AFTER nearly two weeks of living among the Occupy Wall Street protesters in downtown Manhattan, Ellis Roberts, 25, a Pennsylvania garbage collector laid off last year, looked scruffy and dazed.

He was not, however, hungry.

“I’ve been here for 12 days, and I’ve put on 5 pounds,” he said, sitting on the ground in front of a handmade sign that said “Class War Ahead.” “I’m eating better than I do at home.”

Like the rest of his anti-corporate comrades, Mr. 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. Last Thursday he had encountered “a bunch of Katz’s Deli sandwiches,” he said. “That was good.”

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.