SANTA CRUZ >> It is lunchtime on Sunday in downtown Santa Cruz. Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry sits at the corner of Front and Water Streets dressed in immaculate chef’s whites.

He and his team of volunteers are marking his iconic organization’s 35th anniversary by doing what they always do; providing free food, services and “good vibes” to the people who need them most.

A crowd of 30 or so, many of them homeless, sit at tables or on the nearby post office steps eating muffins and plates of vegan food. A free shower has been set up on the sidewalk and haircuts are offered. According to McHenry, four live bands are slated to play later in the day.

“It’s pretty simple,” McHenry says. “War is not the solution; food is the solution.”

Beginning with a 1980 protest disguised as a street performance in Cambridge, MA, Food Not Bombs grew from eight volunteers into an international movement.

“In 1980, I was a produce clerk at a grocery in Boston. I would take leftover food to the projects on Portland Avenue. Across the street from the projects was this big, shiny building where the good people of Draper Laboratory were designing nuclear weapons,” McHenry says. “Hungry people on one side, nuclear weapons on the other. It got me thinking.”

When a friend, anti-nuclear activist Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site, McHenry and seven of his friends started a defense committee. Food Not Bombs was born.

In addition to performing street theater such as “Bake Sales to Buy a Bomber”, the group began providing regular vegetarian meals in Harvard Square and the Boston Commons.

“After we realized that no one was feeding the homeless, we all quit our jobs and focused solely on feeding the hungry,” McHenry says. “In hindsight, it was a pretty radical thing to do, I guess.

After eight years, McHenry relocated to San Francisco where he started a second Food Not Bombs group. He was one of nine volunteers arrested for serving food without a permit at Golden Gate Park on Aug. 15, 1988. In the following years, McHenry was arrested over 100 times for similar offenses and spent over 500 nights in jail.

“This was right when CNN came on air and they did a story about the arrests,” McHenry says. “It sparked the formation of Food Not Bombs groups in thousands of communities all over the world.”

In 1995, McHenry faced 25 years to life in prison under the California Three Strikes Law. With help from Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, he was released.

Today, Food Not Bombs remains dedicated to collecting food from stores and distributors that can’t be sold, and using it to cook and provide vegan or vegetarian meals for the hungry. Along with reducing food waste, the organization tries to inspire people to work for social change.

McHenry and his partner, Abbi Samuels, relocated to Santa Cruz in 2013. While they continue to focus on the needs of the local community, they also maintain a global perspective by visiting Food Not Bombs chapters around the world.

“In the Middle East I’ve seen how poverty and extreme hunger provide fertile ground for violence and terrorism,” he says. “But I’ve also found really beautiful people operating under dire circumstances in places like Ukraine and Africa. At the end of the day, I still have faith in the human race.”