On the Road

Mealtimes are when you see the full strength of a Rainbow Gathering. Anywhere between 20 – 2000 people come together in a circle to hold hands and sing a Rainbow song, ending in a resonant Om. Then the volunteer cooks ask for volunteer servers to come forwards to drag round large pots of rice and lentils to serve to the hippies. Hopefully there’ll be enough to go round.

Then, when everyone has full stomachs and smiles on their faces, the volunteer magic hat people go round and sing the magic hat song. Children are often chosen to hold the hat itself and receive the donations that people put inside it. If you have no money to put inside it’s completely okay but you should still give energy and love to it instead.

Then the magic hat volunteers take the money to the supplies volunteers, hippies with experience in buying 50 tons of pasta at a time. They borrow someone’s truck and drive to a nearby town to buy the necessary supplies for the kitchen, where the volunteer cooks are waiting impatiently for some salt, goddamnit.

Rainbow food is always vegetarian and often doesn’t include garlic or onions so as not to offend the pure yogic meditators. Between gatherings the large cooking pots are looked after by the more responsible hippies and are brought out once more to be heated by logs from the nearby woods.

A rota is drawn up amongst all the volunteer cooks and fortunately someone usually turns up with extensive hospitality experience. Just like armies march on their stomachs, a Rainbow gathering with a dysfunctional kitchen is a miserable place to be. Hopefully people will remember to wash their hands but it’s not uncommon for the food to get contaminated. Then the shit pits get really busy for a few days with all the attacks of diarrhoea.

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