Gleaning a Solution to Hunger

In cities, rural com­mu­ni­ties, and sub­urbs across the coun­try, vol­un­teer pick­ers join forces to col­lect bags and boxes of fruits and veg­eta­bles that find their way to home­less shel­ters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior cen­ters, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, oth­ers see oppor­tu­nity — the chance to make a dif­fer­ence, feed the hun­gry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have sur­plus or sec­onds find a good home for these edi­bles beyond the com­post pile; finan­cially strapped aid orga­ni­za­tions get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the glean­ers get to give back in their com­mu­ni­ties. “I’ve been sur­prised at how emo­tion­ally reward­ing this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gar­dener in Oakland, Calif., who started Food Pool last sum­mer to share the abun­dance from his pro­lific 800-square-foot gar­den with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give some­one in need a dol­lar or a dona­tion, but see­ing some­one get excited about beans from my back­yard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Some glean­ers have even made a national name for them­selves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began col­lect­ing excess fruit in sub­ur­ban Clayton, Calif., while dri­ving her then-baby daugh­ter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit — such as oranges, apri­cots, and apples — left rot­ting in her neigh­bors’ front yards, so she started a single-handed cam­paign to do some­thing about it.

Three years on and hun­dreds of tons of pro­duce later, Chan, who is now a reg­u­lar fix­ture at local farm­ers mar­kets where she col­lects unsold fruits and veg­eta­bles that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been fea­tured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press atten­tion has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mis­sion to feed those in need. “Many peo­ple don’t know where their local food pantry is located and don’t real­ize that food banks will gladly take fresh pro­duce,” says Chan, who encour­ages peo­ple to get started by pick­ing excess fruits and veg­gies in their imme­di­ate area and pass­ing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, com­mu­ni­ties are find­ing cre­ative, local ways to get fresh food to the res­i­dents who have the most chal­lenges access­ing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for exam­ple, has a three-pronged approach: pick­ing sur­plus pro­duce from regional farms, gath­er­ing left­over greens from farm­ers mar­kets, and har­vest­ing excess res­i­den­tial edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network (FDN) in Ithaca, N.Y., has worked with local farm­ers to “res­cue” thou­sands of pounds of pro­duce that would oth­er­wise go to waste and to dis­trib­ute it to low-wage work­ers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned pro­duce donated by the orga­ni­za­tion serves 24 pro­grams that feed more than 2,000 peo­ple a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN pro­gram coor­di­na­tor Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no rea­son per­fectly good food should go uneaten if farm­ers are will­ing and peo­ple are needy.

Some glean­ing efforts have grown out of reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions — not sur­pris­ing, since the term has bib­li­cal ori­gins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are per­mit­ted to pick grain left over from the har­vest. The Society of St. Andrew, based in Virginia, has glean­ing groups in sev­eral states includ­ing Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have col­lec­tively gleaned mil­lions of pounds of pro­duce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Ky., glean­ing group that grew out of a church meet­ing, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of pro­duce since the sum­mer of 2010, from farm­ers mar­kets, farms, and pri­vate res­i­dences. “It is not hard to feed the hun­gry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an inter­faith group not affil­i­ated with any par­tic­u­lar reli­gion or church. “The word is spread­ing and there’s a won­der­ful energy among dif­fer­ent peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that is both col­lab­o­ra­tive and com­mu­nity oriented.”

There are glean­ing pro­grams that con­nect home­own­ers over­whelmed by an abun­dant har­vest with vol­un­teers will­ing to pick pro­duce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit Tree Project in Oregon. But many glean­ing efforts are sim­ply started by an indi­vid­ual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I par­tic­u­larly like pick­ing fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a lad­der or aren’t able to do phys­i­cal labor any­more,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of vol­un­teers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appre­ci­ate and respect their wis­dom and expe­ri­ence, and hear­ing about the ups and downs of hav­ing lived life. These moments of con­nec­tion have brought me — and I hope them — a great deal of unex­pected joy.”

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