Pleasant House

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet (1857), Musée d'Orsay, Paris

“First day of Colorado farm ‘gleaning’ draws 40,000 people in 11,000 cars eager to scavenge for leftover potatoes, carrots, leeks after harvest. Some came prepared with sacks, wagons, and barrels to celebrate getting something for free in bad economy. Farm couple, who are regulars at farmers’ markets and host a fall festival for teaching about food sources, opened fields to public after hearing reports of food being stolen from churches.”

-Quoted from the food times. Entire story in the Denver Post.

Here’s the local news footage that preceded the event. Judging by the demeanor of the reporters, I think they were expecting Ravinia and ended up with Woodstock.

My brother-in-law, Morgan, and I were talking about what gleaning means in today’s America. He asked me if I had seen the movie The Gleaners and I. I haven’t seen it but I know a bit about it and have my own ideas about what gleaning means. To me, gleaning seems instinctual–things like foraging for food, picking bicycles and chairs from the garbage, planting and harvesting food on my balcony, jars of my grandma’s “dollar bag” mango chutney, and roadkill for dinner. But I have learned that cooking at charity cooking events and feeding people who come in off the street without a dime to pay are also both the right thing to do and examples of gleaning.

Morgan

A quick search of gleaning led me first to the masterpiece painting I’ve seen many times, The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet. In very simple terms, Millet’s gleaners were in touch with the rhythm of the harvest and would reap what was left in the fields after the commercial harvest. The origins of gleaning go at least as far back as the Good Book itself. The New International Version of The Bible, in the 19th chapter of Leviticus, reads, “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien.”

Morgan, one of the coolest and most laid-back, generous dudes I know, recently earned his master’s degree in geology, and is a gardener, environmentalist, fisherman, and avid cook living in Tallahassee. To him, and some of his friends, gleaning is about picking up and using the slightly less-than-perfect rejects that have been cast off by a wasteful system of profit dependent on ridiculous ideas of perfection and expiration dates. It would not be surprising to find him and his friends waiting outside of a grocery store at the same time on the same day every week to gather the “scratch and dents” of the produce world. He and his friends are living out, to a certain degree, the freegan ideology of consume less, waste less, and share more. The freegan gleaners hope that people will change their ways after hearing about their radical dumpster-diving tactics, which will result in a society that produces significantly less waste, benefiting everyone. While some freegans glean discarded food and goods from the trash, one freegan recently gleaned himself a free ride to Oxford; “his participatory research into freeganism for his senior thesis in sociology prompted a selection committee to award him the prestigious Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, which will support two years of graduate study at the University of Oxford.”

In addition to his frustration with seeing so much waste outside of stores, Morgan also made me aware of a scene that really gets him steamed. He describes: ”Around here, the green tomatoes (peppers, squash, etc.) are picked and the ripe ones are thrown on the ground to rot. This is probably at least half the harvest; they take the green veggies and gas them so they have an extended fridge life and travel life.”

Morgan sees the potential for gleaning in the tomato fields but brings up potential obstacles and potentially deadly consequences of showing up uninvited to a Florida farmer’s field: “The gleaner has to be at the field once the harvest is over and must make sure not to get shot by the farmer, as this practice is not really legal here. It makes me sick to drive by a field that is littered with rotting, perfectly good fruits and veggies. Liberty now!”

Banksy.co.uk

America has come a long way since the world of Millet’s gleaners in terms of progress. But along the way we have created ingenious ways of cheating nature. What other explanation could there be for having created a system that accepts a gassed tomato as perfect and a naturally ripe tomato as trash?

One of the reasons why I think studying the meaning of gleaning in the twenty-first century is interesting is because the word can take on different meanings for different people, but it always has a positive connotation There are gleaners like Morgan who can afford to buy groceries but whose acts are intended to make a positive political statement. Other gleaners like myself get excited about discovering things that other people overlook, things to put to use for myself and others. And there are those gleaners who feel the need to take care of people who, for one reason or another, cannot pay for food to feed themselves.

A recent New York Times article highlights the increase in food-bank lines as we continue to experience a worsening economic crisis. These people who have fallen on hard times are the people who depend on a second harvest of a much different kind. In this situation, the gleaner becomes the provider of today’s second harvest staples–the boxes, bags, and jars of commercial food products handed out and served up in the food pantries and shelters across the country. Billions of pounds of food have been donated and served up by millions of volunteers  for millions of hungry people. Here’s a short and pleasant video of this type of twenty-first century gleaner:

Thanks to Morgan for getting me motivated to learn a little bit more about gleaning. When the growing season kicks in this year, I’d like to talk to our local Chicago farmers to see if they turn their calculated loss of produce into someone else’s gain or if they make it a practice of not reaping to the edges of their fields. And I would like to learn not only how to help get those veggies into the hands of people before they hit the ground, I’d like to teach them how to turn them into a pot of soup.

If you want to learn more about what the government’s interpretation of gleaning is, check out the USDA Food Recovery and Gleaning Initiative’s A Citizen’s Guide to Food Recovery.