Biotic Baking Brigade

The Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB) is loose group of pie throwing activists. By throwing pies in the faces of capitalists, industrialists, politicians and conservatives the BBB have been able to humorously express dissent and alternative points of view. Anyone can use the BBB name, and pies have flown throughout the world. San Francisco has an especially rich history of pie activism.

Before the Biotic Baking Brigade came into existence, pies to the face were already a form of dissent. For example, Charles Colson, an Evangelical Christian and Special Counsel to President Nixon was pied in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco in 1978.

The BBB added to the humor of throwing a pie to the face by using identities such as Agent Lemon Meringue and included clever pie references into their political statements. While their actions are humorous, their politics are very real. As one agent said, "what we want to change is the entire system of corporate control over our lives. While the issues we try to tackle are serious - clear-cutting redwoods and the global economy - there's something very valuable in getting people to laugh."

Targets of the BBB have usually been individuals who were either being ignored by the mainstream media, or praised by it. A pie to the face can instead bring the person under scrutiny and show that not everyone is content with the status quo. San Francisco targets have included homophobe Fred Phelps (pied by a queer nun), San Francisco mayor Willie Brown for his anti-homeless policies, Nobel Prize-winning capitalist economist Milton Friedman, Chevron CEO Ken Derr, and Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro. Even Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope got a pie in the face for selling out the the grassroots old-growth redwood Headwaters campaign.

In 1999 The Biotic Baking Brigade was so well known that a concerned citizen called the police about pi-day at the Exploratorium museum. Pi-day is a day celebrating the number pi. The police rushed to the museum desperately searching for a high profile capitalist who may be a target for the BBB.

As one agent of the BBB said, "We want to give people who are so overwhelmed by the terror of modern life the opportunity to laugh in the face of people who are destroying us."