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.