The Story With Blueberries

Some friends of mine from Barcelona, Spain, who have spent the summer working on farms in the area had asked me: "What is the story with blueberries in Maine?" I changed the subject to the benefits of antioxidant-rich foods, suddenly realizing I had always taken this tiny commodity for granted.

Coincidentally, I stopped by the Welcome Table the other day to meet with Kara Ibarguen, and while we were cutting corn off the cob in preparation for their evening community meal (Wednesdays 3-6pm), one of the volunteers spoke of a job opportunity she was contemplating at Wyman's of Maine, the leading frozen blueberry operation that employs a large number of local and immigrant families.

Coastal Farms and Foods Blueberry Processing

From the conversation I gleaned that considering a job in the Cherryfield factory of Wyman's of Maine was not going to be comfortable in the least. The conversation became desperate as we all imagined her working 12-hour night shifts in an attempt to cover her bills. Was this really her only option? Would her health be affected?

One of the other volunteers, who had worked at Merrill Blueberry Farms of Hancock, Maine, explained to us what it was like to work in the laboratory of one of these factories, constantly taking samples for quality control and classifying the different grades of blueberries; a very deliberate and thorough process that these producers take very seriously. There are three different blueberry quality classifications: the Grade A blueberries sold primarily to the Japanese market, Grade B sold fresh or fresh-frozen all over the world, and Grade C used for food processors to produce juice, yogurt or ice cream.

I marvelled at these ladies, embarrassed at how much Robert McCloskey's iconic Blueberries for Sal had been a part of my upbringing, and yet how little I really knew about how blueberries have sculpted the socio-economic landscape of Maine.

I'd always heard that raking blueberries was hard work. My father raked for a few summers growing up, and said it was back breaking; however it was such good pay that as a teenager he had even imagined getting rich off it. Questions started to form in my head about our immigrant communities and their work in the blueberry industry, and the evolution of how these industries had once sustained our local communities of people - in some cases the same people who are now food insecure. 

Mary Hildebrand from the Simmering Pot community meal-site called me a couple of weeks ago to let me know her blueberry patch was ready to be gleaned.

We raked for an hour...

...and we sorted for five!

I arrived at the Emmaus Center the next day for Saturday's Free Produce and Bread Day with various donations: 50 lbs of orange blossom tomatoes from College of the Atlantic's Community Garden, some leftover cucumbers from Thursday's Produce and Bread Day, and 30 lbs of blueberries from the Gleaning Initiative's own harvest.

It turns out, I had been unable to fully separate the leaves and stems from the blueberries, and was determined to get some answers. Along with laughter at my self-effacing story, I got more than answers: "You go like this!" A woman picked up one of the rakes I had borrowed from my father's dining room wall, bent her knees and her torso, letting her arms hang down a couple feet from the ground and began brushing the air left to right drawing a figure eight through the imaginary blueberry bushes beneath her. She then held the rake above her head at an angle and let the wind blow the leaves and stems of my mind to a whole new level of appreciation as I realized that the blueberries we had picked were rightfully falling full-circle into the hands of people who had once worked so hard for blueberries I may have eaten in the past.

THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS FROM BARCELONA SPAIN!

(left) Susannah Taylor from Bread & Circuses

Marta García-Bragado from Educant Saltamartins

 Alejandra Coll from Asilvestrada (right)

Authentic Farming and Gleaning in Monroe

This morning I woke up at 6am to head out to White’s Farm in Monroe, ME. I'd been invited by Stewart White to glean beens and large squash. It was a memorable early morning drive!

Thrilled to have found someone to come out and harvest vegetables that he can't sell or feed to his family or pigs, Stewart White confesses "the pigs are fussy, they don't like beans, and they'll eat the squash but you have to grind it up for them". Which is why the second time I showed up at the Blue Hill Farmer's Market he yelled out "Hey gleaner! Want some beans and squash?".

Stewart White has been raising pigs since the 1970s. He stopped when factory pig farms flooded supermarkets with cheap meat, making it impossible for him to sell his product. Back then his prices were 75 cents per pound, and supermarkets had their prices around 10 cents per pound, which steered all of this market away.

Five years ago, Stewart and his son started raising pigs again, seeing an emerging market driven by local consumers' interest in purchasing and eating healthy, local, sustainable meat. White's Farm has since joined the Farmers’ Markets in the region to sell products from their two businesses, Smith’s Smoke House and White’s Farm, with the motto “We Do it All”.

Stewart White’s family-run operation has raised 120 pigs this season, including 30 sows. Their 8 acres of land provides them with enough space for a large vegetable garden and plenty of room for the pigs to live at large. During summer the pigs are fed from the garden and home food waste, and in the winter Stewart gleans food from school lunches in the area.

I first approached Stewart at the Bucksport Bay Farmer’s Market one Thursday afternoon early in the season. I asked him about his pigs, and whether or not he gleaned. Many of us think of gleaning only in terms of harvesting surplus food for people to eat directly. Gleaning food for people is one way to repurpose edible food waste, but collecting food products or food waste that we would not want to eat serves an environmental purpose of reducing waste and is a resourceful way to promote food production. Gleaning follows the recycling logic with a preventive priority list that puts human diet at the top and disposal at the bottom with a series of options in between. Animal feed is the next best use of food that has gone uneaten by people.

In speaking to Stewart I learned that one limitation of gleaning to provide food for animals is that this practice does not qualify under most organic certification standards, including the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association (MOFGA) certification process. Therefore, pigs that are raised on gleaned food can not be sold as certified organic meat. This restriction is in place because a farmer can not ensure that all the food she or he gleans is organic, and therefore once the animal eats the food, the meat product can not be certain to be organic. Some controversy exists regarding this rule, one argument being that vegetables are fed with compost that may include non-organic waste. The current standards state that as long as the compost is raised past a certain temperature, it can be used on organically certified vegetables. However, could not the digestive system and metabolism of a pig be as good a cleaning mechanism of non-organic residues as is high-heat treatment? It is perhaps a stretch to compare, but it certainly seems worthy of debate, particularly as it relates to gleaning and preventing food waste from reaching landfills.

Regardless of this ongoing debate, many people do glean food for raising farm animals, including Stewart. Gleaning is a central part of his farm’s mission and practice. Like some other farms in the region, White's Farm is committed to sustainable and ecological farming practices, producing healthy food without pursuing organic certification. These farms, including Four Season Farm in Harborside, market their foods as Authentic Farming. Organic certification is an important part of the agricultural movement, enabling us to understand better the practices of farms and the healthfulness of food. At the same time, other methods can also bring about healthy and sustainable farming practices - especially when the farm is local and we can visit and learn about the farms ourselves. And in the case of gleaning to feed animals, benefits can come from practices that do not qualify as organic.

Stewart loves his pigs, and his pigs love mac n' cheese - so do our kids. By gleaning school lunches food waste disposal costs are reduced, and the educational opportunity for kids to participate in recycling, and gain respect for quality food, is gained. Stewart says “the little kids do the best job” because there is “no trash in the buckets.” It might even be an act of love for the piglets, since Stewart often brings some with him to further engage the kids in their recycling responsibilities.

Stewart used to glean from supermarkets. When he started raising pigs again with his son, he decided a vegetable garden was a good way to have extra produce for his farm stand and be able to feed his family, and provide his pigs with unused or inedible garden products. His recent collaboration with the Gleaning Initiative has given him another alternative to repurposing his garden's bounty for people who need it most.

Stewart takes pride in feeding his pigs from his garden and from gleaned leftovers. He finds it disrespectful to the animals he knows so well to do it any other way and says "they are food, and they need to be respected". The gleaning of waste from school lunches is one way he feeds his pigs in the winter, but it is not driven by economic logics - the ecological and social impact is in fact greater. He spends one and a half hours to get 60 gallons of gleaned food from schools in a day, and he also spends $60 per week on fuel to reach the schools. He says he does it because he loves his pigs, and he can teach the kids about recycling and food quality, and get them to love the pigs too - that is what makes it all worth it to him.

In the picture below see Stewart’s wood work available at Blue Hill, Bucksport Bay, and Carmel Farmer’s Markets. Check out all the great produce and other goods at the farmers’ markets throughout the region. Flyers with listings of farmers’ markets by area can be found on Healthy Acadia’s website here: http://www.healthyacadia.org/initiatives/food_for_all.html#FarmersMarket.

Check out White's Farm and Smith's Smokehouse, and consider Farm Drop an option for getting your weekly order of locally grown food. Also for any questions about gleaning or to get involved please contact Hannah Semler at 667-7171 or hannah@healthyacadia.org.

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.