“There comes a time when you have to stand up and be counted” – Gale Sayers.

Dear Climate Healers,

At the Global Earth Repair Convergence (GERC) in May this year, Jamen and I were speaking to people about an idea of helping an entire city transition to Planet B protocols en masse, instead of the usual approach the movement has been taking of persuading individuals to stand out from the crowd and go Vegan, one at a time. To our amazement, this idea resonated with pre-vegans attending GERC, including the co-organizer of GERC, Rick Lukens of United Earth Networks and the Together Around Food (previously known as “Hungerless”) project was born.

Beginning next Saturday, June 20, anyone who walks into a Together Around Food gathering in Jefferson County, Washington, will be offered a free, gourmet, whole-foods, plant-based Vegan meal, with no application needed, no means testing, no charge. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week. We believe this simple act of shared nourishment could become one of the most powerful tools available for addressing hunger, chronic disease, social isolation, and the ecological crisis all at once.

Together Around Food is not charity, but the future. When every member of a community can eat well for free every single day, we dissolve the root causes of hunger, chronic disease, ecological destruction, and social fragmentation all at once, and more importantly, equip that member adequately to fight the planetary fire that is raging all around us.

A Simple Premise, A Complex Bet

Together Around Food rests on a simple premise that nourishing food is a basic human right and a shared community responsibility. From that single idea, we can eliminate hunger and malnutrition, accelerate a global shift toward plant-based living, strengthen community bonds through shared meals, reduce food and packaging waste, improve human and ecological health, and reconnect communities to local farmers and food systems.

It is, by design, a holistic and systemic intervention. Rather than treating hunger, disease, loneliness, and environmental degradation as separate problems requiring separate programs, Together Around Food treats them as symptoms of the same underlying disconnection between people, and between people and the planet that feeds them. The proposed remedy is to bring people back to the table, feed them well, and let the rest follow.

Why Port Townsend?

The decision to launch Together Around Food in Port Townsend grew out of GERC, which brought together environmental organizers, ecological restoration practitioners, and food system reformers from around the world to create the conditions for an idea like Together Around Food to find its first home.

Rick Lukens, a longtime organizer of programs for personal, social, and ecological healing, was instrumental in encouraging the project’s launch in Port Townsend. He helped connect the local partners needed to bring the idea to life.

Two local organizations, United Earth Networks and PT Veg, and other local volunteers are spearheading the effort on the ground, working alongside a coalition that spans the globe.
a) Climate Healers;
b) Loving Hut, the international vegan restaurant chain whose volunteers and chefs, with the blessing of Supreme Master Ching Hai, are preparing and serving meals throughout the launch;
c) The Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute, providing medical and nutritional guidance;
d) The Human Ecology Project, led by gourmet vegan nutrition specialists Bill Tara and Marlene Watson-Tara; and
e) The Plant Based Treaty, an international nonprofit campaigning for a food system that operates within planetary boundaries.

Fifteen Days, Three Meals, One Declaration

The project launch unfolds in three phases. The first, running from June 9 through June 20, is a period of community outreach to introduce residents, local businesses, and civic leaders to the vision before the program formally begins.

The heart of the launch is Phase II, fifteen consecutive days, from June 20 to July 4, of free communal dining. Each day features ultra-nutritious, gourmet, plant-based meals alongside community presentations, short educational talks on the science of food systems transformation, and “speed networking” sessions designed to help neighbors who might never otherwise meet find common cause.

During these fifteen days, participants will have the option to do basic biometric screenings before and after the fifteen-day period, with results reviewed alongside medical providers from the Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute. It’s an attempt to make the health case for plant-based eating not just persuasive, but personal and measurable, turning each participant’s own bloodwork into evidence.

The fifteen days build toward a symbolic culmination on July 4 with the presentation of a “Declaration of Independence, Reloaded.” This is a community-authored statement grounded in compassion, unity, stewardship, and freedom from preventable suffering for people, animals, and ecosystems alike. The choice of the date is deliberate, in order to celebrate a reframing of independence not as separation, but as interdependence, and as a declaration of freedom from the systems that produce hunger, preventable disease, and ecological harm.

After the Fireworks: A Model to Spread

What happens after July 4 may be the most important part of the story. Phase III begins on July 5 with a simple goal, to keep going. We want Together Around Food to continue indefinitely in Port Townsend and Jefferson County, evolving as a permanent fixture of community life rather than a one-time event, refining the model, learning what works, and documenting it for others, and making Port Townsend the Portal to Planet B.

Of course, our long-term ambition extends well beyond Washington State. Together Around Food was conceived from the start as a template, a proof of concept that we hope will be replicated in communities around the world. If a county on the Olympic Peninsula can feed everyone who walks through its doors, three nourishing meals a day, completely free, while strengthening local farms, cutting waste, and improving public health, so can other communities, and the model can scale from a single county to a global movement.

None of it would be possible, without an extraordinary outpouring of support from Port Townsend’s local community, Loving Hut’s volunteer chefs and kitchen teams, the Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute’s medical guidance, the Human Ecology Project’s culinary expertise, to funding from Loving Hut, the Karuna Foundation’s Vegan Grants program, and individual donors who believed in the idea early enough to help get it off the ground.

The Bet on the Table

It would be easy to dismiss Together Around Food as utopian, offering free gourmet meals for everyone, three times a day, forever, funded by a patchwork of grants and donations. But we believe that that something as old-fashioned as shared meals, done at scale and sustained over time, might succeed in solving the world’s toughest problems where more complicated interventions have not.

For fifteen days in June and July, at least, Port Townsend has a chance to find out. The tables will be set, the kitchens will be staffed, and the doors will be open to anyone, for any meal, for free.

Help Needed

If this project resonates with you as much as it does with us, please
a) donate here to support its implementation so that we can access matching grants from VegFund;
b) write about the project in your networks;
c) come on over to Port Townsend and volunteer with us;

With much love,