A Human Ecological Perspective

Gleaning has traditionally been an agreement between food producers and community members, providing special rights to those willing to gather food that would otherwise go to waste. Some farmers used to leave the four corners of their fields unharvested, and community members could then glean as needed. Modern day food systems have fewer people producing most of the available food, posing a logistical obstacle for such free-form gleaning. Consumers are generally disconnected from their farmers and food production systems. The coordination component is therefore required for modern gleaning to successfully recover food and distribute it to individuals experiencing low income or food insecurity.

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet (1857)

 Having gone from the innocent act of picking blueberries on top of Blue Hill mountain as a child, to participating in Freeganism, as an “exhibition of the injustice of food waste” in Germany (listen to Tristram Stuart’s TED talk), to then researching supermarket quality managers’ perspectives on food waste for my Thesis last year, what I bring to the act of gleaning is a combination of many interests, and a good nose for networking needs. I am inspired by students that dumpster-dive to save money while paying college tuition, as much as by the “evil” food businesses committed to reducing the negative environmental impact of food waste in landfills, the non-profit organizations that strive to counter the injustice of abundant food being restricted from people who need it, and many others who just want to make a difference, get to know new people, and have fun. Gleaning is a way of making sense of the world and is one way to support access to healthy food for all.

Local gleaning is a necessary social act of rootedness that I can only make sense of through my human ecological antenna. Gleaning has me balancing hand in hand my natural and social surroundings and restores what I consider to be a lost part of our human ecological nature. It has the potential to bridge the relational gap that has grown between us as producers and us as consumers. I do not see gleaning as the single solution to the food access challenges we face, but I see it as a powerful resource. Food waste recovery is an important sustainable outcome of gleaning, but it is not the only outcome. The cultural implication of the act of gleaning is that it can play a role in slowly restoring the true value of food. Whether it is collecting tons of apples left hanging on road-side trees, bushels of berries fallen from bushes, carrots lying in fields in Guatemala, or salad greens in Maine hoop-houses, the collective act of gleaning empowers us to recognize the essential value of food and its potential to restore our relationship to nature, to each other, and to ourselves.

We need to measure what we glean.

Global gleaning is a powerful call to action to address the local implications of international food waste streams. This past February, Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000 and author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009), addressed the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) in Kenya, where 500 Ministers, diplomats and senior officials from around the world dined with food that would otherwise have gone to waste or been fed to animals (see Feeding the 5000). Kenya’s farmers are made to waste 40% of what they produce, due to the market’s restrictions on cosmetic standards tailored by our quality demands. Due to market expectations, this food is turned down by western retailers, but the food never reaches people who need it even within the same country it is produced. Transporting it, and even harvesting it, may exceed its value in local markets.

Again, we see this same challenge in the United States, where plenty of fresh produce is going to waste. Because fruits and vegetables are not one of the primary commodity crops subsidized by the government, like corn, soy, wheat or rice, vegetable farmers can’t afford to deliver their product to certain towns, and consumers have a hard time reaching their nearest fully stocked grocery store. In contrast, junk food is readily available because it is usually made from corn, soy and wheat products, therefore highly subsidized, and because it has a long shelf life. Vegetables and fruit are neglected items in the US food system.

Feeding the 5000 - Peas from Kenyan farmers

Gleaning can bring back common sense. Peas rejected for being too small, as seen in the picture above, can find their place in the world again.

It does depend on us.

I worked at a fruit and vegetable retail store in Barcelona for a year, promoting an alternative form of a buying club, where everything was managed for consumers, and people were able to choose items in an open room filled with all kinds of produce. We only asked they commit to coming in once a week. This was expected to help predict the amount of food we would need to order each week and supposedly reduce loss or prevent food waste. Another model that builds on reliability and waste prevention is the CSA model (Community Supported Agriculture), where consumers pay in advance and get a reduced price for a bag-full of in-season produce delivered every week. While CSAs can be an excellent option for producers and consumers, many people desire more choice each week when deciding what they do and do not want to eat. The argument, for which the jury is still out, is whether this is innate, as hunter gatherers to tend to pick the best of what is available, or whether this is learned in a society where abundance has driven us silly, and consumerism and convenience have transformed our sense of what is real.

At the organic produce shop in Barcelona, supposedly well-intentioned alternative consumers, attracted by the fairly low organic prices, would come in every day and complain if there wasn’t any of this, or any of that. Inevitably at the end of the day, at the bottom of the wooden boxes, lay a carrot with a slit, an apple with a bruise, a banana with a brown spot, a lettuce with a broken leaf, an orange with a spec. And worse yet, there were boxes of peas going moldy.

We can return to a conscious state of being where apples with bruises are the best for smoothies and perfect shinny ones are considered overly fussy, and where we all pitch in to collect and share food that would otherwise go to waste. We may not be able to change the weather today, but considering the rain, we might want to make more of an effort to fix our broken tent poles, and invite others to come inside to share the bounty of our food system.

From Farm to Food Pantries: Our CSA Model

The Food for All CSA Project is a partnership between food pantries and farms, facilitated by Healthy Acadia, to offer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares to 133 households experiencing low income in Hancock County for the 2013 season. Community Supported Agriculture is a system by which consumers pay farmers directly at the beginning of the growing season to receive weekly deliveries of fresh produce throughout the summer months. CSAs provide an income to farmers in the spring when they need it most. In exchange, consumers receive more than what they pay for because the retail value of all produce received amounts to higher than the CSA price. Though variations exist, this is the most common model offered by our local farmers. CSAs play an integral role in the farm economy of Hancock County. Most of the dozens of farms that we regularly work with offer CSAs to hundreds of families throughout the county. It is uncommon, however, for those experiencing low income to be able to afford either the up-front cost of a CSA or the prices of local, organic food. The Food for All CSA Project makes healthy food accessible to more families, supports local farmers, and builds relationships between farmers and community members.

Ready for Pick-up

While farmers often offer reduced-price CSA shares, or working shares, and try to accommodate the different needs of community members with flexible payment plans, the families we reached out to through the Hancock County Food Pantry Network have added difficulties coming up with the upfront cash on which the CSA model is based. The Food for All CSA Project supports our local farms and connects them to sectors of their local community they might not otherwise reach, by partially subsidizing the shares. The shares provided through this project are offered to participants at $50 while valued at $200. Farmers have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to create new relations with community members, providing input and advice on how to best organize each new drop-off point, making sure preservation and quality are upheld, and sometimes even offering to deliver to people’s doorsteps in situations where transportation is an issue. In addition, food pantries have opened their doors to us, allowing us to reach out to their clients with this opportunity, which sometimes adds another layer of complexity to their volunteer work, in a conscious effort to ensure more fresh healthy options for community members.

Packing 20 Individual Shares

 The participating farms are Beech Hill Farm, Happy Town Farm, King Hill Farm, Mandala Farm, Old Ackley Farm, Star Root Farm, Sweet Pea Farm, and Tide Mill Organic Farm. This community of farmers has been extremely welcoming, as we’ve gone through the ins and outs of running a new pilot CSA Project in partnership with our local food pantries. As leaders in the effort to have more locally grown fresh vegetables accessible to more community members, farms and food pantries are creating long lasting relationships with community members and building the foundation for continuing this type of work in the future. Healthy Acadia is pleased to be a part of the growing relationship between local farms and food pantries and is extremely dedicated to making these sorts of initiatives take root. The CSA Project is a pilot program that can provide a base from which to gather input from farms, pantries and families served, which Healthy Acadia and partners will use to design new strategies for long-term solutions to poverty and food insecurity, while bringing a sustainable consumption model closer to home.

Derek Semler - playing behind free produce and bread stand

Fill Your Bag for $5!

Farmer Mellie and CSA members

Our extended “Free Produce & Bread Day” will continue through the end of August, and the $5 bags of produce valued at $21 will be offered until the several shares we still have available are filled. Bread or produce can be donated every Thursday and Saturday before 8am, or small amounts can be dropped of daily between 8am and 5pm at the Emmaus Center. All donations are greatly needed and appreciated. We are still looking for gleaners, stand managers and other volunteers! If you are interested in getting involved with the Gleaning Initiative, please contact me.

The Non-Stop Link to Gleaning

Alex has made it to Maine and says she already feels at home. Alejandra, as she is known in Spain, is my first volunteer recruit. She broke my teeth when we were six years old, so I figure she owes me. No hard feelings though, it is the bond of that story which has perhaps made us lifelong friends. She will be studying vegetable farming with Barbara and Eliot at Four Season Farm, and occasionally working to support the Gleaning Initiative. Alex contributed the photos for this blog entry.

Alex learns another form of gleaning - a sea-run brookie!

Alex and I began our gleaning rounds on Friday morning at the Local Food Exchange in Blue Hill. Vendors were defiantly dancing out of rhythm to the sheets of pouring rain pounding their tarps into submission. Bill was at the Tinder Hearth stand. We got some warm hugs, some exquisite mixed greens and a loaf of tender heart bread. Ducking quickly into the next stand to get out of the rain, we found ourselves at the Bagaduce Farm with owner Deborah Evans.

Introducing ourselves as gleaners got more than the usual eye-brow raise from Deborah. Turns out she had 47.48 lbs of locally made organic sausage up for gleaning! A processing mistake in the grinding had turned 40 packages of top-quality sausage into a less than marketable item. Deborah couldn't bring herself to sell to her customers something they would regard as being different than usual. She had experienced them oozing onto the pan as she tried to cook them herself, and had sort of given up. She had been meaning to stop by Simmering Pot in Blue Hill to drop her beautiful product off, but it seems she had been waiting for a gleaner's nudge to actually part with the fruits of her hard work.

We made a plan with Deborah. I was to pick up a cooler at the Blue Hill Farmers’ Market on my way to MDI the next day, drop off at Common Good Cafe in Southwest Harbor on Saturday and get the rest to Simmering Pot by Monday.

Blue Hill Farmer's Market at Fair Grounds (Saturdays 9-11)

Laurie from Common Good Cafe had called to tell me she was interested in the black bean soup from Panera that The Tree of Life had over-ordered a few weeks ago. The packaging size turned out to be too big for pantry customers (8lbs per bag) to take home with them, so the Gleaning Initiative reached out to the different meal sites nearby.

The Common Good Cafe is currently serving popovers to fundraise and stock up with food for the winter soup distribution program. They make nutritious soups from all the great products available in summer, freeze them, and then redistribute them to people who don't have a steady source of food during winter. I mentioned to Laurie over the phone that sausages had just become available, and asked whether she had the space to store 30 lbs of organic pork sausage. Laurie readily accepted.

We dropped off frozen soup and sausages at 11am at the Common Good Cafe.

I touched every single package as quality control to make sure that frozen packages went to Common Good Cafe, and slightly thawed packages were kept for Simmering Pot's Monday community meals. The Common Good was not planning on using the sausages until late summer, when they prepare meals for the winter, so the sausages could not be thawed and then refrozen.

When we spoke to Paula Mrozicki, at the Simmering Pot, she said they would have rather had the sausages frozen. Because the meal was already being planned by the Blue Hill Hospital they would not have found a use for the sausages until the following week. We suggested coming down on Monday morning at 10am to cook the 15 lbs of sausage into a spicy pork meat and tomato bolognese sauce that could be frozen and used over the course of coming months.

After leaving the sauce to cool for five hours, we went back to fill five 1/2 gallon containers with the sausage bolognese sauce. Not only is the Simmering Pot freezer now stocked for the season with a delicious sauce, food and people, farms and meal sites, and the Gleaning Intitiative itself, have made new lasting linkages within the community that directly confront food insecurity.

Local Gleaning Teams

Back in Harborside, a mile from Four Season Farm, I drove from the other direction along a narrow dirt road delicately bordering this incredible Maine coastline. As I approached what used to be Forest Farm, I tried to picture how the original settlers Helen and Scott Nearing had arrived back in the 1950s. I wondered how the same land they had drifted to half a century earlier, in search for a place to call home, was going to welcome this gleaning dream emerging before me.

I envisioned people, bounty and eager offerings of labor.

I was venturing out to meet Nancy and Warren Berkowitz who have been caring for the upkeep of the gardens at the old Nearings’ farm, now named The Good Life Center. It has been an ongoing community effort to maintain the remaining gardens as they were half a century ago. The Good Life Center is supported by individual donations as well as the proceeds from the Nearings’ book sales (www.goodlife.org). The space, open to the public, plays an important role as having been one of the first of the homesteader movement in Maine.

The newly arrived 2013 Nearing Resident Wren Haffner approached me as I arrived, and we immediately got carried away in what turned out to be a shared gleaning vision. We spoke of the garden as a space to bring practical learning to future community gleaners, furthering the role of gleaning as a way to connect back with farming as a community building activity. We discussed the educational component for all ages, but specifically targeting adolescent youth or people at risk of social exclusion looking for an opportunity for reintegration.

The Good Life Center’s garden

The Good Life Center embraces the notions of simple living the Nearings lived by, and the Center strives to remain true to their principles, practices and gardening traditions. Scott Nearing was himself a strong advocate for social justice, leading the fight against child labor that got him banned from teaching, threfore cornering him into the good life itself. Helen had been given the choice of higher education or traveling the world, and having chosen the later, she was joined later in life by Scott with whom she would move from New York City to the pristine nature in Vermont, to Harborside, where the Nearings finally found a place to call home, "The Good Life" or maybe some of us refer to it as “The Way Life Should Be”.

The Good Life Center Apple Trees

The Original Nearings' Home

Yesterday I listened to Sister Lucille, who began her work at the Emmaus Center in Ellsworth, speaking on WERU radio program Talk of the Town, moderated by Ron Beard. Panelists of the Grand Theater in Ellsworth’s showing of “A Place At The Table” explained to us that Maine, although a seemingly beautiful landscape, has an underbelly of food insecurity that is not the way life should be at all. Relating the problem of poverty to the limited access to healthy food options, the documentary stated that 50 million people in the United States are underserved. Locally, the Tree of Life Food Pantry in Blue Hill has determined that 14.8% of Blue Hill Peninsula residents rely in some way on the food pantry to get by - see Video “Turning Clothing into Food”.

The Good Life Center also tackles the issue of hunger by growing vegetables for the Simmering Pot’s free-by-donation community meal at the Blue Hill Congregational Church on Mondays from 2:30pm to 6pm. Started by a student of well-known local Chef Jonathan Chase, the Simmering Pot offers a cooked weekly meal open to all community members, which can either be enjoyed sitting down at the table with others, or taken home. The Blue Hill Memorial Hospital has recently signed on to sponsor one of these meals a month and organizes doctors and other community members to come down and get to know each other. This is a wonderful effort to web together long-lasting community ties that can support the estimated 20% of Blue Hill Peninsula residents who find themselves experiencing food insecurity, whether they ask for help or not.

Mary Hildebrand, long-time Simmering Pot volunteer

Free produce from C&G growers

This summer, The Good Life Center and The Gleaning Initiative, a collaboration of Healthy Acadia and UMaine Cooperative Extension, are planning a program together to teach basic gardening skills to an open group of gleaning volunteers. This is being designed as an opportunity for people of all ages to reconnect around gleaning as a community event. Volunteers will experience some of the teachings of how old and new practices of growing vegetables can be combined to serve different needs, approaching the complexity of food distribution, and considering hard questions about hunger in a lively learning environment from the ground up.

Wren, Warren and Nancy discussed turning up a new garden with the gleaning volunteers, planting deer-proof crops, like potatoes, since they are the most likely to be successful in a vegetable garden project developed out of lawn space. If you are wondering what to grow for your community, potatoes are in high demand, since they can usuall only be found locally until around December. If you don't know where to start we can support you through our program Maine Harvest for Hunger for seeds and skills.

Meanwhile, weeding, harvesting and logistical skills can be practiced through The Gleaning Initiative’s “gleaner-welcome farms” in Hancock County. So far  King Hill Farm, Old Ackley Farm, and Four Season Farm have embraced the notion of gleaning on their farms, and now its a question of forming a ready gleaning response team that is sensitive to the cause and motivated for the work. Darthia Farm in Gouldsboro is on board for a Schoodic Peninsula Team to work on their farm to get trained, and Star Root Farm in Ellsworth is also on board for finding new creative ways to support the Gleaning Initiative. Meanwhile more Community Gardens such as the College of the Atlantic run by Suzanne Morse, and the Jackson Lab, run by Wellness Director Ben Billings, are going to be contributing produce to our Gleaning Initiative through the Maine Harvest for Hunger program lead by the Umaine Extension. Employees of the Jackson Lab will be gardening during thier breaks, and in the evenings be able to deliver to food pantries and meal-sites as part of their efforts.

If the dream comes true, a Secret Cafe, where meals are made by mysterious and wondrous cooks, traveling all over Hancock County, will spread edible delights throughout our communities, based on gleaned ingredients and simple recipes. The plan is for all fresh produce to be gifted to those who can make the best and readiest use of the food; and the hope is that people will turn to gleaning as the next best thing for fun, health and a day or two at the farm.

To check in with The Gleaning Initiative contact Hannah Semler - hannah@healthyacadia.org or call 667-7171 for info on your local team and to get involved for a few hours, days or weeks.

Gleaning activities coming up!

NOW! This summer the Gleaning Initiative will be rolling out its Training Program forming local teams (Blue Hill Peninsula, Schoodic Peninsula, Mount Desert Island, and Mainland) that can help farms weed, wash and chop, as well as distribute to a local food pantry, meal-site or commercial kitchen.

Farm, kitchen or pantry, get connected with the gleaning initiative to help make this work for you!

Early Fall! We've identified another gleaning activity in early fall parallel to King Hill Farm’s Carrot Harvest in Blue Hill where you can work for food or get paid to harvest, and where gleaning is an integral part of post-harvest clean up.

Late Fall! Later in the fall apple gleaning across the county will build relationships across the State to get apples off the ground and down from trees that would otherwise go to waste. The plan is to come up with a plan to make apple sauce and press cider for all who participate using a commercial kitchen that will allow us to also donate the products to the food pantries. We shall see!