8 Ways to Join the Local Food Movement :: Glean Those Fields Clean
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Glean Those Fields Clean
A lot of perfectly good food is left to rot in farm fields and under fruit and nut trees. With a bit of work, you can gather a group to “glean” this free food, providing fresh, nutritious food to your community.
To glean in your area, talk to farmers, gardeners, and orchard owners. Explain your purpose, share a copy of federal “Good Samaritan” law, which protects them from liability, and ask for written permission to glean.
Recruit gleaners. Family, friends, students, and members of your faith community are potential volunteers. You can also put a notice on craigslist, bulletin boards, at farmers markets, or in the local paper.
Contact food banks, shelters, and other facilities to check on their needs, and to arrange delivery times.
On gleaning day, bring collection baskets and buckets, snacks, water, and other necessities that will ensure a successful expedition.
As the day ends, gather your freshly harvested food, thank the landowner, distribute something to each gleaner, and leave the land in better condition than you found it.
—Kim Nochi
Source: University of Maine Cooperative Extension
| Sarah van Gelder, Anne Lovejoy, Kim Nochi, and Heather Purser wrote pieces for this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is the Executive Editor of YES! Magazine. |  |
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Gleaning - another approach
There are thousands of fruit trees throughout that valley: orange, lemon, apricot, peach, nectarine and avocado. I estimate somewhere between seventy to ninety percent of that fruit goes to waste, it drops to the ground and rots there. Most people get their food from markets and buy what they need right now. Their grandparents, or great grandparents lived in a time when picking a crop of fruit and preserving it for later use was common place. In my youth many kitchen cupboards or cellars had shelves lined with mason jars of preserved fruit. But for the current generation the knowledge and desire to do this has been lost.
I suggest several actions:
1. Develop volunteer "urban harvest" groups that approach home owners and volunteer to harvest their fruit regularly during the ripening season, giving them the "cream of the crop" for their on use. In addition, at the end of the harvest season the volunteers will strip the remaining fruit from the tree and clean up the ground under the tree.
2. During the initial contact give them information on freezing and/or preserving their own fruit, so they can enjoy it out of season. Offer to send a volunteer to work with them the first time to get their own fruit preservation program started.
3. Distribute the harvested fruit to the volunteers, local food banks and community feeding projects.
Thousands of pounds of delicious fruit rots on the ground every summer in the San Fernando Valley, and this is happening in communities throughout America. Community action can reduce this shameful waste.
Del Stanton delstanton {at} l y c o s . c o m