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Join the Glean Team!

The Glean Team is a group of dedicated volunteers whose mission is to

reduce food waste,
combat local hunger,
raise community awareness,
increase the availability of local produce at food pantries.

Five days each week we pick up food from Roche Brother’s in Acton that would otherwise be thrown away and donate it to Loaves and Fishes food pantry, WHEAT’s food pantry in Clinton, and Transitions at Devens (a temporary shelter for women and their children). In addition, during the harvest season, we pick up food weekly from the Harvard Farmers' Market, Applefield Farm in Stow, and most recently, Burrough’s Farm in Boxborough. We also glean food from fields and orchards whenever we are invited by the local farmers to do so.

Gleaning is fun and just plain makes you feel good to be making such a concrete difference in people’s lives. If you would like to join us, sign up for a shift by clicking the following links:

If you’d like to get on the Glean Team’s email list, contact one of the cochairs, Risa Goldman, Cary Browse, or Ellen Joseph, and we will make sure you receive notices of all Glean Team activities, including last-minute field gleaning opportunities. Oh, and don’t forget to ask us about how to get one of our cool new Glean Team hats!

August 2011 Update

Over the summer, the Glean Team has been incredibly busy gleaning from Roche Brother’s market in Actonfive days a week. Each day, we receive a large carload of food which we then deliver to Loaves and Fishes twice a week, WHEAT’s food pantry in Clinton twice a week, and Transitions at Devens (a temporary shelterfor women and children in Devens) once a week. All recipients have been incredibly grateful for the wonderful bounty of food they have received from Roche Brother’s.

We are also now gleaning produce from Applefield Farm stand in Stow and bringing the leftover food to Loaves and Fishes once a week. Applefield Farm grows organic produce and is dedicated to getting their food to the people who need it.

Additionally, we have had a few opportunities to glean fields with Oakes Plimpton and the Boston Area Gleaners (BAG) group. So far, we have gleaned beets, carrots and peaches with them and hope to have more cooperative gleaning opportunities with BAG, especially as the harvest season gets into full swing.

We have also begun gleaning from the Harvard Farmer’s Market. Our first week, we gleaned an estimated 200 pounds of food to donate to WHEAT. We will continue gleaning from the Farmer’s Market through the end of October.

An exciting project we took on this summer was to create Glean Team baseball caps to help us identify ourselves at gleaning events and also to market ourselves and our mission. If you are interested in purchasing one of our attractive blue caps, we have a limited supply at a price of $12 (If we run out, the next batch will be more slightly more expensive). You do not need to be a Glean Team member to sport one of our fine looking hats!

Coming up, we hope to have several more opportunities, including gleaning from Harper’s Farm and Garden in Lancaster, gleaning from Willard’s farm in Harvard, and gleaning local apple orchards.

While we now have almost 50 people on our Glean Team, we would love to continue growing our team and have more people join us. If you are interested
in participating in any of our gleaning activities, please contact Risa Goldman, Cary Browse or Ellen Joseph, co-chairs of the Glean Team.

What is gleaning?
What we do
How you can be involved
Did you know?
A religious imperative
Photos

What is gleaning?

Gleaning is the age-old practice of picking from fields the produce that is leftover after the main commercial harvest. It is a way of salvaging food that would otherwise be dumped or left in the fields to rot due to minor “imperfections.” In most cases this food is completely edible and nutritious and can be gathered and distributed to feed those in the community who are hungry.

Gleaning can also refer to efforts to salvage edible food that would otherwise be thrown out from wholesalers or retailers, including grocery stores, farm stands and farmers’ markets. This type of gleaning is sometimes called “food recovery” or “food rescue.”

What we do

The HUUC Glean Team is currently involved in a number of local efforts including:

Gleaning from local farm fields, a local farm stand, and the Harvard farmer’s market
Distributing the gleaned food to local food pantries and meals programs
Preparing food using the gleaned produce either to distribute or to sell to raise funds for hunger relief
Composting to reduce our own food waste

Future projects we envision include:

Gleaning from local grocery stores
A community-wide “Squash Hunger” campaign to raise awareness and money for local hunger relief
Events such as community suppers prepared using gleaned food and “food rescue” field trips to educate participants about the connections between food waste and hunger
Advocacy for town-wide composting and other food-waste reduction efforts

How you can be involved

Pick up food from Farmer’s Market
Pick up food from local farm stand
Contribute extra produce from your own garden
Deliver produce to local food program
Participate in composting project
Help prepare foods from gleaned produce
Help with special events/suppers
Be part of an on-call glean team to help harvest from local fields on short notice
Help with “Squash Hunger” booth at Flea Market
Organize a gleaning event for RE classes to visit a local farm
Sign up for our email list to learn about additional opportunities to get involved!
Join us for our monthly planning meetings

Did you know?

Americans waste between 40-50% of the food we have available to consume, approximately 96 billion pounds of food per year.
Much of this food is wasted before it ever reaches a point of sale, often dumped or “plowed under” because it is “irregular” or “imperfect” in appearance.
Decomposing food waste is the single greatest producer of methane in landfills and methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than CO2.
If we all stopped wasting food, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 out of every 4 cars off the road.
Over a billion people in the world are hungry—one in almost every seven people.
Each day, 16,000 children die of hunger-related causes—one child every 5 seconds.
In the US, over 37 million people live in households that experience hunger or the threat of hunger; this includes over half a million people in Massachusetts.
There is enough food produced globally to provide each person with 4.3 pounds of food each day, more than enough to meet all of our needs!”

A religious imperative

In Jewish tradition, one of the historical and theological sources of our UU tradition, it is written…

And when you reap your land’s harvest, you shall not finish off the edge of your field, nor pick up the gleanings of your harvest. And your vineyard you shall not pluck bare, nor pick up the fallen fruit of your vineyard. For the poor and for the sojourner you shall leave them. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10)

About that passage, a 16th century rabbi once wrote…

When we leave part of our fields and vineyards unharvested so that the poor can come and take what they need, we must not feel that we are giving them a gift from our own property. Our harvest is ours only through the grace of God, who expects us to act as His agents to see to it that the poor get what they need… We must always remember that whatever we possess is not really ours but God’s.

Our UU Principles remind us that we are part of an interconnected web. Our actions have an impact on those around us. Until we learn to live and consume more justly, equitably and compassionately, one person’s abundance will continue to be another person’s scarcity.

Click each photo to enlarge.

Betsy and Susie having fun.

Glean Team bounty