"Riot Ribs, a mutual aid kitchen based in Lownsdale Square, fed people night and day for 12 straight days. On the 13th, the group lost the kitchen they built. Standing in the middle of Lownsdale Square in downtown Portland on Wednesday night, among the various tents, drummers, and masked-and-helmeted twentysomethings, a man named Legend flipped ribs. He was cooking in the middle of a makeshift kitchen, a table scattered with metal containers, plastic shelves stacked with water, hand sanitizer, and rubbing alcohol. On July 15, the kitchen was surrounded by a small barrier built with coolers, Kendrick Lamar’s music played in the background, and Legend’s fellow cooks tended to the other business at hand: sorting through donated water bottles, cutting slices of watermelon, tossing hunks of pork in barbecue sauce. A man named Rico handed the pork to people inside the kitchen and out — some sat in camping chairs, smoking cigarettes. Other volunteers greeted customers, serving them meals for free. 'The people out here, they haven’t had a hot meal in 12 days,' Legend said. 'That’s a big thing for us.' By Thursday morning, Riot Ribs — a mutual aid kitchen physically located in the middle of contentious protests over police brutality — sat abandoned, behind a metal fence. After 12 days serving free ribs, chorizo tacos, and Beyond sausages to the people of Portland, city and county police arrested at least five members of the Riot Ribs team between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., according to the collective; 10 members are still unaccounted for. Parks and Recreation brought in a cleanup crew, confiscating all of the group’s food, coolers still full of food for another day. As of 11 a.m. Thursday, the people behind Riot Ribs who haven’t been arrested are now separated from the kitchen they built, watching Parks and Recreation workers sift through from the other side of the fence." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden
