A week before Thanksgiving, over 20,000 people descended on a farm in Colorado. In response to the farm's owners' offer to give away post-harvest root vegetables, cars clogged the tiny streets leading up to the property. Reportedly the farm and its employees were overwhelmed.
According to a study released in 1996, the U.S. produces 300 billion pounds of food annually. A total of 96 billion pounds is lost between production and consumption. That 32 percent could feed every hungry person in the country. In other words, there is a lot of food lying around. Since nature is involved, it's difficult to predict when and how much of any crop there will be at any given place and what condition it will be in.
Gleaning, picking and distributing food that is left over after a harvest, a custom that began in the ancient world (it forms the climax of the Biblical story of Ruth), continues today. The idea that food that comes from the earth must be distributed to the poor is part of the mythology of the growing cycle. If it is not harvested and eaten, it does not continue to grow.
Once associated with the poor, gypsies and food activists, gleaning is becoming more organized in the U.S.
In Vermont, greenest of the states, food activist Theresa Snow began to notice a high volume of salvage crops when she worked at a farm in Vermont several years ago. She did some research and launched Salvation Farms, a branch of Second Harvest, a national organization that links farmers and food distribution agencies.
Now Snow is the program director for agricultural resources for Vermont Food Bank. Last year she was able to provide over 130,000 pounds of gleaned food from area farms to agencies. The merger of Second Harvest with Vermont Food Bank will provide support and funding to increase the efficiency of the operation. ?
"Educating farmers about options they have before composting or tilling is a big part of our work," says Snow. ?The unharvested food matter has to be dealt with in some fashion. For gleaners to come and take the unharvested crops off the hands of the farmers is a service to them, and provides food for others. "The farmer calls the coordinator, who makes arrangements to come pick up the food. If it needs to be picked, we do that. If it's ready to be picked up, they just tell us when and where," Snow says. "In 2010 we will be covering the entire state with gleaning."
In Western Massachusetts, Jessica Harwood, a 29-year-old teacher, has been organizing formalized gleaning efforts for the past three years. Harwood, who also runs a delivery service called Valley Green Feast, which distributes locally grown food, worked every weekend in the summer bringing school groups to farms in the Valley where growers agreed to have their apples, cabbage, peppers and other crops gleaned. Jessica and her students picked, sorted, had a snack, then loaded everything into a van and brought their loot to Kate's Kitchen in Holyoke, Rachel's Table in Springfield and many other organizations that serve the hungry.
Harwood is originally from Cambridge. "Years ago I moved here from Vermont, where there is a great gleaning organization called Salvation Farms," she says , referring to Snow's organization. "When I got here, I called around to find out if there was gleaning going on around here. Rachel's Table was excited for it to happen and to support it."
Dan Botkin, a grower in Gill, owns a farm with year-around plantings, a greenhouse and livestock. As an enthusiastic youth, he dove into dumpsters. Today he sees gleaning from the vantage point of farming.
"Those of us who've been privy to the immense waste stream in every sector of the food industry in America know the truth: supermarkets still routinely toss pallets of perfectly edible stuff; cafeterias and restaurants still waste tons daily," he says. "Even in local food stores there is a lively flow of green waste headed for landfills, last I checked. And that's just the visible waste, the tip of the iceberg.
"Serious gleaners may dive headfirst less often than we used to into random dumpsters. More likely we politely arrange with a sympathetic local green grocer to haul away boxes of waste for our livestock. Notwithstanding my well-fattened backyard goats, this doesn't really begin to address the deeper, systemic issues of industrial food, transcontinental shipping, spoilage, hunger and waste."
Getting food from the farm to the plate could be as efficient as getting your favorite movie to your home a day after you order it online. Imagine if the efficient information gathering and delivery systems of Netflix were applied to available food? No one would go hungry, and no one would be without a movie.
In the second week of February, 2009, a documentary by French filmaker Agnes Varda will be shown as part of Winter Fare, a yearly event in Greenfield that features an indoor farmers' market, workshops, tastings, potluck suppers and other events. The screening of The Gleaners and I and the subsequent discussion are open to the public. More information about Winter Fare can be found at www. winterfare.org.
