The Lemon Lady needs a new nickname, methinks.

Anna Chan, 37, has outgrown the title, which doesn’t begin to describe the difference this anti-hunger activist has made in less than a year in her one-woman campaign to get fresh produce into the mouths of people in need in her community.

This stay-at-home mom from Contra Costa County, California has (almost) single-handedly harvested, by her own estimates, 12,000 pounds of local produce from neighbors’ front yards. She’s also collected more than $60,000 surplus fruit and veg from local farmers’ markets, which she hauls in the back of her SUV to food pantries in her area. And she’s donated hundreds of seedlings and helped plant veggie gardens in her county in the hope that she can inspire others to grow their own row — and feed their families whole food.

In September I spent several hours watching Anna in action. We met at one of her many pet projects, a modest but thriving veggie patch in a low-income neighborhood of Concord. (Anna got involved with the garden after being approached by Kathy Gleason,  corporate donations coordinator for the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, who sewed the seeds for this edible effort on her own time by getting to know the neighborhood and seeking out other volunteers.)

Out of one of the apartments popped a proud mom who gave me a spontaneous tour of the garden before Anna even pulled up. Begun with seedlings tended and donated by The Lemon Lady, the summer bounty included tomato, eggplant, pepper, and squash. When Anna arrived, the three of us chatted about the challenges of raising corn and the ease of growing Asian greens such as mizuna. We were just three moms, one Japanese, one American, one Australian, talking about the joys of making tomato sauce from scratch with homegrown produce to feed our hungry kids.

Before we left, Anna gave the grateful woman a seed catalog, with the promise of more seeds to come for a fall crop. Next stop: The lively Concord Farmers’ Market, where Anna distributes cardboard boxes and chats with vendors when they’re not serving customers. Farmers such as the pear purveyors from Alhambra Valley Farms and the Bautista Ranch veggie peddlers willingly pack up leftover produce for her to cart away at the end of the market to take to local food pantries, including the Salvation Army, SHARE Pantry, and Monument Crisis Center.

While the market was in full swing, I sat down with Anna to get a sense of what drives this former office manager to spend hundreds of hours volunteering for the greater good, one piece of produce at a time.

Reading between the lines, I suspect that a challenging childhood, made a little less rough by the kindness of strangers and community volunteers much like herself, serves as a constant reminder of the importance of giving back.  That’s not some pat charitable phrase for this petite and pretty woman; she knows what it’s like to encounter tough times and deal with health concerns. Now, blessed with a thriving toddler, a supportive dentist husband, and a happy home life, she wants to help others less fortunate than herself. Plus, the gal has a big heart, a passion for nutritious home cooking, and energy that doesn’t quit. (Typically she does a farmers’ market surplus run four days a week.)

Anna’s efforts add a public service spin on the au courant activity known as fruit foraging. She combines two old-fashioned concepts: gleaning and doing good, and in a time of great need (one local food pantry recently closed for a day; demand is so high it ran out of food) she simply cannot stand to see perfectly good produce go to waste.

Not surprisingly, those she comes in contact with sing her praises. “She’s a local gem,” says Jessie Neu, the director of the Contra Costa Certified Farmers’ Market. “She’s a life saver,” says one food-distribution volunteer from a local food bank. The California Garden Clubs recently honored Anna for her community service and her efforts to promote growing greens and getting fresh, nutritious food to hungry people.

And it all began way back in February, when this suburban mom was simply trying to find a way to soothe her colicky child to sleep. Anna resorted to driving her fussy, nap-fighting toddler, so Ava would drift off to the Land of Nod. (Oh, boy, do I remember those car rides from my own sleep-resistant son’s early days.)

As Anna tooled around her neighborhood she saw trees laden with luscious lemons ready to drop and rot. Where others saw potentially fallen fruit, Anna saw good food needing a way to get to the hungry.

So she worked up the courage to knock on strangers’ doors to ask homeowners if she could collect their excess fruit for local food pantries. And she left fliers letting her neighbors know that she’d noticed their bounty and wondered if they’d be willing to share their surplus by leaving a bag or two for food bank donations, or allow her to pick their extra produce. The response? Overwhelmingly positive. People have happily donated lemons, as well as oranges, apricots, plums, peaches, tomatoes, beans, and zucchini.

Anna’s on a mission to spread the word that many food banks gladly take fresh produce. “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 Anna. A lot of people, she points out, incorrectly assume that only canned goods or government surplus food is acceptable in such places. Not so.  (Check out a revealing New York Times Magazine article for the back story on why food banks are now accepting more fruit and veg in the recent Food Issue.)

To learn more about The Lemon Lady, visit her blog, where she champions the work of food banks and farmers, shares the joy of growing food with her daughter, and encourages others to follow her example in their own communities.

Click here for one of her favorite baking recipes, lemon bars, of course.

Thumb through the opening pages of Kauai’s phone book and you’ll find local maps that denote something you won’t find in most places – a tsunami line. The barely perceptible demarcation that runs just inside the coastline of Hawaii’s western most major island is a subtle warning of the always present threat of natural disaster. Perhaps more poignantly, it is also a reminder of how perilous life has and could become for the 63,000 year-round residents of this otherwise paradisiacal isle.

The Kauai Food Bank, whose parking lot physically falls within the tsunami zone, is the first, and depending on your directional orientation, the last line of defense for local food security in the United States. Compared to other food banks around the country, Kauai’s has been a first responder to the local emergencies that have shaken the island over the past two decades. In fact its mission statement reflects a rough reality: provide food for the hungry, respond to emergencies, and eliminate hunger. And as the food bank’s executive director, Judith Lenthall will tell you, it’s the emergencies which make the pursuit of the other two goals a greater than normal challenge.

In 1992 Kauai was ravaged by Hurricane Iniki which stripped the vegetation bare and left one-third of the population homeless. Two years ago, the island had rain of truly biblical proportions (it literally rained for 40 days and 40 nights) that produced flooding that killed 7 people and wiped out much of the small scale agriculture. Both events stretched Lenthall’s organization to its limits. “We’re remote and prone to disasters, both natural and manmade” Lenthall said. “We’re only one shipping strike away from severe food scarcity. If anyone should think about food self-sufficiency, we should.”

With a 2001 grant from USDA’s Community Food Project, the Kauai Food Bank embarked on a journey that would take them far from the safe harbor of everyday food distribution. Over the course of five years they cultivated a new crop of 57 small farmers who, at the project’s peak, were selling over $600,000 of fresh produce to local hotels as well as the Food Bank. To seed this new venture the Food Bank developed an innovative approach to assisting their kapuna – a respectful Hawaiian expression for the elderly – by linking their local food production to another USDA nutrition initiative, the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Through the SFMNP, over 1200 kapuna received almost $200 of locally grown produce per year directly through the Food Bank. And in a place where locally produced food is available year-round, this was a huge benefit for the island’s most nutritionally vulnerable.

Their local food project was a great idea and a successful model. But with an indifference that only nature can show, the well laid plans of men and women were destroyed by the 2006 flood. Broken hearted but not defeated, the Kauai Food Bank bailed out their warehouse and pulled their trucks from the volcanic red mud. They secured more donated food for distribution and started a food stamp outreach program that has provided an additional $114,000 in food buying benefits for the island’s needy. And they are beginning to dream the dream of local food production once again.

“Food self-sufficiency was the Hawaiian way of life,” said Lenthall. “The ocean – our refrigerator – and our land provided everything we needed to eat well. We need to go back to that in order to go forward again.”

Though the next deadly disaster could be brewing somewhere in the far reaches of the Pacific, Lenthall’s more immediate concern are the developers who are building resorts and timeshares, and the endless stream of buyers who want a little piece of paradise. In a place where one-acre lots can sometimes fetch one million dollars, much has to be done to preserve those remaining patches of arable land. “We need more affordable housing, living wages, and lower food and energy costs. And we need to stay rural and agricultural.”

At the nation’s extreme western edge, sitting over 2500 miles from the U.S. mainland, Kauians are as vulnerable to high food and energy costs as a people can be (a supermarket green pepper was $5 a pound; gas was $1 more per gallon than on the mainland). Lenthall and the food bank she runs are committed to doing all that they can to protect the immediate food security of their little island community. At the same time, they are laying plans for long term food security by preserving and rebuilding their traditional agricultural way of life.

Photos by Nurpu and jennconspiracy.

Chef Calvin Blake holds the huge, deep green, red-veined leaves up to his nose and breathes in their pungent, sassy aroma. “That smells so good—so fresh!” he exclaims, adding the bags of Giant Red Mustard leaves to his cart. “These are going to be great in salads.”

Calvin isn’t shopping for one of San Francisco’s renowned restaurants, but for the Salvation Army Meals Program, which operates meal sites and delivers hot lunches to people who are homebound.

He isn’t shopping at a restaurant wholesaler, either; he’s at the San Francisco Food Bank, which has just started receiving the yield from Slow Food Nation’s Victory Garden.

“It’s great that this was grown right here in San Francisco,” Calvin says when he learns of the produce’s origins.

Leafy greens are harvested on Monday mornings by Victory Garden volunteers, then picked up by a Food Bank truck as it makes its rounds collecting and delivering food. The produce travels to the Food Bank’s warehouse, where it’s made available to more than 600 agencies that rely on Food Bank supplies to serve San Francisco’s 150,000 hungry citizens.

For a city that seems to overflow with good food, hunger is actually a serious problem here—1 in 4 children, 1 in 3 seniors, and 1 in 5 adults are unsure of where their next meal will come from. Every day, the San Francisco Food Bank sources, collects, sorts, inspects and repackages thousands of pounds of food, then distributes it to soup kitchens, senior centers, school programs and nearly 200 grocery pantries throughout the city. Thanks to Chef Calvin’s keen eye for greens, his clients are the lucky ones who get this week’s Victory Garden bounty. He already has plans for the spicy leaves. “I’m going to slice it thin, like for slaw, and mix it with other salad greens,” he says, adding, “I love being able to work with fresh produce.”

He stacks six cases of fresh bell peppers on his cart. These aren’t from the Victory Garden, however (the pepper harvest is a few weeks away); they are the result of an innovative program called Farm to Family, which enabled the San Francisco Food Bank to distribute 15 million pounds of fresh produce last year to low-income families.

California food banks work with growers and packers to collect surplus crops and culls—blemished or off-sized items that don’t meet grocery store standards, but still taste just fine. That means people who couldn’t dream of affording, say, a fresh orange, might actually get to enjoy one. It also means that food which might otherwise go to waste becomes an important part of the food system.

Calvin says that many clients served by the Salvation Army program are homebound Seniors. “I send out meals to about 120 people in their homes,” he explains, “I don’t want to just feed people; I want them to enjoy what they eat. Produce like this really makes a difference.”

Thanks to the generous donations from individuals, companies and groups like Slow Food, the San Francisco Food Bank was able to distribute 31 million pounds of food to the hungry last year—enough for 66,000 meals every day. To learn more or arrange for a tour, visit www.SFFoodBank.org.

Photos by Kei Hoshino and Jeremy Toeman

Rio Thomas is leading a small squad of volunteers through the damp, early morning fields of Alm Hill Farm at the outskirts of Bellingham, Washington. Their voices hushed by the gray sky overhead and limbs still stiff from sleep, this silent band treads carefully across rows of lettuce and strawberry beds before reaching their target – precisely lined-out rows of snap and snow peas with pods dangling loose and sassy like earrings from a gypsy’s ears. Thomas issues instructions to pick only the ripe pods, leave the young ones, and fill their harvest buckets at will.

Are they a band of hungry hobos bent on relieving their stomach pangs? A detail of soldiers foraging food for a nearby encampment? No. These stealthy scavengers are gleaners from a tiny non-profit organization known as Small Potatoes which, with the permission of the farmer, are harvesting crisp, organically-grown, albeit surplus peas for low-income residents of Whatcom County. Their mission is to harvest as much high quality produce as the farm will permit and then deliver it within a few hours to one of the county’s 15 food pantries.

“Farmers hate to see their food go to waste,” said Thomas, a stout middle-aged woman whose skin is deeply tanned by constant field work. As someone who has devoted many years of her life to farming, and just as importantly, grew up “being limited resource” as she puts it, Thomas identifies with both the farmer’s concern for surplus and the low-income persons fear of scarcity. She has put her dual experience to work by cultivating the participation of a dozen Whatcom County farmers, all of whom are organic and gladly share their surplus with thousands of the county’s neediest families.

Thomas points out that part of what motivated her to start this venture was her previous work in a food bank. “I was discouraged by the quality of the produce I saw there,” she said, “and thought we could do better if we established direct relations with our local farmers.” It is this kind of concern that makes Small Potatoes uniquely effective in pursuing food justice. Besides Thomas’s passion and that of her 100-plus cadre of volunteers, their commitment to only gleaning and distributing organic food gives them a leg up on other gleaning projects.

The 50,000 U.S. emergency food sites that feed about 10 percent of the U.S. population every year are running out of food. Demand is growing and supplies are shrinking, partly due to the food industries’ financial constraints and improved operational efficiencies. Out of necessity and their desire to improve the nutritional quality of the food they distribute, food banks have sought out more fresh produce donations. But like any perishable food shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, food bank produce arrives at the warehouse looking a little worse for wear. And since industrial scale farms and regional distribution systems aren’t donating their best produce, low-income families can’t expect to receive much in the way of top-notch fruits and vegetables.

Fortunately that’s not the case in Bellingham, WA. With not much more than $30,000 in cash donations each year, Small Potatoes is making – at least in their better years – over 100,000 pounds of the area’s freshest apples, lettuce, berries, and much more available to the community’s neediest families. And it’s local and organic.

Photo by Leslie Duss