Spinach Revisited

Exactly two years ago to this day I fumbled my way through a row of spinach at Four Season Farm, getting a grand total of 8lbs of spinach, most of which got taken to the Emmaus Center in Ellsworth. Eliot Coleman set me up with a knife and some plastic bags and showed me what to do. I filled two bags and quit; honestly it felt a little strange. I remember using the spinach to bribe my first volunteers, giving a bag of spinach to anyone at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension 2013 Plant Sale who would sign up to be a gleaner.

This Spring 2015 we have exceeded our spinach gleaning expectations and increased by 50 times the amount gleaned in 2013. With crates, and harvesting knives, a lot more experience and 5 powerful volunteers (Kristin Witting, Paula Mrozicki, Little D, Christina Fortin and Katrina Fennelly) we gleaned 25 crates of spinach, were able to distribute 450lbs (4500 servings) to 10 food pantries and meal sites, reaching over 1,000 families in Hancock County through the following food security organizations: Simmering Pot Community Meal and Tree of Life Food Pantry in Blue Hill, Bucksport Community Concerns Food Pantry, H.O.M.E Co-op in Orland, Dinner is Served and Island Pantry in Deer Isle & Stonington, The Welcome Table, Emmaus Center and Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry in Ellsworth, and the Bar Harbor Food Pantry. All pantries and community meal sites that were open last week were contacted, others who were not open were not contacted; more will come. Thank you all for the amazing work you do to address food security in Hancock County. Contact your local food pantry by going to Healthy Acadia's website - http://www.healthyacadia.org/initiatives/documents/ExtensionHAFSO11_19_2014.pdf

Healthy Acadia and UMaine Cooperative Extension's Gleaning Initiative serves over 30 food security organizations in Hancock and Washington counties. Please be in touch for more information at hannah@healthyacadia.org / (207) 667 7171

NOTE: The pictures below were taken and provided by Brendan Bullock, a photographer who is working on a collaborative project commissioned by the Mainers Feeding Mainers Program of Good Shepherd Food Bank, and Maine Farmland Trust, documenting food access projects in Maine.

The Apple Story

October 17th, 36 volunteers gleaned at Johnston's Orchard.

We got 5,235lbs of apples from Johnston's...

...and 150L of Cider from Joe Tracy's community cider pressing.

Joe Tracy's apples go from his truck into a bleach solution;

a mechanized grinder pulverizes the apples;

buckets of apple mix getting dumped into the cider press...

(Joe Tracy's custom made cider press)

...and finally "the twist" produces the juice.

Stay tuned for plans to grow this five year tradition of apple gleaning and processing into an event for the community at large in 2015. The more apple varieties the better the cider, and certainly meal sites can best be served with a healthy drink already made than too many apples in their limited storage.

This year we distributed 5,000lbs of apples to pantries and 60L of cider to meal sites. 

Thank you gleaners and community members for making this possible.

Happy Holidays to all, see you in 2015!

Hannah & The Gleaning Team

Making History: Gleaning for Community Development

The U.S. Department of Economic and Community Development says:

"CONGRATULATIONS to the State of Maine Department of Economic and Community Development for being awarded the 2014 COSCDA Sterling Achievement Award for Community Development for the Hancock County Gleaning Initiative" (DECD).

The Maine Department of Economic and Community Development sponsored the Community Development Block Grant that enabled Healthy Acadia and UMaine Cooperative Extension to launch the Gleaning Initiative in 2012. The award was presented at the Annual Training Conference at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, and was bestowed during the Presidential Reception and Award Recognition Ceremony on Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at the Boston Public Library. It was a small and beautiful event.

This might be the first time that gleaning efforts have been officially recognized nationally as an award-winning strategy for community development. However, gleaning has been on the national agenda before. Dan Glickman served as the United States Secretary of Agriculture from 1995 to 2001. Under the Clinton Administration, Glickman promoted Gleaning and Food Recovery by organizing conferences, passing The Good Samaritan Food Donations Act, and building a national network of gleaning organizations. We could probably trace a relationship between these national efforts and the success of Maine's Good Shepherd Food Bank food redistribution programs, as well as claim that the University of Maine Cooperative Extension put gleaning on their agenda as a product of these efforts. 

Should gleaning be national policy for hunger relief? If stripped of all its community-building, educational, and other value-added aspects, is gleaning, strictly economically speaking, worthwhile? (or sustainable?)
Some of the other gleaning organizations in New England such as the Boston Area Gleaners calculate the input-output ratio for each of their gleaning opportunities to decide whether or not to make the investment. There are overhead, gas, wear and tear on vehicles, time and effort, sorting and distribution costs, as well as a myriad of transaction costs to consider for gleaning opportunity; are those costs off-set by the pounds of food going to hungry people? Are we using speculative market prices to define value here?

Strategic management theory, based on economic decisions about the worth of any given gleaning opportunity, is one angle from which to consider the return on investment of gleaning. But in terms of what each gleaning opportunity produces, to put it in economic terms, there is a social and environmental return on investment (SROI and EROI) that needs to be measured first. I would even put my neck out to say that there is an emotional return on investment when the hopeful nature of gleaning raises the spirits of local farmers, pantry volunteers, non-profit organizers, policy makers, and the families of those who bring home fresh vegetables gleaned especially for them and/or by them, at the end of the day. 

I believe gleaning can make it back onto the national agenda, not only as a food waste prevention effort but also as a recognized award-winning community development strategy that puts the social, environmental and economic return on investment on an equal playing field.

The Pig Idea

This is not my big idea, by the way. But what are we, if not mosaics of stolen pieces of other people's brilliance and inspiration? Tristram Stuart, a professional gleaner in the UK was horrified at an early age by the amount of food waste in his school cafeteria, and began feeding the food scraps to his pigs, and feeding his community some of the often overlooked, but still delicious pig-parts. He is now a famous gleaner responsible for the many “Feeding the 5000” events that have taken place around the world.

One local version of this same brilliance comes in the form of Chris Brown of Brown Family Farm in Bar Harbor. Chris has been gleaning from Hannaford Supermarket to feed his pigs and support a Community Meal, which he organizes every Thursday from 3-6pm at the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Bar Harbor. Another pioneer is Stewart White of White's Farm in Monroe, who until recently would pick up school food waste to take back to the farm, taking his piglets along for the ride for the kids to experience. Unfortunately, Stewart is too worried about what is being fed to the kids to actually feed the scraps to his pigs; he also gets no return from this activity. However, virtually anyone who has pigs and birds at a non-commercial level is doing some form of gleaning: that is repurposing food in quality appropriate ways. In order to ensure quality and to support the many decentralized gleaning systems that are developing throughout Downeast Maine, the Gleaning Initiative is developing a Community-Based Gleaning Guide to meet the needs of partners in all food sectors across the region.

For the sake of context, we are in the second chapter of the Gleaning Initiative's Exploratory Phase. The first chapter was a time for networking, outreach, community-building, and on-farm gleaning. This second chapter adds in farmers’ market gleaning, restaurant food waste prevention, retail-to-pantry, on-farm resource-based consulting, surplus management, marketing, and transportation. We are expanding to Washington County, and we have also just recently added our first official processing experiment. 

Deborah Evans of Bagaduce Farm is an incredible community player. From the beginning, she has bought in to the gleaning idea, and we have had many a conversation about how to include different versions of The Pig Idea. We worked with David's Folly Farm to raise money for two pigs for the Tree of Life, thanks to the Aragosta at the Barn event for which Deborah donated a pig (see June post in A Girl's Got to Glean). We have had informal gatherings to taste headcheese and pick the pig heads to make pork tacos. We have grilled pig tails and eaten them ¨like popsicles¨, by suggestion of Aragosta Sous Chef Susannah Taylor. Most recently, led by Deborah Evans, we had our first official processing workshop and made a Danish pig liver pate at the Halcyon Grange in North Blue Hill, for which we had seven participants from the ages of 6 to 65. 

To follow the recipe see: http://www.food.com/recipe/danish-pork-liver-pate-13895

As we continue to think about the many creative ways in which we can rescue and repurpose food that is otherwise going to waste, the question arose of whether we could use frozen pig liver to make pate. Interestingly enough, people who were connected to one of the seven volunteers who joined the workshop at the Halcyon Grange loved it. Others to whom the product was presented to without context, maybe not so much. Some wise palates say that frozen pork liver is not ideal, or that purely pork liver pate is in fact liver pasté, generally accepted as a Northern European traditional food that would be a very different taste for many of those raised on an American diet. Is this something worth putting a lot of energy into? What are the health benefits of eating liver? Maybe we can do it again and have a tasting of the different variations of the recipe and decide next steps. I can just see Bagaduce Farm celebrating the 10th Annual Pork Pate Pop-Up Party in Blue Hill Maine. 

Imagine... got liver?

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Check us out in the news!

NATIONAL - http://newsdef.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/08/20/25505636-gleaning-americas-farms-unused-crops-feed-hungry-families#th4131487-c84944874

REGIONAL - http://bangordailynews.com/slideshow/gleaning-program-puts-garden-surplus-on-tables-helps-fight-food-insecurity-in-hancock-county/

LOCAL - http://weeklypacket.com/news/2014/aug/28/gleaning-initiative-connects-farm-produce-with-peo/#.VAYPTUgU7Xc