Saturday, I attended a training to become a field supervisor for gleaning outings. In other words, if you sign up to glean crops with the Society of St. Andrew, I might just be the guy in charge. Scary.
While I’ve volunteered a bunch in the past, but haven’t been out gleaning in far too long. That’s why I jumped at the chance to oversee some events because it’ll provide the needed kick in the pants.
At the training, I had a chance to peruse the SoSA Annual Report. I was pleased to learn that the pounds of food saved increased 13 percent from 2008 to 2009. That means more crops are being gleaned and food is being salvaged. That’s good, because the number of hungry Americans keeps growing.
Two other tidbits that came up in the training:
Last year, a potato sorter in North Carolina donated 2.5 million pounds of spuds that were rejected as imperfect or the wrong size. That speaks to how particular the market has become. What would Mr. Potato Head say?
An apple grower in the North Carolina mountains had a whole bunch of apples to be gleaned because he’d been priced out by cheaper Chinese imports. The 3 cents per pound that this grower was offered wouldn’t have covered the labor of harvesting.
If you’re interested in helping, SoSA leads gleaning outings in many states and is open to everyone, except odd potato haters.
4 Comments
Hi Jonathan,
Congrats on accepting a very worthy responsibility to serve as a gleaning coordinator. If you are interested in learning more tips on how to organize, you may want to contact Amy Grey. She is director of an organization called Backyard Harvest, and they do incredible work registering trees and gleaning excess fruits and vegetables. Here is there website: http://backyardharvest.org/ and a good interview in Country Living with Amy: http://www.countryliving.com/women/amy-grey-0508. If you haven’t already, you may want to highlight their efforts sometime, because they are doing great work out here in Idaho, and other parts of the country. Take care,
Santiago
Thanks, Santiago. I’ll check out those resources. You know how I love tree gleaning…
It makes me so angry to hear about all those rejected potatos and apples. But at least for this post its great to read about the food being salvaged. It doesn’t seem there is a chapter of either society of st andrew or backyardharvest near me, but I’m going to do some more research!
Thanks for your great website, Jonathan–and congrats on your gleaning coordinator position! Last year I apprenticed at a small farm in Marin, California. We partnered with a group called Marin Organic, which would bring in a group of volunteers to sweep our fields before they got turned under, donating the produce to schools. We also gleaned for the Free Farm Stand (freefarmstand.org) in San Francisco. Gleaning was one of the most enjoyable parts of my time in the fields. It’s great to know that all that holey-but-beautiful food will be going to people who need it.