operation and all the shit you get will be paid for. This is dependent on a number of variables, so we’ll map out one scheme and you can modify it to suit your particular situation. Each member of every commune could be assessed a fee for joining. You want to get together about $2,000, so at 200 members, this is ten bucks a piece. After the joining fee, each person or group has to pay only for the low budget food they order, but some loot is needed to get things rolling. The money goes to getting a store front or garage, a cheap truck, some scales, freezers, bags, shelving, chopping blocks, slicer and whatever else you need. You can get great deals by looking in the classified ads of the local overground newspaper and checking for restaurants or markets going out of business. Remember the idea of a conspiracy is to get tons of stuff at real low prices or free into a store front, and then break it down into smaller units for each group and eventually each member. The freezers allow you to store perishables for a longer time.

The hunting party should be well acquainted with how to rip off shit totally free and where all the best deals are to be found. They should know what food is seasonal and about nutritional diets. There is a lot to learn, such as where to get raw grains in 100 pounds lots and how to cut up a side of beef. A good idea is to get a diet freak to give weekly talks in the store front. There can also be cooking lessons taught, especially to men, so women can get out of the kitchen.

Organizing a community around a basic issue of survival, such as food, makes a lot of nitty gritty sense. After your conspiracy gets off the ground and looks permanent, you should seek to expand it to include more members and an emergency food fund should be set up in case something happens in the community. There should also be a fund whereby the conspiracy can sponsor free community dinners tied into celebrations. Get it together and join the fight for a world-wide food conspiracy. Seize the steak!

CHEAP CHOW

There are hundreds of good paperback cook books with nutritional cheap recipes available in any bookstore. Cooking is a vastly overrated skill. The following are a few all-purpose dishes that are easy to make, nutritional and cheap as mud pies. You can add or subtract many of the ingredients for variety.

Hog Farm Granola Breakfast (Road Hog Crispies)

½ c millet 2 c raw oats

½ c cracked wheat 1 c rye flakes

½ c buckwheat groats 1 c wheat flakes

½ c wheat germ 1 c dried fruits and/or nuts

½ c sunflower seeds 3 tbs soy oil

¼ c sesame seeds 1 c honey

2 tbs cornmeal

Boil the millet in a double boiler for 1/2 hour. Mix in a large bowl all the ingredients including the millet. The soy oil and honey should be heated in a saucepan over a low flame until bubbles form. Spread the cereal in a baking pan and cover with the honey syrup. Toast in oven until brown. Stir once or twice so that all the cereal will be toasted. Serve plain or with milk. Refrigerate portion not used in a covered container. Enough for ten to twenty people. Make lots and store for later meals. All these ingredients can be purchased at any health store in a variety of quantities. You can also get natural sugar if you need a sweetener. If bought and made in quantity, this fantastically healthy breakfast food will be cheaper than the brand name cellophane that passes for cereal.

Whole Earth Bread

1 c oats, corn meal, or wheat germ 2 tsp salt

1½ c water (warm) 2 egg yolks

¼ c sugar (raw is best) 4 c flour

1 pkg active dry yeast _ c corn oil

1 c dry milk or butter

Stir lightly in a large bowl the oats, cornmeal or wheat germ (depending on the flavor bread you desire), the water and sugar. Sprinkle in the yeast and wait 10 minutes for the yeast to do its thing. Add salt, egg yolks, corn oil and dry milk. Mix with a fork. Blend in the flour. The dough should be dry and a little lumpy. Cover with a towel and leave in a warm place for a half hour. Now mash, punch, blend and kick the dough and return it covered to its warm place. The dough will double in size. When this happens, separate the dough into two even masses and mash each one into a greased bread (loaf) pan. Cover the pans and let sit until the dough rises to the top of the pans. Bake for 40-45 minutes in a 350 degree oven that has not been pre-heated. A shallow tray of water in the bottom of the oven will keep the bread nice and moist. When you remove the pans from the oven, turn out the bread into a rack and let it cool off. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll never touch ready-made bread, and it’s a gas seeing yeast work.

Street Salad

Salad can be made by chopping up almost any variety of vegetables, nuts and fruits including the stuff you panhandled at the back of supermarkets; dandelions, shav, and other wild vegetables; and goods you ripped off inside stores or from large farms. A neat fresh dressing consists of one part of oil, two parts wine vinegar, finely chopped garlic cloves, salt and pepper. Mix up the ingredients in a bottle and add to the salad as you serve it. Russian dressing is simply mayonnaise and ketchup mixed.

Yippie Yogurt

Yogurt is one of the most nutritional foods in the world. The stuff you buy in stores has preservatives added to it reducing its health properties and increasing the cost. Yogurt is a bacteria that spreads throughout a suitable culture at the correct temperature. Begin by going to a Turkish or Syrian restaurant and buying some yogurt to go. Some restaurants boast of yogurt that goes back over a hundred years. Put it in the refrigerator.

Now prepare the culture in which the yogurt will multiply. The consistency you want will determine what you use. A milk culture will produce thin yogurt, while sweet cream will make a thicker batch. It’s the butter fat content that determines the consistency and also the number of calories. Half milk and half cream combines the best of both worlds. Heat a quart of half and half on a low flame until just before the boiling point and remove from the stove. This knocks out other bacteria that will compete with the yogurt. Now take a tablespoon of the yogurt you got from the restaurant and place it in the bottom of a bowl (not metal). Now add the warm liquid. Cover the bowl with a lid and wrap tightly with a heavy towel. Place the bowl in a warm spot such as on top of a radiator or in a sunny window. A turned-off oven with a tray of boiling water placed in it will do well. Just let the bowl sit for about 8 hours (overnight). The yogurt simply grows until the whole bowl is yogurt. Yippie! It will keep in the refrigerator for about two weeks before turning sour, but even then, the bacteria will produce a fresh batch of top quality. Remember when eating it to leave a little to start the next batch. For a neat treat add some honey and cinnamon and mix into the yogurt before serving. Chopped fruit and nuts are also good.

Rice and Cong Sauce

1 c brown rice vegetables

2 c water 2½ tbs soy sauce

tsp salt

Bring the water to a boil in a pot and add the salt and rice. Cover and reduce flame. Cooking time is about 40 minutes or until rice has absorbed all the water. Meanwhile, in a well-greased frying pan, saute a variety of chopped vegetables you enjoy. When they become soft and brownish, add salt and 2 cups of water. Cover with a lid and lower flame. Simmer for about 40 minutes, peeking to stir every once in a while. Then add 2 1/2 tbs of soy sauce, stir and cook another 10 minutes. The rice should be just cooling off now, so add the sauce to the top of it and serve. Great for those long guerrilla hikes. This literally makes up almost the entire diet of the National Liberation Front fighter.

Weatherbeans

1 lb red kidney beans 2 tbs parsley (chopped)

2 quarts water ½ lb pork, smoked sausage

1 onion (chopped) or ham hock

1 tbs celery (chopped) 1 lg bay leaf

1 tsp garlic (minced) salt to season

Rinse the beans, then place in covered pot and add water and salt. Cook over low flame. While cooking, chop up meat and brown in a frying pan. Add onion, celery, garlic and parsley and continue sauteing over low flame. Add the pieces of meat, vegetables and bay leaf to the beans and cook covered for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. It may be necessary to add more water if the beans get too dry. Fifteen minutes before beans are done, mash about a half cup of the stuff against the side of the pan to thicken the liquid. Pour the beans and liquid over some steaming rice that you’ve made by following the directions above. This should provide a cheap nutritional meal for about 6 people.

Hedonist’s Deluxe

2 lobsters 2 qts water

seaweed ¼ lb butter

Steal two lobsters, watching out for the claw thingies. Beg some seaweed from any fish market. Cop the butter using the switcheroo method described in the Supermarket section above. When you get home, boil the water in a large covered pot and drop in the seaweed and then the lobsters. Put the cover back on and cook for about 20 minutes. Melt the butter in a sauce pan and dip the lobster pieces in it as you eat. With a booster box, described later you’ll be able to rip off a bottle of vintage Pouilly-Fuisse in a fancy liquor store. Really, rice is nice but…