Want to get fat on Wall Street? Try protesting

“I’ve been here for 12 days,and I’ve put on 5 pounds,” he said,“I’m eating better than I do at home.”

Like the rest of his anti-corporate comrades,Roberts learned soon after arriving in Zuccotti Park that his meals would be taken care of. All he had to do was amble toward a ramshackle cluster of tables and boxes in the middle of the park and,without paying a cent,grab a slice of pizza or a warm slab of homemade vegan casserole.

The makeshift kitchen has fed thousands of protesters each day. Along the way,it has developed a cuisine not unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement itself: free-form,eclectic,improvisatory and contradictory.

Requests for food go out on Twitter and various websites sympathetic to the protesters. And somehow,the food pours in.

Robert Strype,29,a protester who was wearing a T-shirt that expressed his displeasure with Monsanto,said that anger about practices like factory farming and the genetic modification of vegetables was one of the factors that had roused him and some of his fellow occupiers. “Food plays a huge part in this movement,” he said. “Because people are tired of being fed poison.”

Nobody was turning down any donations. Some,like the sudden arrival of a much-needed can opener,were greeted with whoops of gratitude. Others caused twinges of puzzlement. “Someone gave us Spam (canned pork meat),” said Elliot Hartmann-Russell,18,a volunteer. “I’m not going to eat it,but…” Tom Hintze,24,was volunteering in Zuccotti Park last week. “Just now there was a big UPS delivery,” he said. “We don’t know where it comes from. It just appears,and we eat it.”

He and his colleagues have fielded homemade stews and boxes of organic carrots.

“This is as grass roots as eating can get,” he said.

Because city law prevents open flames in the park,and because the menu relies on that steady but unpredictable supply of donations from home cooks,food trucks,farmers,restaurants and markets,what appears on any given occupier’s paper plate can be more of a cross-cultural mishmash.

“It’s kind of a scramble to keep on top of the donations we receive,” said Anj Ferrara,24,who seemed to have slipped into a leadership role in the kitchen. The deliveries,she said,can throw the kitchen crew for a loop. At any moment,scores of cucumbers might be dropped off,and the volunteers have to improvise a quick use for them. Last Thursday evening,they made a rapid-fire cucumber salad which paired nicely with the heaps of falafel organisers had paid for by pooling contributed money.

Ferrara said they had begun looking for a nearby kitchen they could use to prepare all the perishable food coming in; that might reduce the need to rely on takeout. “We’re hoping to find a donated space,” she said.

Now and then,the park’s kitchen gets lucky. Bob Reich,who once worked for Birdbath Bakery in Manhattan,appeared in the encampment a few minutes before 7 p.m. bearing bags of freshly baked cookies. “The ingredients are as organic as we can get them,” he said.Why had Reich made the effort? “Because I support what people are doing here,” he said. “And who doesn’t love a cookie?”