Foraging for food—whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot—is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept—gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens—is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

In cities, rural communities, and suburbs across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect bags and boxes of fruits and vegetables that find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, others see opportunity—the chance to make a difference, feed the hungry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have surplus or seconds find a good home for these edibles beyond the compost pile; financially strapped aid organizations get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the gleaners get to give back in their communities. “I’ve been surprised at how emotionally rewarding this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gardener in Oakland, California, who started Food Pool last summer to share the abundance from his prolific 800-square-foot garden with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give someone in need a dollar or a donation, but seeing someone get excited about beans from my backyard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Some gleaners have even made a national name for themselves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began collecting excess fruit in suburban Clayton, California, while driving her then-baby daughter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit—such as oranges, apricots, and apples—left rotting in her neighbors’ front yards. so she started a single-handed campaign to do something about it.

Three years on and hundreds of tons of produce later, Chan, who is now a regular fixture at local farmers’ markets where she collects unsold fruits and vegetables that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been featured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press attention has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mission to feed those in need. “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 Chan, who encourages people to get started by picking excess fruits and veggies in their immediate area and passing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, communities are finding creative, local ways to get fresh food to the residents who have the most challenges accessing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for example, has a three-pronged approach: picking surplus produce from regional farms, gathering leftover greens from farmers’ markets, and harvesting excess residential edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network in Ithaca, New York, has worked with local farmers to “rescue” thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and distribute it to low-wage workers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned produce donated by the organization serves 24 programs that feed more than 2,000 people a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN program coordinator Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no reason perfectly good food should go uneaten if farmers are willing and people are needy.

Some gleaning efforts have grown out of religious organizations—not surprising, since the term has Biblical origins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are permitted to pick grain leftover from the harvest. The Society of St. Andrews, based in Virginia, has gleaning groups in several states including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have collectively gleaned millions of pounds of produce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Kentucky, gleaning group that grew out of a church meeting, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of produce since the summer of 2010, from farmers’ markets, farms, and private residences. “It is not hard to feed the hungry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an interfaith group not affiliated with any particular religion or church. “The word is spreading and there’s a wonderful energy among different people and organizations that is both collaborative and community oriented.”

There are gleaning programs that connect homeowners overwhelmed by an abundant harvest with volunteers willing to pick produce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit in Oregon. But many gleaning efforts are simply started by an individual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of volunteers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me—and I hope them—a great deal of unexpected joy.”

Bossier’s first stop with fresh food is often the local men’s shelter. “These men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them,” says the clinical social worker. “I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: To provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.”

Some gleaning programs have become an integral part of their community. Take the Novato Unified School District Gleaning Program. Every week for the past six years, parents, students, and members of this Marin County, California, community glean excess organic produce from a participating local farm. (There are about 15 in the program.) Through a partnership with Marin Organic, a cooperative association of local growers, that fresh chard picked by a volunteer on Monday finds it way into school pasta sauce later in the week. The gleaned fruits and vegetables now offsets up to 25 percent of the district’s weekly produce, according to Miguel Villarreal, the director of food and nutrition services for the small school district, where some 4,000 meals a day are dished up at 13 schools.

For Villarreal, who has worked in school food for 30 years and grew up helping pick crops with his parents in the fields, the program is a no-brainer. “There is so much beautiful abundance in this area and our school food program can use all the help it can get,” says Villarreal, who sees educational and community-building benefits to the program, as well.

Others raise some unexpected benefits of gleaning. Melita Love, of Farm to Pantry in Healdsburg, California, found a community of people in her new hometown when she started gleaning. Love has collaborated with local preservers to extend the shelf life of the bounty she and her crew harvest in such staples as applesauce and tomato sauce — think canning for a cause — that food pantry patrons can pick up along with gleaned fresh goods. She’s also worked with local groups to explain to patrons how to use produce that may be unfamiliar. “The first time we dropped off kale to a food pantry nobody took it because they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Love. “So we did cooking demos for kale salad, kale chips, and a winter soup with kale, and we handed out recipes, too. Education is an important part of any gleaning effort.”

Food Pool’s Sigal points out that a group of gardeners who share their backyard bounty with less fortunate folk in his community have gone a step further, funding and constructing a community garden at a local food pantry where there was once an unused piece of land. “A year ago, most of these people didn’t even know there was a food pantry there,” he says. “There’s this incredible value in creating community that goes beyond just sharing surplus fresh food.”

Top, Lemon trees often produce far more fruit than a single family can use. Photo credit: Marco Chiesa. Middle, Blackberries grow wild all over rural and, often, suburban areas. Photo credit: Alex Brown. Bottom, One of several varieties of kale, lacinato kale grows abundantly and can be used in numerous healthy dishes. Photo credit: Oriana Papadopulos. All photos used under Creative Commons license.

Originally published on Shareable

Driving around North Berkeley with Natasha Boissier is an educational experience; where others see a quiet residential area she sees streets lined with potential pickings and delights when she spots prospective bounty or familiar fruit.

Boissier is a part of a growing movement of urban gleaners who pick fruit from people’s yards (with permission) and donate this surplus produce to food banks, senior centers, and schools who can put this fresh food to good use.

Some residents view an abundant fruit tree as a problem but the 42-year-old clinical social worker sees a simple solution to excess bounty and a way to fill a community need.

Boissier grew up, in part, in Switzerland and remembers climbing her favorite walnut tree during her childhood. She’s turned her love of fruit picking into a kind of foraging philanthropy as the founder of North Berkeley Harvest.

Since the summer of 2007 Boissier and her loose-knit volunteer crew (about 30 in all, around 10 regulars) has harvested a cornucopia of fruit including apples, pears, Asian pears, oranges, lemons, limes, plums, peaches, figs, nectarines, apricots, persimmons, feijoas, grapefruits, sour cherries, walnuts, quinces, and loquats.

Word spread quickly about her gleaning for good effort after local media coverage and a nod in a New York Times story on backyard bounty finding its way to food banks. She has expanded her reach beyond Berkeley to include neighboring El Cerrito, Albany, Richmond, and parts of Oakland too.

Last year North Berkeley Harvest picked 3,602 pounds of fruit from 43 homes, many the group visit every year. During peak picking season volunteers meet about once a week.

Boissier delivers the bags and boxes of fresh fruit to several local non-profit organizations, including Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Berkeley Unified School District’s Central Kitchen at King Middle School, and the senior lunch program and after-school children’s program at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay.

She lives in North Berkeley with her partner and two young children. We met this week first for fruit foraging and later for lunch at Au Coquelet Cafe.

How did you get started?

I was walking in my neighborhood while on maternity leave with my newborn son and I was struck by how many fruit trees there are here, how abundant they are, and how much of their fruit is allowed to drop and rot. It was a light-bulb moment: Picking this unused fruit seemed like a natural way to address waste and deal with hunger. So I went home and wrote up a flyer. That’s how North Berkeley Harvest came into fruition.

Do you have standards for the fruit you forage?

I taste test and only pick fruit that I would eat myself. I harvest fruit that hasn’t been sprayed or fertilized with any chemicals. It’s perfectly fine if the fruit comes in funny shapes, that’s how it is in nature, but it has to taste good.

What’s the most unusual use for the fruit you pick?

We harvest grapefruits but the ones here in Berkeley don’t taste so good to humans. A woman from an animal sanctuary called PAWS collects them for her elephants. She says they eat them like bonbons.

How has this project impacted your life?

It has brought me tremendous satisfaction. I work at UCSF’s [University of California at San Francisco's] Memory and Aging Center, counseling families dealing with dementia in their elderly loved ones. It’s rewarding work but it’s often very sad.

I’m also the mother of two young children with all the challenges that come with parenting. So sometimes I enjoy just going to harvest on my own. It’s a meditative, contemplative time for me. A very restorative hobby.

I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore. They come out and talk with me while I work and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me–and I hope them–a great deal of unexpected joy.

Have there been other unforeseen benefits of this work?

Serendipity. A friend I lost touch with, Sarah Pyle, read about my work and contacted me; now she’s one of my most regular volunteers. And sometimes a resident will recognize one of the volunteers–from way back–and they’re so happy to see each other again. I love it when these kind of things happen.

Do you have a preference for where you pick?

If I have to prioritize during the busy harvest season I’ll choose to pick fruit from the homes of elderly residents, many of whom are treasures who have tended these trees for decades. There are some really old trees in town.

Do you have advice for others who want to forage fruit for donation?

Yes, it’s simple and straightforward. This doesn’t need to be a big, organizational undertaking. Write a flyer and put it in people’s mailboxes in your local area. Enlist family and friends for your initial harvest and start small. The only equipment you need is a ladder, a fruit picker–you can buy one at Home Depot for about $30–clippers, gloves, and some bags or boxes for the bounty. Identify some local groups that could use the fruit and get in touch in advance to find out what and how much they can accept (sometimes more isn’t better).

Have a contact person for your drop-off days but keep in mind these organizations are often staffed by low-paid workers or volunteers and there’s high turn over. They’re also very busy; so don’t expect a lot of accolades. Just deliver and go and know in your heart you’re doing good. I remember one resident at a shelter yelling at me: “Why are you bringing us fruit?” We’re grown men–we need meat!” I thought it was funny.

Have you met any interesting people harvesting?

There have been so many. One elderly couple come to mind: He’s a retired UC Berkeley expert on moss, she’s interested in lichen. I’ve been picking their apple tree for the last few years. I call her the Lichen Lady because she showed me her notebook full of these watercolor sketches of all the different lichen she’s seen in her travels around the world. They were just exquisite.

This is a place that celebrates people’s uniqueness. This town is full of intense, quirky, opinionated, and passionate people. I come into contact with some of them picking fruit. I call them the Berkeley specials. They keep things fun.

What’s next?

I’d like to take young school children on fruit harvesting field trips. It’s an area ripe with educational experiences: Nature, growing produce, tasting food, and sharing abundance.

Do you have a preferred place where you like to donate?

My first stop is often the men’s shelter. I’m not sure why. They’re often last in line for services–I mean, of course, women and children first–but these men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them. I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: To provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

With summer here, and the influx of both wild and planted harvestables gaining momentum, I am taking pause to compare season’s past with now.  Aside from what we’ve chosen for our garden, my typical food foraging generally takes place on my own property, harvesting native wild blackberries, volunteer plums, and miner’s lettuce and wild arugula for supple spring salads.  We’re also fortunate to have access to some prime mushroom hunting, and usually pull in a few pounds of porcini and chanterelles each year.

But this year is weird. A chilly, wet, and extra long spring delayed the growth of our starts.  Much of the seeds we purchased ended up being bunk, a huge disappointment especially since we appreciate the back-story of the heirloom company so much.  And we are still smack in the middle of constructing our home, taking away each spare moment that would otherwise be spent keeping up a farm.

And then there is work, the means to the end for all those visions and dreams of a future away from the office.  Which brings me to the main difference of this year from last.  I am not home enough to spend time harvesting my own space.  Instead, my day-to-day reality is in town, driving from workplace A to workplace B to sometimes workplace C.  Last year, I had more leisure to wander around the property, picking this and that and creating interesting dishes, salt mixes, teas, and jams from the loot.  Now, the part of my brain that is inspired by those lucky edible finds lurks behind a drearier headspace of computer screens, files, and phone calls.  But there still remains a glimmer of culinary motivation that blooms on those asphalt and brick laden drives.  Sometimes on the urban trail lies a gift, just waiting to be plucked, prepared, and appreciated.

This concept is nothing new, and in recent years the idea of gleaning excess produce has taken shape in organized efforts throughout the country.   In urban environments, gleaning projects are popping up as well, specifically in Portland, San Francisco’s Urban Gleaning Program in conjunction to the Department of Public Works, and the widely renowned Forage Oakland, spearheaded by Asiya Wadud, that is now seen as a model of true success in solving issues within our current wasteful food system.

My small city’s climate actually offers an abundance of produce, dripping from heavy branches and vines over gates and fences.  I’ve spied grapefruit, Meyer lemons, mulberries, plums, dandelion greens, and even Buddha’s hand citrus in one special front yard.  Along our coastline, people enthusiastically harvest muscles and seaweed.  But one of my favorites, that few seem to revere, is the loquat.  The pale yellow clusters of fuzzy orbs, juxtaposed against the tropical dark green leaves, always catch my eye.  Loquat trees are everywhere, once identified they seem to pop up on every route.  Many parts of the plant are edible, including the leaves that are often dried and brewed as a tea in several Asian cultures.  Some health benefit claims include blood sugar control and insulin production, the release of anti-oxidants, acts as a repertory expectorant, aids in digestion, decreases skin inflammation, and that the loquat has anti-viral properties.

But I love the fruit.  It’s a subtle, delicate sweetness, a firm texture coating large, glassy black seeds that feel like marbles on the tongue.  If I don’t simply enjoy them freshly picked out of my own hand, my second preference is to pickle them with a couple of cloves.  The brining and preserving turns them into something I can only describe as olive-like.  Here is a recipe for your next city harvest.

Pickled Loquats

6 Lbs. loquats
3 cups sugar
3 cups water
3 cups cider vinegar
Several whole cloves

Combine sugar, water, and vinegar in a large pot.  Tie the cloves loosely in cheesecloth and add.  Boil 10 minutes then remove spice bundle.  Alternately, you can simply drop 2 or 3 whole cloves into each jar along with the fruit for a more assertive spiced pickle.  Meanwhile, wash the loquats, removing the stem and blossom ends and seeds; do not peel them.  Pack into hot sterilized jars, filling ½-inch from rim with the hot syrup.  Seal and process in water bath 15 minutes.

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.

When I think of Petaluma, California I think of a tiny little town 30 minutes or so north of San Francisco home to antique and outlet stores, many a poet and artist, dairy cows and rolling fields nestled next to quaintly rusted industrial-scapes. I have never really given much thought to the families and seniors in line at the free food pantries. The fact is though that Petaluma has changed a lot in the last five to ten years. In 2007 there was a 30% increase in the number of seniors visiting food pantries and a similar 30% increase in the number of children enrolled in the free or reduced price meal program at school. That’s one in three kids and a reminder that all is not as it may seem.

A job-hunting informational interview led me to Petaluma Bounty and Grayson James, the Executive Director of the non-profit dedicated to transforming the way the hungry get fed in Petaluma. He schooled me in the realities of Petaluma’s hungry when we met on a rainy March morning to tour Bounty Farm the urban farm arm of the organization’s four-pronged approach to addressing systematic change. “It’s the focal point for a healthy food system,” said James.

The other arms include: the Bounty Box, a weekly CSA sold wholesale to low-income families; four Community Gardens with three located on elementary school campuses; and, Petaluma Bounty Hunters (meaning one who chases down healthy fruits and veg all around town), a gleaning program targeted at backyard gardeners.

Each program has synergies with each other and with people and food. “You want to give people multiple options and many different ways to participate because that’s how you change the food system,” said James.

Bounty Farm lies along a stretch of Petaluma Boulevard North, one of the main arteries through town, and across the street from an RV sales business. It’s around the corner from Lucky’s supermarket and occupies land “donated” to the organization thanks to a charitable five-year lease at only $1 per year. The property is open to the entire community and is run by Amy Rice-Jones, the Farm Manager, and her forty some odd regular volunteers who come to weed, plant and build.

The day of my visit, two volunteers were planting seedlings and placing them in the sizeable greenhouse built at a one day “greenhouse raising” last October. It’s Petaluma’s first community greenhouse and was created by 25 volunteers including a 79-year old woman.

The system and the synergistic way the programs work together is a result of research into other cities around the country, who are doing similar things to make sure that everyone in their community has access to healthy, clean and affordable food. Most notably Portland’s which James said “is way ahead of other cities from the perspective of community gardens and includes a powerful statewide gleaning program. We’re not using their model but it was certainly inspiring.” Seattle’s P-Patch program was another inspiration.

When James started developing the program just two years ago, thanks to funding from the Hub of Petaluma Foundation that wanted to address hunger in Petaluma, he talked to all of the hunger relief organizations and educators in the area and realized that “if we really want to make a long-term difference we have to focus on more than just hunger relief.” The end result of his community meetings was that focusing energy on an emergency food system wasn’t going to cut it.

“We think the way to do this [feed a community in need] is to become as self-sustaining as we can.” While not quite there yet, Petaluma Bounty works a little something like this: The chard, kale, broccoli, carrots, peas, onions and other food from the farm is sold to local restaurants who get to brand it on their menus as a Bounty Special, thus educating their diners about the program. Flowers from the farm are sold to local businesses as a weekly subscription, also branded – so that each place they sell is an opportunity for education. The joint sales of the farm are meant to support the operating costs of the farm.

The weekly CSA, Bounty Box, which currently serves 25-35 families, works with existing programs that serve low-income families and sells to them wholesale. These families, jazzed in turn, volunteer to assemble the CSA boxes. The CSA is currently self-sustaining thanks to retail sales and some local corporate sponsors, namely Clover Stornetta Farms, Kaiser Permanente, Exchange Bank, Petaluma Poultry and North Bay Construction.

The Community Gardens and the wholesale cost CSA project got their start thanks to a prior relationship with one of the three schools, which each happen to be the lowest income schools in Petaluma. James met with the families of the students and asked them to participate in the planning process. He asked what they wanted and what they could afford and they all went out to research prices at the local grocery stores to see what they could reasonably grow and sell in the CSA boxes. Their research resulted in an agreement that the community wanted organics and that they could sell them at wholesale for the same price or a little less than the price at local retailers. One of the schools, McDowell School, is both the packing site and a pick up site for the Bounty Box program. The gardens include classroom beds and beds open to local families where they are invited to plant anything legal as long as they do so organically. This helps bring families into the schools. Today there are four gardens being used by 65 families, each with their own plots.

The Bounty Hunters program just reached its 100,000 pound of collected and distributed food, and has two collection sites (for dropping off gleaned food), one at Elim Lutheran Church and another church on the East side of town. The program asks people to drop off any surplus from their gardens and volunteer drivers take the food to local food pantries, senior citizen centers and programs that serve low-income families.

“In addition to its primary objective of connecting good food to people who need it, folks are discovering that gleaning is helping to connect neighbors to neighbors, to increase awareness of the potential bounty of local food systems, and to foster a greater sense of community,” said James.

It took a year to formulate the multi-pronged approach – one that addressed the question of how to build a community food program healthfully and affordably. The program is doing really well and the plan is to create 20 more gardens around town and launch a GYOB (Grow Your Own Bounty) Program that will teach people of all income levels about how to grow food, understand nutrition and educate them about the current issues facing the food system. “We want people to grow food in backyards, porches, balconies, bathtubs and sidewalks,” said James.

I have been “gleaning” in various ways my entire adult life.  Gleaning, of course, is an ancient practice by which people go out and collect, salvage, consume and/or otherwise utilize unpicked crops left behind in the field – whether from weather anomalies, variable economics, the lack of timely help or the vagaries of mechanical harvesting.  Today I believe “gleaning” may prove to be as valuable to us as a state of mind – as it is for the tonnage of food actually salvaged or the number of winter larders enhanced.

I’ve never personally suffered chronic food privation or hunger.  Yet, there’s always been for me a powerful, nearly primal allure of “free food.” Whether it was those early, all-you-can-eat grease joint offers along the interstate, or the gustatory glee of the college “potluck,” or those beloved seasonal fruit orgies around plum, peach and pear thickets on both coasts, finding ways to eat for free has held my interest.  Later, this same fascination led me directly into organic farming, heirloom seeds and permaculture.

Those of us who’ve been privy to the immense waste stream in every sector of the American food industry know the truth: supermarkets still routinely toss palettes of perfectly edible stuff, and cafeterias and restaurants still waste tons daily. Even the local food coop had a lively flow of green waste, headed for landfill, last I checked.  And household food waste is astonishing. But that’s just the visible waste, the tip of the iceberg’s tip.

Serious gleaners, perhaps, dive headlong into random dumpsters less often than we used to. Instead we politely arrange with a sympathetic grocer to orderly haul away said “waste” for our goats, pigs or other “livestock”.  We gleaners keep it up day after day, even knowing full well that such post-market salvage doesn’t really address the deeper, systemic issues of industrial food and all its built-in carbon emissions, poison runoff, abusive labor practices and assorted waste.

And the various practices we call “gleaning” are sure to increase with current rising unemployment and the dramatically down-turned economy. But the impulse to glean may also spring from a deeper, older body memory. Buried somewhere within our human family tree or tribe, remains the karmic recollection of hunger, yes even famine. Isn’t that also partly why tens of thousands drove out to a Colorado farm last week to glean remnant leeks and spuds and carrots abandoned in the field?

Come to find, gleaning has accompanied farming for millenia, on every continent, with countless millions depending on it for their seasonal sustenance.

And there’s something else here today about gleaning, above and beyond the raw value of the salvaged food (or hay, bricks, lumber, etc) Observing that many people continue to glean even when the dollar value may not “justify” the practice.  I conjecture that it may also hold a secondary appeal. Seems that gleaning also affords us a sense of doing right, as in helping out the farmer, the planet, reducing waste, etc; connects us (including the landless and non-grower) to soil, plants, the natural world and its cycles; allows for a visceral, tactile experience of bounty beyond what we may experience in normal, daily life; and, offers a more creative, activist response to highly imperfect and variable (food and life) circumstances.

In this last sense gleaning emerges as one of the world’s oldest forms of agricultural “value adding.” Personally, I like to think of it as targeted recycling, only with a missionary’s edge.

This fall, for example, before the hard frost, I went around gleaning my own outdoor gardens of still-green, living brassica plants, leeks, lettuces, chards, beets, celeries. I lifted from the ground anything left vaguely alive that I couldn’t stand to lose, and transplanted them like sardines into raised, permanent beds in a 65′ backyard hoophouse, chuckling as I worked at the irony of the gleaner gleaning himself. These retread plants easily survived and now are almost certain to over-winter, with zero added heat, sprouting modest but steady sprigs of high-value, nutrient-dense food all winter and beyond.  Will I make any profit on these slow growing but delicious greens? No! But, nor would I trade them for a Caribbean vacation.

Gleaning food is great, but we must also transpose its brilliant logic to gleaning wasted energy, clothes, lumber, bricks, books – even friendship, hope, time and good ideas.  A quick look around reveals just how many other precious commodities are also left bruised, forgotten and squandered in the field.  Ideas like community economics, organic agriculture and effective world government. Ideas like a woman president, sustainable energy, conservation and Peace.  Gleaning of such crucial, but overlooked ideas may end up being the ultimate “rescue package.”

What began for me as a bourgeois sport and political statement has become over thirty years time a pragmatic philosophy of life and of farming. Gleaning has taught me not to overlook the seemingly “spoiled”, “rotten” and “dead”, to revel in the “over-ripe”, the unwanted and the used, and to prize the ugly, anomalous and out of date.  Gleaning has taught many of us that plants and food, in all their stages, like people, are sacred and should never be taken for granted. The news around the world tonight does not reflect that sanctity. But experience shows there are untold riches to be gleaned, nearly everywhere, though some caked in ignorance and mud, yet hidden from view.

Photo: Africankelli, prisoners gleaning food for the Phoenix food bank

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